A 20-meter-tall light bulb rested silently on a grassy ground near Pittsburgh.

The W shape logo on its surface gave up crucial clue: it was a Westinghouse Electric Corporation made nuclear accelerator device made in 1937. Its unusual bulb shape is because it is an old Van de Graaff style electrostatic accelerator. The steel dome would build up a huge electrical charge, repelling positively charged ions down a beam tube onto an experiment or detector.

In its prime time, the bulb is cutting edge in many ways and helped engineers and scientists made groundbreaking breakthroughs. After WWII, plants and labs moved away, technology itself moved on and this bulb has been all on its own all this time.

In 2012, an ambitious real estate company acquired this land and had several iterations of a plan to convert it into something useful nowadays (a STEM educational facility was one of them). But almost any kind of conversion required several million dollars and eventually the company just gave up. In 2015, the structure was in dire situation and started to dislodge from its supports so the developer took it down and laid on its side.

Westinghouse Atom Smasher used to pay the way for human advancements in particle accelerator technology and our understanding of the subatomic world. Now it sit at the same place as 90 years ago, surrounded by post-industrialization community and has become a mysterious big dumb object.