It’s National Ferret Day, and so here’s the story of a ferret named Felicia who made an unusual contribution to the field of physics as a kind of living pipe cleaner for some heavy-duty equipment.
This was back in 1971, at a place known then as the US National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois (now known as Fermilab).
The facility had a brand new, $250 million particle accelerator, and scientists wanted to start accelerating all those protons.
But soon after starting the apparatus up, some of its parts started breaking down.
The scientists later found out that there were manufacturing issues with some of the accelerator’s parts, but at first they were concerned that the tube had been contaminated by tiny shavings of scrap metal.
To get the system running as intended, they needed to clean out those shavings.
But that was tricky.
The accelerator tube was about as narrow as a tennis ball; it wasn’t as if they could just run a broom through it.
But a physicist from the UK, Robert Sheldon, suggested they could run a ferret through the tube, as scientists in his country had been doing.
Ferrets love tunnels, after all; then all the team would have to do is rig up a cleaning system.
And that’s what they did.
Wally Pelczarski, who had designed the Main Ring of the accelerator, acquired Felicia the ferret for $35 from a farm in Minnesota.
He gave Felicia a harness with a long string (as well as a diaper, for obvious reasons).
And he trained the ferret to head down 300 foot stretches of tube.
The humans back at the start of the tube could then attach a swab soaked in cleaning fluid to the string, which could then be pulled through the tube to flush out those metal shavings and any other extraneous material.
Felicia made about a dozen cleaning runs before retiring; she was paid mostly in meat.
And she’s left us a tremendous scientific legacy, as the star of the greatest ferret-based particle accelerator cleaning system in physics history.
In most of the places we visit, a chair is pretty much a chair.
But not on the Instagram account known as chair of virtue.
It’s a digital magazine that showcases and celebrates some of the wildest chair designs – some in off-kilter shapes, others made from unusual materials, like one made of metal and shoes.
Felicia Ferret (Fermilab History and Archives Project via Archive.org)
Bizarre True Story: Physicists Once Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator (Science Alert)
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