Word: lasered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...frontier of the American musical theater is wherever Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim are. Last season, the producer-director and composer-lyricist collaborated on Company, which focused a diamond-cutting laser beam on marriage, Manhattan-style. With Follies, Prince and Sondheim, together with Choreographer and Co-Director Michael Bennett, have audaciously staked out some unknown territory. They have put together the first Proustian musical-an act of dramatic creation even more daring than making a Proustian film (see CINEMA...
...battle cut-rate imports better by increasing its productive efficiency than by raising its protective barriers. Last week Genesco, Inc. and Hughes Aircraft showed off a jointly developed machine that may help U.S. clothing makers to compete. The machine, which looks like a miniature steel rolling mill, maneuvers a laser beam over cloth to cut garments according to computer-determined patterns. It acts with speed, accuracy and a flexibility that human cutters cannot match. It can cut a man's sport coat, a woman's skirt and a child's pair of shorts consecutively from the same...
...three of the locations, scientists are literally shooting at the moon-aiming powerful beams of intense laser light at the corner reflectors left by the Apollo astronauts near their lunar landing sites. Astronomical telescopes concentrate the beams and pick up their reflection from the moon. By precisely clocking the round-trip time of each short burst of light-about 2½ seconds-scientists have been able to measure the distance between earth and moon to within six inches or less. They are gathering invaluable data on such puzzles as the drift of continents, the earth's polar wobble...
Intense as they are, the beams aimed at the moon are not powerful enough to damage an aircraft flying thousands of feet above the laser gun. But the high-energy light could sear the retinas of a pilot or passenger who happened to look directly into it. So far nothing of the sort has occurred, but the FAA is taking no chances. The observatories themselves cooperate by stationing aircraft spotters outside to watch the skies whenever experiments are in progress. If a plane is seen near by, scientists hold their fire until it has passed...
There are more laser-experiment sites than those listed by the FAA. Under the U.S. Air Force's so-called Eighth Card program, centered at Kirtland Air Force Base (N. Mex.), researchers are exploring the use of even stronger laser beams as military weaponry. The airspace over bases housing such experiments is automatically out of bounds to civilian craft. One goal of the program: the development of a laser that could destroy incoming enemy missiles. Traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), a laser beam could, in theory, intercept a 17,000-m.p.h. ICBM...