The first meeting of the CERN Council quickly followed the signing of the agreement. It took place at UNESCO from 5-8 May 1952 with Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer in the chair. At this meeting, governments wishing to host the new laboratory were invited to submit proposals before the end of July and the first five officials were appointed.

Edoardo Amaldi was made Secretary General of the provisional organisation, Cornelis Bakker from Amsterdam headed the group that would draw up plans for the laboratory’s first machine -- a synchrocyclotron with an energy of at least 500 MeV, Niels Bohr headed the theory group, and Odd Dahl from Norway got the job of exploring options for the originally conceived 'bigger and more powerful' machine that would bring together European science and scientists.

Lew Kowarski -- who originally proposed setting up a laboratory for fundamental research, unlinked to military goal, with a nuclear accelerator -- was tasked with organising and setting up an international laboratory, from financial procedures to buildings and workshops.

On 17 May 1954, the first shovel of earth was dug on the Meyrin site in Switzerland under the eyes of Geneva officials and members of CERN staff.

At 10.28am on 10 September 2008 a beam of protons is successfully steered around the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. The machine is ready to embark on a new era of discovery at the high-energy frontier.

LHC experiments address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the universe’s existence.

Explore the resources prepared for press.

LHCb is the fourth experiment approved for the LHC. The experiment will study the phenomenon known as CP violation, which would help to explain why matter dominates antimatter in the universe.

Four years after the first technical proposals, the experiments CMS and ATLAS are officially approved. Both are general-purpose experiments designed to explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe, including the Higgs boson.