Word: beams
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Westinghouse Electric Corp. came up with an idea: instead of building higher & higher towers, why not transmit television from planes flying high in the sky? Westinghouse engineers talked it over with Glenn L. Martin Co., which proposed to build B-29-sized planes for the job. Ground studios would beam programs to the planes, which, at 30,000 feet, could then transmit the programs to receivers within a 211-mile radius. Only 14 planes would have to be in the air to service...
...Beam That Sees. An electronic supergadget which "sees" as well in the dark as in the light, radar projects a radio beam which, on striking an object near or far, returns an echo that is translated into a visual image on the radar screen. Radar can see the flight of a shell, the wake of a ship, the explosion of a target, the fall of a hit plane. At sea, it can detect buoys, reefs and other ships more than 20 miles away...
From the air, by night or day or through the thickest cloud, it lays open the terrain below like a relief map, showing coastlines, ships, harbors, jetties, mountains, lakes, rivers, bridges, cities. At close range, with the narrowest radar beam, it is possible to see a city's river fronts, avenues, even buildings...
Like light, the ultrashort radio waves used in radar can be focused in a beam, are reflected by solid or liquid surfaces, travel with the same speed as light (186,000 miles a second). But for "seeing" distant objects, radio waves have a great advantage over light: they penetrate fog, clouds and smoke, reach out to far greater distances than the naked eye. And unlike light, radio impulses can easily be controlled to give an exact, automatic measurement of the distance to the detected object...
Shots in the Dark. Halsey selected that night for his most defiant gesture. His battleships steamed within ten miles of the coast of Honshu, northeast of Tokyo. As they bore south, each trained the 67-ft. barrels of its nine 16-inch rifles over the starboard beam...