On September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN successfully sent its first beam of protons all the way around its 27-kilometer ring beneath the Swiss-French border. At 10:28 a.m. local time, engineers watched a beam travel the full loop of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator for the first time, capping off roughly two decades of design, funding battles, and construction. The moment was broadcast live around the globe and reportedly reached an audience of more than a billion people.
The LHC wasn’t just a physics milestone — it was one of the most ambitious engineering projects in tech history. Built inside a tunnel originally dug for CERN’s previous accelerator, it relies on thousands of superconducting magnets cooled to colder than outer space to bend proton beams to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together. That first-beam success in 2008 was short-lived; a faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused a serious fault just nine days later, forcing over a year of repairs. But the LHC came back strong, and by 2012 its detectors had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that explains how other particles get their mass.
Source: CERN — First beam in the LHC, History.com — CERN Large Hadron Collider is powered up
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
