Word: cadmium
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...smokers who want to avoid flameout: a hurricane-proof cigarette lighter that needs no flint or fuel. Powered by a nickel-cadmium battery that never needs replacement, the Gulton lighter uses a glowing filament like a dashboard lighter. It can be recharged (about three packs' worth) by plugging it into any AC wall outlet. Price...
...unusual trick of the new Smith-Corona portable, introduced last week; it can keep right on typing after its cord is pulled out of the socket. The source of its cordless energy is a compact, efficient power supply that has excited the inventive brain of U.S. industry: the nickel-cadmium battery. This versatile product can be recharged in an ordinary electric socket, can be made tiny enough to power a hearing aid, and is good for a total life of three or four thousand hours...
Smith-Corona's new typewriter is the latest of a stream of portable nickel-cadmium-powered consumer products that have helped to boost sales of the batteries to $20 million; the industry expects its sales to be $200 million within a decade, considers the rechargeable battery its equivalent of the electronics industry's transistor. "Now man is fettered by a cord," says Research Engineer Frank Kamen of Chicago's toolmaking Skil Corp. "We want to release his bonds...
That is all there was to it. The operation of the pile depended on natural properties of 1) uranium, which normally emits neutrons at a steady rate, 2) graphite, which slows neutrons down but does not absorb them, and 3) cadmium, which absorbs neutrons very effectively. As the control rods were withdrawn-so the experimenters figured-fewer of the neutrons from the uranium would be absorbed, and therefore more fission would occur. At some point of withdrawal, fission would be producing new batches of neutrons faster than the cadmium would be absorbing them. Result: a chain reaction...
...inside the pile. As Weil withdrew the rod, the meters clicked faster and faster. Fermi did some calculating with the little slide rule he always carried with him. "This is not it," he said. The rate of radiation leveled off as neutron emission from uranium and neutron absorption by cadmium came into equilibrium...