Word: instruments
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when the late Chuck Willis rendered his emasculated version of the famous blues, but Ma Rainey sang it as Easy [not C.C.] Rider Blues much earlier. Old blues singers applied the term easy rider to the guitar, which, because of its shoulder strap, "rode easy." Eventually, because of the instrument's feminine shape, easy rider came to mean a woman of easy virtue or a man who prospered by her entrepreneurial activities. There is more to culture, Mr. Dove, than that which revolves 45 times per minute...
...Schawlow and Charles Townes describe a device that they thought would be able to stimulate molecules of gas confined in a cylinder until they gave off photons in an intense and powerful stream. Their device was a variation of Townes's earlier Nobel Prizewinning invention, the maser-an instrument that produced invisible microwaves by a process called "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Because it was designed to produce visible light, ihey called their proposed new instrument an optical maser...
Just two years later, Physicist Maiman used the Townes-Schawlow theory and built the world's first working laser, a small, hand-held instrument that shot out bursts of brilliant red light. Instead of a gas, Maiman's laser used a synthetic ruby crystal grown in a bath of molten aluminum oxide. In pure form, the aluminum oxide crystal is colorless and transparent. But a pinch of chromium added to the bath as an impurity gives the resulting crystals their characteristic ruby-red hue and supplies the chromium atoms (one for every 5,000 aluminum atoms) that cause...
...infra-red laser beams. Peeling Potatoes. The various laser wave lengths, about 1,000 times shorter than those of the microwaves used in conventional radar, make laser altimeters, range finders and aerial mappers remarkably accurate. In a demonstration of a laser distance-measuring device, Spectra-Physics, Inc. flew the instrument over a Philadelphia high school stadium at an altitude of 1,000 ft. A conventional radar altimeter would have indicated only the slope of the stadium; the laser picked out each row of seats, the one-foot space between each row, and even the slight depression of the running track...
Many of Karr's techniques are self-taught. Raised in a musical family in which the father, grandfather, two uncles and three cousins all played the bass, he took up the instrument at nine "without even knowing there were other instruments." He made such rapid progress that he soon ranged beyond the conventional approach to the bass. He studied with a cellist, a pianist and even with Singer Jennie Tourel ("the greatest influence on my phrasing and musical ideas"). After a 1962 appearance in one of Leonard Bernstein's televised Young People's Concerts, he started...