News of the historic achievement spread rapidly by phone and telex. Despite the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the Main Control Room at Fermilab began to fill as the champagne was brought out.
CERN’s director-general Herwig Schopper was one of many dignitaries extending his congratulations to Fermilab director Leon Lederman by telex. Lab directors around the world had awaited news on the Tevatron, the first accelerator to use superconducting magnets to steer a beam of protons around a ring. Featuring more than 1000 magnets cooled to nearly absolute zero temperature, the success of the four-mile-circumference Tevatron accelerator helped to jumpstart other advances in superconducting technology.
The Tevatron achieved 900 GeV on October 21, 1986. Today, the Tevatron operates at a beam energy of 980 GeV, still holding the world record. Another superconducting accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider under construction at CERN, will take over the energy frontier in 2007.
The global telex point-to-point teleprinter system that conveyed congratulations to the Tevatron in 1983 is now largely obsolete, except for its use (called TDD or TTY) by hearing-impaired persons to receive typewritten messages by telephone.
