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Starting in 1967, a collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology directed an Electron beam at liquid hydrogen, providing proton targets. Jerome Isaac Friedman, Henry Way Kendall and Richard Edward Taylor participated in this experimental program.^[ref]

The 1969 paper Observed Behavior of Highly Inelastic Electron-Proton Scattering reports inclusive Electron spectra at $6^{\circ }$ and $10^{\circ }$ with incident energies from $7$ to $17\mathrm{GeV}$. Its scaling comparison estimated ${\nu }_{\mathrm{lab}}{W}_2$ under a transverse-virtual photon assumption, finding approximate agreement as a function of $\omega =1/x$ for $Q^2>1{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$ and $\omega >4$. These are the paper's conditions, not a claim of exact Bjorken scaling at every momentum transfer.^[ref]

A movable magnetic spectrometer selected scattered Electrons by momentum and scattering angle. Magnetic fields dispersed momenta at the focal plane. With relativistic Electrons, the inferred momentum determines outgoing energy $E^{\prime }$. Commissioning included steering the beam through the spectrometer at zero angle to check its optics and accepted solid angle. Counters sorted events into momentum and angle bins. The acceptance entered the conversion from counts to differential scattering cross-sections.^[ref]

Radiative corrections matter because photon emission can move events from an elastic scattering peak into lower outgoing-energy bins. The analyses subtracted the elastic radiative tail before unfolding inelastic radiation. Independent MIT and SLAC procedures provided a check. An uncorrected low-$E^{\prime }$ tail alone therefore cannot establish deep inelastic scattering.^[ref]