Word: betatrons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...betatron, a close relative of the ordinary transformer which raises or lowers the voltage of an alternating current, is an electron accelerator. A whopping electromagnet (130 tons) is energized by a heavy current flowing through two coils made of one-inch copper rods...
...huge, super-secret "betatron"-which generates an X ray so powerful and dangerous that the entire apparatus must be enclosed in three-foot concrete walls-was completed a couple of years ago. Wartime security kept it hidden until last week. Even then, General Electric Co. did not tell quite all. But G.E. did give a fair description of how the great gadget works, and some broad hints about a few of the things that it will...
...knock neutrons out of silver atoms, turning them into an unstable silver isotope, which breaks down into cadmium, giving off powerful streams of electrons. Some silver, too, is turned into palladium, while some of the copper in the coin's alloy is turned into atoms of nickel.* The betatron is controlled from a neighboring room...
Inventor Kerst first learned his physics at the University of Wisconsin, then taught at the University of Illinois, where last year he built his first small betatron - a 2,300,000-volt table-top model. He saw at once that similar machines capable of imparting energies of 100,000,000 volts, and even higher, could readily be built...
This week, while G.E. is starting work on a giant 100,000,000-volt model, Kerst is shipping his betatron to his laboratory in Illinois to see what discoveries he can make with it. Its electron beams have already penetrated inch-thick aluminum, made copper radioactive. Its medical applications, like those of the cyclotron which once struck the bewildered public as a useless device, must be explored. In time the betatron may be able to produce earthborn artificial cosmic rays, whose fantastic energies - hundreds of millions of volts - now smite the earth mysteriously from among the stars...