Bert Little, host of the Science Reporter TV episode “Big Magnets,” looked into the camera in 1961 and gravely promised that soon MIT “will house the strongest magnets in the world.”

These magnets were co-designed by MIT professor Francis Bitter, who ironically was dwarfed by Little on camera. Bitter had founded MIT’s magnet laboratory over twenty years prior to his on-screen appearance, and for him it wasn’t just the strength of the magnet that mattered, it was also about how you used it. Bitter said magnets were a way to see the invisible; to him, they were the key to solving the “mystery of patterns beyond life.” And the funding climate, after a twenty-year lull, could not resist the attraction of deciphering those mysterious patterns.

Magnets had driven huge technological advances following two world wars. In 1946 two scientists independently discovered that magnets could yield information about a molecule’s structure, a Nobel Prize-winning discovery that eventually led to the invention of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In 1951, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory completed Whirlwind, a computer that relied on magnetic core memory to provide real time warnings of planes flying low over the U.S.

In the wake of these and other magnet-driven innovations, MIT and the U.S. Air Force joined forces to build the nearly ten-million-dollar MIT National Magnet Laboratory (NML), a collaborative enterprise whose resources would be available to scientists worldwide.

The NML aimed to take advantage of Bitter’s water-cooled electromagnets to generate magnetic fields as strong as 500,000 times that of the earth’s. Benjamin Lax, the head of the solid state division at Lincoln Laboratory and the first director of the NML, hoped to use these strong magnetic fields to study how electrons in solids behave and react to magnetism. Lax said that increasing the strength of existing magnets by a factor of ten would allow scientists to conduct new experiments and to do the old experiments better. “And therefore, we are tremendously excited,” he said.

Two years after Little’s on-screen prediction of MIT’s future magnetic prowess, Bitter gave a speech to celebrate the NML’s dedication. “I love fishing—for facts and ideas,” Bitter wrote in the notes he had prepared. “Especially when you discover a new pond, when you’re ahead of the crowd. NML provides us with a new fishing pond.” On a tour of the facility the previous day, though, Bitter noted that it was “not all smooth sailing” on this fishing pond.

First, the team leading the lab’s development needed to address concerns about housing the world’s strongest magnet on campus. In a press release, Lax assured campus denizens that the magnet facility would not affect metal objects in its vicinity, nor could it be weaponized in any way.

Then, there was the back-and-forth that took place between the academics building the lab and the U.S. Air Force funding the lab. Bitter and colleagues even forgot to invite the Air Force, their “modern patrons,” to a conference they hosted about superconducting magnets. Bitter recounted in a letter that discussions with the Air Force had yielded disagreements about whether the facility would be controlled by MIT, or simply located there. “The comment was made ‘I thought you people had agreed and understood by this time that this was not the MIT National Magnet Laboratory, but the National Magnet Laboratory at MIT,’” he wrote.

MIT did not capitulate, and the map included in the dedication invitations clearly marked the “M.I.T. National Magnet Lab” between Albany and Vassar Streets where it still stands after fifty-one years. In 1967, after Francis Bitter’s death, the lab was renamed the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory to commemorate the physicist’s crucial role in its formation.

Bitter hoped that the lab would be both collaborative and enduring, involving “many people in one generation, and also many generations.” Before the National Science Foundation switched funds for its national magnet lab from MIT to Florida in 1995 (a decision Lax called “asinine”), visitors to the lab accounted for between 70–75 percent of magnet use. In early October 1981, in fact, a team of scientists from Bell Labs used MIT’s magnet lab to discover that electrons can form new types of particles in high magnetic fields, which seventeen years later resulted in a Nobel Prize.

After the NSF terminated the lab’s funding, its name changed yet again to simply the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, losing the “National.” Current FBML Director Robert Griffin says that he estimates 50 million dollars of equipment were just thrown away. Nevertheless, the FBML still remains true to Bitter’s dream for a multi-institutional, collaborative environment. In 1998, Griffin and Gerhard Wagner formed the MIT/Harvard Center for Magnetic Resonance, where they now use magnets to understand biological systems—focusing not on the activity of electrons in solids but on protein structure and interactions. Regardless of whether the application is solid-state physics or biophysics, however, the FBML remains committed to using magnets to solve the “mystery of patterns beyond life.”