Word: fibers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...evening's representative of the muse of irony, Gore Vidal. When Elizabeth Taylor, almost the last survivor of the studio star system for which the Oscar ceremony had been created, appeared on the walkway, it was like the arrival of a galleon in a weekend fleet of fiber-glass runabouts...
Glacé Blondes. The Grand Prix circuit is the class act in racing. Unlike stock-car drivers, Grand Prix racers are rich sybarites who zip through the industrialized world in futuristic "Formula I" nodules of fiber glass. Theirs is a life of death and daring where excess baggage means two cars and a couple of glacé blondes. "This is the only gentlemen's sport left," observed a Caracas businessman. "Polo and tennis are such a bore...
Field Test. Bell Labs is currently field-testing an experimental fiber-optics communications system in Atlanta. But much work must still be done before glass replaces copper in regular systems. Engineers are still trying to find efficient ways of joining the threadlike fibers together. Researchers are working to increase the lifetime of the lasers used to generate the fine beams upon which optical communication depends; the lasers now in use have a projected lifetime of 100,000 hours; researchers would like to increase this to 1 million hours. Scientists are also developing integrated optical circuits, the optical equivalent...
Police in Bournemouth, England, are now using an optical system developed by International Telephone and Telegraph to link their radio room with a computer data bank that enables them to keep track of their patrol cars. Fiber-optics circuits are being tested as control systems in U.S. military aircraft and ships; a Japanese power company is using fiber-optics circuits, which are not affected by nearby high-tension lines, to control some of its equipment...
...indeed, encourage an increase "by a factor of thousands" in the amount of information flowing in and out of the average home as people use their phone lines more and more to gain access to everything from their checking accounts to computers and consumer services. A single glass fiber can now be made to carry up to 672 one-way conversations simultaneously. This means that eight fibers, a bundle no thicker than a pencil lead, could do the job now being done by a 3-in. telephone cable...