The original Frank Lee Van de Graaff accelerator was described in the Jan. 1959 Amateur Scientist was an electron accelerator. This is what got me started with vacuum and all that good stuff.
The column of August 1971 (not by Lee) is the one you are probably thinking of - it was equipped with an ion source and could be used to accelerate protons and deuterons.
The accelerator described in the RSI article predates the 1971 article and it was the RSI article that got me on the way to building my own accelerator ca 1969-70. (I think Richard Hull now owns the VDG terminal that I used.)
The most ambitious accelerator described in the Amateur Scientist was certainly the proton cyclotron (Sept. 1953) put together by a bunch of Chicago high schoolers (the article states how improbable it was for a group of inner city school kids to make something like this ... it's almost impossible to imagine now). The thing was impressive: 1600 watt RF generator, half a ton of Norwegian iron for the core and 800 lbs of #13 magnet wire. The article does not mention deuterons or neutrons.
Steve
Created on Sunday, March 11, 2001 9:09 AM EDT by Steve Hansen