Physicists kept on improving particle accelerators by increasing their energy. The designers wanted higher energy to study smaller building blocks of matter. From the start, physicists realized that as charged particles spun around, they gave off electromagnetic radiation. In the early 1950s, other scientists started to use this radiation for experiments unrelated to the "atom smashing" collisions that were the primary goal of the machines. Particle accelerators shifted from cyclotrons to synchrotrons where the particles traveled in a circle rather than in a spiral path. Construction costs increased as synchrotrons got bigger to the point that many nations joined to build just one very big synchrotron in Europe (CERN) to conduct atom smashing experiments. Other synchrotron labs, such as the Lawrence Berkeley Lab did not have enough energy to discover new particles. So, they switched to using their machines as a source of electromagnetic radiation. Instead of tuning the machine to make particles travel faster, they learned how to wiggle the particle beam to give off particular frequencies of light. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists wanted to redesign synchrotrons to generate brighter light (more intense electromagnetic radiation) than ever before. These designs were called "third generation synchrotrons." The ALS was the first third generation synchrontron put into operation.