The disintegration of the nucleus using artificially accelerated protons by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at the Cavendish Laboratory in April 1932 marked a significant turning point in the history of nuclear physics. Widely reported in the press then and since as the "splitting of the atom", the achievement became one of the landmarks of 20th-century physics. The experiment was swiftly copied in Europe and America, and by the late 1930s atom-splitting had become a growth industry in physics, with ever larger and more powerful particle accelerators being applied to the task. More than that, it established a form of physics research that was to shape the intellectual and institutional development of the subject for the rest of the century.
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