It was manufactured by the Allis-Chalmers Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was very similar to the one being used at the time by Donald Kerst at the University of Illinois.

29, 1949 starting the really first concerted clinical investigation of the usefulness of the betatron as a radiotherapeutic tool, with over 300 patients treated in 17 years of operation.

[4] The construction of the Linear Accelerator (LINAC) was announced in September 1961,[5] and was portrayed as the next logical step on the University's research path.

[6] Construction officially began on May 10, 1962, when Sir John Cockcroft, Nobel Prize in Physics winner, ceremonially turned the first sod.

It was a four-section 140 MeV machine operating, with the first section designed for higher current (and thus lower energy) for radiation chemistry.

For radiation protection purposes the accelerator and research facilities were housed in an underground building with 10 feet of compacted gravel above it and considerably thicker shielding over the regions where the full beam intensity was diverted into the experimental areas.

[12] In 1994 an NSERC panel had proposed that a synchrotron should be built in Canada,[13] and SAL director Dennis Skopik convinced the University to bid to host the new facility.

One committee member insisted there was no need to travel to Saskatoon in the dead of winter before deciding, as he had visited UWO and was convinced it should be the place.

The former SAL underground experimental area EA2 now houses a 35MeV LINAC[17] which is part of a CLS project to produce the medical isotope technetium-99m, a mainstay of nuclear medicine.