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I'd never seen this one before, but the history of accelerators is quite interesting.

In the Boston science museum there is a working tandem Van de Graaff generator with domes large enough that a lab was set up in each one to do experiments with particles flying through a tube between them.

Radio frequency linear accelerators were built with many electrodes that were much smaller, but were still limited by their length.

The cyclotron was an elegant solution that uses a uniform magnetic field to guide ions in a circular trajectory through the acceleration region of the same electrodes many times.