November 10, 1988: The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)

On this day in engineering history, U.S. Energy Secretary John S. Herrington announced that Waxahachie, Texas would serve as the site of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

In January 1987, President Ronald Reagan approved the Department of Energy's (DOE) $4.4 billion plan to build a 54-mile underground, oval-shaped tunnel filled with 8,600 superconducting magnets, each with a 4-cm bore through which a beam of 20 teraelectronvolt (TeV) protons would pass. "Mr. President, you're going to make a lot of physicists ecstatic," said William Miller, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). "That's probably fair," replied Reagan, "because I made two physics teachers in high school very miserable."

Fifteen thousand physicists, engineers, technicians, contractors and support personnel flocked to Waxahachie, a farming community south of Dallas, to work on what John G. Cramer called "the machine that would restore the preeminence of the United States of America as the center for high energy physics." Ultimately, however, the SSC project was short-lived. On October 27, 1993, Congress voted to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider after spending $2 billion and completing 14.7 miles of underground oval tunnel.