13 



at that time to 300 Mil francs, which roughly corresponds to 250 Mil. Dollars of 

 today. 



II. Construction Period 



On August 13, 1954^ major excavation work started at a site in Meyrin, a 

 suburb of Geneva, on land donated by the Canton of Geneva to the organization, 

 ■with full support of the Government of Switzerland. The site is adjacent to the 

 French frontier north of Geneva. A whole laboratorj- with all buildings, equipment, 

 workshops, restaurants, etc., had to be erected on that laud. 



The first Director-General, F. Bloch remained only one year. He was not 

 enough interested in the problems of constructing large facilities. He was replaced 

 by the Dutch physicist, C. Bakker,who, before, was in charge of constructing the 

 smaller machine. The construction went on extremely well; a number of American 

 physicists and engineers came to Geneva to help and participate, such as Drs. John 

 and Hildred Blewett from Brookhaven. 



One of the most fortunate circumstances was the eagerness with which many 

 young physicists and engineers gave a positive answer to offers to join the recently 

 born provisional organization for contributing to the construction of a laboratorj' of 

 still rather indefinite future. I could give a list of names of people recruited in that 

 period and that later contributed remarkably to the development of CERN. I will, 

 however, mention a single case. The young man was John Adams, who joined CERN, 

 and devoted his whole life to its development. He supers-ised the construction of 

 the two major accelerators built at CERN in the last 30 years. 



Most of the parts of the construction were ordered from the industries of the 



