Word: belle
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...South Side Chicago building, three miles from the stadium where the world's first atomic pile went into action 14 years ago, a shrilling alarm bell signaled the birth last week of U.S. industry's Atomic Age. As a white-smocked scientist twisted the knobs on a control panel outside a monolithic concrete cubicle, a lighted dial flashed: REACTOR ON. Thus the world's first nuclear reactor devoted exclusively to industrial research went into operation at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Armour Research Foundation...
...giving top scientists the widest latitude, Bell Telephone Laboratories, the $113 million-a-year research arm for American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and Western Electric, has struck some of the biggest pay lodes in industrial history. In 1948 Bell Mathematician Claude Shannon, projecting earlier studies by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Norbert Wiener, published Communication Theory, a complex mathematical scheme for measuring information content in communications, as well as evaluating the performance of systems that transmit words and pictures. The theory opened new horizons in telephone and TV transmission, has already found its way into the Air Force...
...Another Bell breakthrough in 1948 was the discovery, after years of basic research into the structure of matter, that a solid metal such as germanium or silicon (earth's most abundant solid element) can be made to act like a vacuum tube, i.e., it will amplify an electric signal. Result: the flea-size transistor−and a king-size new industry. Thirty-five manufacturers have already turned out 7,000,000 transistors v. 1 billion vacuum tubes now in use in the U.S., are doubling output each year. Transistors will multiply the speed of future telephone exchanges...
Through patent-licensing, most big U.S. companies share the fruits of basic research. RCA has earned enough income from royalties and Government contracts since 1947 to make its research program selfsupporting. Thousands of patents developed by Bell Labs may now be used by other companies without charge, as a result of the trustbusting consent decree signed last January by A. T. & T. and Western Electric. Eastman Kodak estimates that at least one-third of 1,800 basic studies published by its researchers have benefited industry as a whole...
...years from production." To cut the average ten-year time lag from test tube to cash register, most companies rigorously analyze even the most promising leads in terms of cost, marketability, timeliness and practicality, reappraise the potential new product at every stage of development. At Bell Labs, systems engineers spend years checking research developments against rival theories and the existing mechanisms they will outdate. They argue: "If it works, it's already obsolete...