Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...laboratories in Camden announced a new, simpler electron microscope for educational and research laboratories. Like earlier and bigger models, the new instrument uses beams of electrons instead of beams of light for magnification, furnishes enlargements up to 100,000 diameters, but it can be plugged into an ordinary electric outlet...
...they still insist it is far off. When a slow-moving neutron hits the uranium atom's nucleus, the nucleus is constricted around the middle and finally splits, like an amoeba reproducing itself. But though the energy of the activating neutron is only a small fraction of one electron-volt, 200,000,000 electron-volts of energy are released. Last fortnight, Dr. Richard David Present of Purdue described a three-way split. If conditions, including the energy of the entering neutron, are right, two constrictions instead of one crease the atom, dividing it into nearly equal thirds. First...
...electron microscope leads scientists a long way downward into the realm of the infinitesimally small. Using magnetically focused electron beams instead of light beams, it discloses details (of germs, chemicals, etc.) 20 or more times finer than can be seen with optical microscopes (TIME, Oct. 28). Fortnight ago its beams cleared up another dark corner. In Rochester, tart, smart, British-born Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, head of research at Eastman Kodak Co., announced it had upset old notions of how silver is distributed in photographic films...
When a film is developed, silver atoms clump together in tiny islands. It used to be assumed that these clumps were a grainy, cokelike mass. It was just an assumption, because no ordinary microscope could penetrate the clumps. In the Eastman laboratories, Researcher C. E. Hall made electron pictures magnifying the silver islands 25,000 times. Then it was seen that they were composed of tangled, thin strands of silver, some of them only a few atoms thick. "The developed grains," said Dr. Mees. "resemble masses of seaweed rather than coke...
Britain's William Lawrence Bragg once described the atom as "like someone's head [i.e., the nucleus] with a cloud of mosquitoes [i.e., electrons] buzzing around it." Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he pictured electrons as little red balls. But physicists have long since stopped trying to visualize the atom. As understood today the electron has become almost a dreamlike abstraction. It does not obey the laws of cause and effect. Nevertheless, even in quantum mechanics, the abstruse mathematics of the atom, the electron is assigned a constant electric charge, e, and a constant mass, m. Thus...