Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With microscopes using visible or ultraviolet light, magnifications of a sort up to 5,000 diameters have been obtained, but the really useful upper limit has hovered around 2,000 diameters. With microscopes using electron beams, useful magnifications have jumped to 100,000 diameters and more. Light is a train of waves; to pick some tiny body out of the unseen, the waves must find it big enough to get hold of. If the body is much smaller than the wave length, it will slip through like a mosquito through a fishing net. Electron beams are also wave trains...
...deepest thrust into the infinitesimal, he can thank a microscope that sees things without the help of light. This is the electron microscope. With it, in Camden, N. J., Berlin, London, Toronto and Pasadena last week, scientists studied things 50 times smaller than they could see a decade...
...High electronic magnifications (105,000 diameters) of vinylchloride polymer, a rubberlike synthetic, show a mottling of dots which scientists assume to be actual molecules; 25,000-diameter pictures of soft face-powder granules reveal the jagged projections which make them cling to the skin. Electron photographs of typhoid germs and intestinal bacteria disclose delicate, wavy filaments which may be their means of locomotion...
...great pioneers in electron microscopy are the German firm of Siemens & Halske (TIME, June 6, 1938), and, in the U. S., the R. C. A. laboratories at Camden (TIME, Jan. 9, 1939). R. C. A.'s big man in the field is Russian-born, reticent Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, who is also its television ace. His first electron microscope was as big as a hot-water boiler, needed a whole roomful of high-voltage equipment to run. Since then R. C. A. has designed a smaller, slimmer, slicker instrument, whose power plant occupies only two cubic feet...
Died. Sir Joseph John ("J. J.") Thomson, 83, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), Nobel Prizewinning (1906) physicist and author; in Cambridge, England. Small, easygoing Sir Joseph helped bridge the gap between the old & new physics by establishing the electron theory. Before his discoveries, atoms were considered indivisible; Thomson and colleagues figured out that each atom consists of a positively-charged nucleus surrounded by negatively-charged electrons...