There aren’t a whole lot of pictures of the Bonner Lab, and the ones I do have are almost all of the outside:
I’ve only ever seen a couple images taken inside. The first one provides almost no clue to help understand how the building actually worked. See how unhelpful this is?
There’s a second one, though, clearly taken decades later, that’s more useful. What I’m interested in here is the wall, which looks to have been made of something like cinder blocks:
I note this because I recently came across this picture of long-time Physics Department chairman Jerry Phillips, closer in time to the second photo than to the first, posing in an unfamiliar location. I have no idea what this is but my instinct is that it must be somewhere inside Bonner Lab:
Thoughts?
Bonus: It was just like one in Canada!
Extra Bonus: Brockman Hall for Physics, 2023.
Fun Fact: The 1959 machine was actually the third accelerator on campus. The first was a 200,00 volt machine that was built in 1936 under the guidance of the first head of the Physics Department, H.A. Wilson. The second was a 2 million volt Van de Graff accelarator that replaced it in 1939. These machines played an enormous role in the development of graduate studies at Rice. By 1959 Rice had awarded a total of only 261 doctorate degrees and 91 of them were in Physics, largely because of the research done with the accelerators.