Word: quartz
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Looking around for a better measuring stick, scientists found that quartz can be made to vibrate electrically at very constant frequency. A quartz disk will keep time for short periods with the accuracy of one part in 10 billion (the equivalent of a one-second error in 300 years). But after a week or so, quartz changes its frequency in an unpredictable...
Electron Cutter. United Aircraft Corp.'s Hamilton Standard Division (propellers) will put on the market a machine, developed by West Germany's Carl Zeiss Foundation, that uses electron beams to weld, mill and drill hair-fine holes in the hardest known materials, e.g., quartz, tungsten, zirconium. An electron gun fires beams that boost the temperature on the surface of the material up to 11,000° F. ; it can cut 100 holes in a straight line across a pinhead, drill a sapphire watch bearing in six seconds, weld a tough nu clear reactor core. Lease price: about...
...sails, flowing tresses, war bonnets, redcoats and pieces of eight. Andrew Wyeth, his even more famous son, has gradually emptied his own pictures of all but the barest, palest and sharpest images. As against his father's brocades, Andrew Wyeth's art has the austerity of smoky quartz crystals; yet it is all the richer for that, and the more valued. Last week the Philadelphia Museum of Art bought a typically bare new Wyeth for $35,000. Though not all museums disclose purchase prices, Philadelphia Museum officials believe theirs was the highest price ever paid...
Neutron Shower. In Kolb's experiment, the deuterium plasma is held in a quartz tube about a foot long. At each end the magnetic field is given added strength to form a magnetic "mirror," which reflects back the charged particles as they try to escape, thus sealing the gas in a magnetic bottle. A bank of 99 condensers, kept in the basement since condensers sometimes blow up, sends a jolt of 4,000,000 amperes thundering through the coil, heating the gas up to around 20 million degrees. Dr. Kolb reported that his machine had confined plasma and kept...
Self-Cleaning Lamp. General Electric introduced a tiny, tubular quartz lamp billed as "one of the most important basic improvements in incandescent lamps since Thomas Edison." The pencil-shaped tube lasts twice as long and is one two-hundredth the size of a standard industrial lighting lamp, does not grow dim throughout its life. Iodine vapor in the bulb prevents the formation of blackening carbon on the inside; the lamp's high operating temperature incinerates dirt that touches the outside. Because of their small size, the new lamps can be used to throw exact lighting patterns for show windows...