Energy & Power

The Museum's collections on energy and power illuminate the role of fire, steam, wind, water, electricity, and the atom in the nation's history. The artifacts include wood-burning stoves, water turbines, and windmills, as well as steam, gas, and diesel engines. Oil-exploration and coal-mining equipment form part of these collections, along with a computer that controlled a power plant and even bubble chambers—a tool of physicists to study protons, electrons, and other charged particles.

A special strength of the collections lies in objects related to the history of electrical power, including generators, batteries, cables, transformers, and early photovoltaic cells. A group of Thomas Edison's earliest light bulbs are a precious treasure. Hundreds of other objects represent the innumerable uses of electricity, from streetlights and railway signals to microwave ovens and satellite equipment.

This is one section of a laser amplifier tube from the Shiva experimental fusion apparatus, operated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1978 through 1981.
Description
This is one section of a laser amplifier tube from the Shiva experimental fusion apparatus, operated at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1978 through 1981. Scientists used the Shiva device to test theories about how lasers might be used to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction. The research program was part of the continuing quest to harness nuclear fusion as a source of energy.
Lasers are useful in this type of research since they emit such a narrow beam of intense radiation. Shiva focused the energy of twenty laser beams on a tiny target of fuel to determine how the fuel would react. This amplifier tube is a short section of one of the twenty beam paths and contains panels of neodymium glass that strengthen and focus the light beam. Device included in Shiva laser chain, 1977-81. Power amplification - maximum 20. Donor notes: "These amplifiers were used in Shiva, a twenty-arm pulsed glass laser which preceded the Novette and Nova lasers."
Location
Currently not on view
date made
1977
maker
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
ID Number
1985.0236.11
accession number
1985.0236
catalog number
1985.0236.11

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