Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...respect: he was formerly director of the famed Physical Institute of the University of Vienna. He is also a noted heretic. In 1910 he tangled with Caltech's brilliant Robert Andrews Millikan, then a young professor at the University of Chicago, who had just isolated and measured the electron. Ehrenhaft said that he himself had isolated electrical particles of various sizes, many of them smaller than the electron. Millikan demolished Ehren-haft's proofs, won the Nobel Prize...
...inventor of this "electron microanalyzer" is a fledgling still in his late 20s, James Hillier, co-inventor of the electron microscope (TIME, Oct. 28, 1940). The general atomic composition of bacteria and viruses is well known-they are mostly carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. But under high electronic magnification (100,000 times), bacteria often reveal granules of previously undetected substances that are hard to identify. The granules are much too small to be analyzed by a spectroscope, the conventional instrument for the quick determination of atomic components...
Hillier's analyzer, like the electron microscope, does its job by bombarding a substance with electrons. It has an electron "needle" of extremely fine focus. Hillier first lines up his minute target (such as the head or tail of a virus) by means of the microscope, then needles it with an electron stream of some 50,000 volts. This dislodges electrons from the atoms in the target. Since the energy required to dislodge them varies with the kind of atoms present, the loss of energy in the bombarding electrons after they pass through the substance indicates the nature...
...full significance of the electron microanalyzer is not yet clear, but instruments opening new vistas into the infinitesimal have always led to practical results...
...Well, beat my frequency!" said the electron. "There goes that wave I've been trying to modulate...