Word: platinum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Many substances, including platinum give off ions (electrified particles) when heated to high temperature. At one end of the lonophone's quartz tube is a small quartz cylinder with a coating that contains fine particles of platinum. When the platinum is heated electrically to about 1,000° C., it fills the horn-shaped cavity above it with a cloud of rapidly zigzagging ions. The ion cloud responds almost instantly to changes in the strength of a high-frequency electric field around the little quartz cylinder, and the cloud's expansion and contraction set up sound waves. When...
...finds nothing that can quite match his favorites of yesteryear-Theda Bara, the archetype of the Vamp; Gloria Swanson, with her passion for spangles and feathers; Clara Bow, the original "It" girl; Greta Garbo, the incomparable Swede, still a legend after a decade off the screen; Jean Harlow, whose platinum-blonde petulance and provocative lisp still agitate nostalgic memories in thousands of aging males...
...like surgeons in public relations," explained platinum-haired Clem Whitaker, who got $100,000 a year for running the $4,500,000 campaign. "We perform the operation, and when the patient recovers we move out." Whitaker & Baxter had been working full time for A.M.A., needling doctors and public alike to fight the Truman-Ewing health scheme (TIME, Feb. 20, 1950). They were itching to get back to California and round up some new accounts...
Electrons in the Raw. Meanwhile, the doctors are trying something new with the betatron. Previously they used it in a roundabout way-shooting a stream of electrons against a platinum target, which produced X rays, and then aiming the X rays into the patient's cancer. The new technique is to use the electrons in the raw. The advantage: whereas an X-ray beam keeps going after it has passed through cancerous tissue, and may cause "exit burns" where it leaves the body, the electron beam can be focused to hit the cancer site and then dissipate itself...
...Story of Virginia Hill. Counsel Halley had one more diversion before he went back to the main theme. In flung Virginia Hill, queen of the gangsters' molls. She was soignee in a platinum mink stole and picture hat. She was also cursing the photographers. "Make them stop doing that; I'll throw something at them in a minute," she told Kefauver angrily. Then, while the Senators listened breathlessly, Virginia told her simple tale of how a 17-year-old waitress from Alabama met a friend of big-time bookies named Joe Epstein, and started along the road...