Postwar European scientists, including Louis de Broglie and Niels Bohr, wanted a joint laboratory that could rival American physics and stem the flow of talent across the Atlantic. The site chosen was Meyrin, outside Geneva, near the French border. Felix Bloch became CERN's first director-general. The laboratory's accelerators led to Nobel-winning discoveries, including the W and Z bosons and, in 2012, the Higgs boson. The World Wide Web was also invented there, in 1989.
The idea for a European laboratory was put forward at a cultural conference in Lausanne in 1949, when de Broglie proposed an international research institution. UNESCO helped organize a provisional council, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, whose initials gave the organization its lasting name. In 1953 twelve countries signed the convention, and on September 29, 1954, after France and Germany completed ratification, it entered into force.
The founding members were Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. The convention specified that CERN would do only pure research, publish its results and have no involvement in military work, a point of importance in the early Cold War.
CERN's first accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron, began operating in 1957. Its Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer ring buried beneath the French-Swiss border, is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Today CERN has 25 member states and hosts thousands of physicists from around the world.
Key people: Louis de Broglie, Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr