Clas Ohlson company was founded in 1918 by the technically minded Clas Ohlson (1895–1979), as a mail order business based in the Swedish village of Insjön, Dalarna. Initially, only manuals and technical literature were sold, thus allowing people who lived in rural communities to obtain literature that would otherwise be unavailable. He opened his first shop in Insjön in 1926, but it was not until 1989, when the company opened a store in a shopping centre in central Stockholm, that it expanded into the retail business. The first store outside Sweden was opened 1991 in Oslo in Norway and in 1999, the
CLAS detector at the center of CLAS. These collisions generally produce new particles, often after the target nucleons (protons and neutrons) are briefly excited to heavier-mass versions of the familiar protons and neutrons. A whole variety of intermediate-mass short-lived particles called "mesons" can be created. Scattered electron as well as the longer-lived produced particles travel through the CLAS detector, where they are measured. Particle physicists use these measurements to deduce the underlying structure of protons and neutrons and to better understand the interactions that create these new particles. The CLAS detector system was operational from 1998 until May 2012. From that time