Word: kapitza
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...those in the U.S. and Britain, had devoted their main effort to long-range, fundamental research. Langmuir & Co. further discovered that the Russians, through sheer volume of effort, already led the world in some fields of study (e.g., geology and soil science). In Moscow, they found famed Physicist Peter Kapitza presiding over one of the world's best-equipped electronics laboratories-where a photoelectric cell ten times as good as any in the U.S. has been developed...
Helium is the hardest of all gases to liquefy. The standard method involves liquid hydrogen, which is unstable and highly explosive. Kapitza's method not only did away with liquid hydrogen, but. cut the cost of making a quart from $50 to $5, the time from 24 hours to two hours or less. In the neighborhood of absolute zero, ordinary lubricants freeze hard as iron and Kapitza's problem was to find a lubricant for his compressor. He solved the problem by allowing a little helium vapor to squeeze through the piston clearance, so that the helium itself...
...Kapitza went to the U. S. S. R. to attend a scientific meeting. When he started back to England, the dictatorship of the proletariat stopped him, said he was needed at home (TIME, Nov. 25, 1935). There were frustrated roars from the late Lord Rutherford and other big wigs of British science, only miserable silence from Kapitza...
Meanwhile, in the U. S., Physicist Cecil Taverner Lane of Yale decided to build a Kapitza liquefier. He sent to Cambridge for blueprints. Unwilling to dismantle the machine for the sake of exact measurements, Cambridge sent only sketches, which showed valves in impossible places and other aberrations. Nevertheless Dr. Lane persevered, correcting the mistakes in the sketches by hunch and logic as he went along. It took him three years, cost $5,000. Last week he announced that he had successfully completed a Kapitza liquefier, was making liquid helium for low-temperature research quickly and safely, and at a cost...
When Dr. Lane started his difficult job, he got an encouraging but not enormously helpful letter from Peter Kapitza. He has not heard from the prisoner scientist since. Apparently the Soviets disapproved the correspondence...