Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...electron-hurling machine, weightiest contribution to atomic physics since the cyclotron was invented in 1931, was unveiled before science and the world last week. It can hurl electrons-particles of negative electricity-at nearly the speed of light. It can produce 20,000,000-volt X-rays, some ten times more than the world's biggest X-ray machine. It can out-radiate all the extracted radium supplies on earth-and its further abilities have scarcely been explored. While U.S. scientists speculated upon the discoveries the device might lead to, they welcomed to their front ranks its brilliant young...
...heart of the betatron," explains Inventor Kerst, "is a doughnut-shaped glass vacuum tube between the poles of a large electromagnet" (see cut). Inside the tube, a hot filament gives off electrons. Magnetically guided, each electron circles about the tube 400,000 times, accelerated at each rotation by small 70-volt kicks whose cumulative push gives the particle an energy of 20,000,000 volts within a fraction of a second. These fiercely energized electrons are then either: 1) Released continuously from the tube as a beam of beta rays-whence the betatron's name-which...
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...
...pictures were taken with an electron microscope developed by R.C.A. (TIME, Oct. 28). The photographic plates were exposed by beams of electrons instead of beams of light. Practical limit of light magnification is about 2,000 diameters, of electron beams 100,000. These molecules are about ten-millionths of an inch long. In the picture above they are shown alone; in the picture below, they look fuzzy and out of focus because they are clustered over with antibodies, smaller molecules which produce immunity in organisms by reacting with the larger virulent ones. It is an action shot of a battle...
...tobacco plants, one of the largest molecules known to chemists. It is a rod-shaped structure, about 40,000,000 times the size of the hydrogen atom (basic unit of atomic and molecular weight). But even at this size it could be photographed only with the recently developed electron microscope (TIME, Oct. 28), which by using electron beams instead of light can magnify images 50 times greater than the best light microscopes...