In 2004 Lyncean Technologies announced the construction of the Compact Light Source (CLS), a miniature synchrotron which uses inverse Compton scattering to produce high-intensity, tunable, near-monochromatic x-ray beams. The CLS was designed to bring state-of-the-art protein structure determination to the home laboratory -- but it has also promised to have a broad impact across the spectrum of x-ray science.