On 12 June 1973, staff at Geneva airport measured winds gusting up to 47 knots. A few kilometres away, where CERN lay right in the path of the storm, it was even worse. Torrential rain and hail devastated neighbouring vineyards and caused havoc inside the laboratory. Roads turned to rivers and buildings to swimming pools. The Proton Synchrotron was shut down as water in the basement rose to 1.80 metres.

Muddy water forced up from the drains made matters worse, but all staff mucked in to help. When the floods receded, everything had to be hosed down (treatment not usually recommended for electrical equipment!) and the repair gangs and cleaners got on with the slow job of recovery. See more pictures and a link to the CERN Courier article here.

CERN’s Gargamelle bubble chamber was 4.8 metres long by 2 metres in diameter, weighed 1,000 tonnes, and held nearly 12 cubic metres of heavy-liquid Freon. It was inaugurated on 7 May 1971 with a day of speeches, visits and lunch for the journalists and other guests. This short film, made a few months earlier, describes the design, construction and operation of the giantess. 

Early results from Gargamelle provided crucial evidence for the existence of quarks, and in July 1973 the Gargamelle collaboration presented the first direct evidence of the weak neutral current. The pictures that made the tracks of particles visible as trails of bubbles, yielding these scientific results, are also extremely beautiful. The one shown dates from 1978; you can see more, and some of their interpretive sketches, here.

Wolfgang Pauli took up his duties as professor in Zurich at the end of April 1928. Before accepting the post he had insisted on the appointment of an assistant, and wrote to Ralph Kronig on 22 November, ‘I would like to ask you, for the moment quite tentatively, if in principle you would agree to accept this position … your task would be:

1. Every time I say something, to contradict me with detailed arguments.
2. To animate somewhat the scientific activity with modern ideas.

Looking back (this photo dates from 1955), Kronig considered his time in Zurich, ‘not only as one of the most instructive, but also as one of the most exhilarating periods’ of his life. He added, ‘One of my tasks, not agreed upon beforehand, was to watch out that Pauli should limit his consumption of ice cream at Sprüngli’s Konditorei at the Paradeplatz where we often went in the afternoon.'

Pauli thought Heisenberg’s ‘World Formula’ needed a lot more work, and he made his point graphically. He sent this drawing of an empty picture frame to George Gamow on 1 March 1958 with the caption, ‘This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian … Only technical details are missing.’

Pauli and Heisenberg had collaborated for many years, but Pauli was unconvinced by the results of their search for a unified theory of elementary particles, and felt the publicity about it was premature.  He died in December of the same year. The letter is online here.

Wolfgang Pauli received his habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1924  – the same year he discovered his Nobel-Prize-winning exclusion principle – and delivered his inaugural lecture on 23 February. He was awarded the title of professor in 1926, then obtained a professorship in theoretical physics at the ETH, Zürich, in 1928. His tendency to forget about the audience, and think out problems as he went along, proved challenging for some students. But, as Markus Fierz pointed, they at least learned to think critically about a theory!

Future Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli was a little over six-and-a-half years old when this photo was taken in December 1906. His biographer Charles Enz notes that that young Wolfi contracted all the usual childhood diseases and, to use the typically Viennese expression, es war ihm immer fad – he always felt bored.

By the age of four he was already adept in the art of contradicting his elders that would later help him to reshape modern physics. On being told during one of his walks through Vienna, ‘Now we are walking over the Danube Canal', he replied firmly, ‘No, Aunt Erna, this is the Wien Canal, which flows into the Danube Canal.’

Chief engineer Bernard Poulten received this drawing from his colleagues at CERN’s Isotope Separator On-Line DEvice fifty-one years ago. In deference to the well-known legend and opera, it was inscribed ‘To Tristan from Isolde (project), 3.11.1966’. (You can see the full drawing here.) Clearing out some old papers recently, he and his family very kindly decided to send the drawing back to CERN… where it arrived just in time for ISOLDE’s anniversary celebrations!

ISOLDE, CERN’s longest-running experimental facility, produced its first radioactive beam 50 years ago. Past and present staff tell the story, with the help of some early film clips here.

On 10 October 1964 representatives of CERN’s Member States came to see for themselves the progress made during the laboratory’s first decade and to hear about plans for the future. On 30 October Director-General Victor Weisskopf invited all staff for a glass of wine to celebrate, and declared 2 November an official holiday.

You can read the official speeches here, or you can read R. W. Penney’s ‘unscientific recollections’ in the CERN Courier.  Penney preferred speak of an eleventh anniversary, since he said CERN really took off in September 1953, when the various groups began to centralise in Geneva. The Meyrin site was still a ploughed field, so they worked where they could; he summed up life in the early days as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘exhausting’.

A new group set up at CERN in the 1970s had rather different objectives to those of the rest of the laboratory. Their main task was to build a 3.6 metre telescope to be sent to Chile, following signature of a collaboration agreement between the ESO and CERN on 16 September 1970.

The first meeting of the coordinating committee two years later reviewed progress and confirmed that ESO’s Sky Atlas Laboratory was also welcome to continue their work of mapping the southern sky at CERN. The groups relocated to the ESO’s new premises at Garching, Germany, in 1980. See the committee report, read the press release and Professor Blaauw’s article in the August 1970 CERN Courier, or enjoy some more photos of the teams at work.

‘It is a pleasure to introduce our long expected internal bulletin,’ wrote Director-General Cornelis Jan Bakker, ‘I hope it will benefit not only from your attention but also from the many suggestions which will certainly arise in CERN's fertile minds.’

The first CERN Courier featured visiting VIPs, a forthcoming trip to Russia, feedback on the 13^th CERN Council Session and a round-up of news at CERN and abroad (Other Peoples' Atoms). Behind the scenes, an introductory report from the editor discussed the objectives and format of the proposed journal, and also how to finance it. Disagreement about whether it would be ethically acceptable to include advertisements rumbled on for quite some time.