Westinghouse Atom Smasher in the context of Westinghouse Electric Corporation

The Westinghouse Electric Corporation was an American manufacturing company founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was originally named "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" and was renamed "Westinghouse Electric Corporation" in 1945. Through the early and mid-20th century, Westinghouse Electric was a powerhouse in heavy industry, electrical production and distribution, consumer electronics, home appliances and a wide variety of other products. They were a major supplier of generators and steam turbines for most of their history, and was also a major player in the field of nuclear power, starting with the Westinghouse Atom Smasher in 1937.

A series of downturns and management missteps in the 1970s and 80s combined with large cash balances led the company to enter the financial services business. Their focus was on mortgages, which suffered significant losses in the late 1980s. In 1992 they announced a major restructuring and the liquidation of their credit operations. In 1995, in a major change of direction, the company acquired the CBS television network and renamed itself CBS Corporation. Most of its remaining industrial businesses were sold off at this time. CBS Corp was acquired by Viacom in 1999, a merger completed in April 2000. The CBS Corporation name was later reused for one of the two companies resulting from the split of Viacom in 2005.

An electrostatic particle accelerator is a particle accelerator in which charged particles are accelerated to a high energy by a static high-voltage potential. The reason that only charged particles can be accelerated is that only charged particles are influenced by an electric field, according to the formula F=qE, which causes them to move. This contrasts with the other major category of particle accelerator, oscillating field particle accelerators, in which the particles are accelerated by oscillating electric fields.

Owing to their simpler design, electrostatic types were the first particle accelerators. The two most common types are the Van de Graaff generator invented by Robert Van de Graaff in 1929, and the Cockcroft–Walton accelerator invented by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932. The maximum particle energy produced by electrostatic accelerators is limited by the maximum voltage which can be achieved the machine. This is in turn limited by insulation breakdown to a few megavolts. Oscillating accelerators do not have this limitation, so they can achieve higher particle energies than electrostatic machines.