Word: quartz
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Seated in a steel sphere Explorer Beebe and Otis Barton, inventor, dropped 1,426 ft. into the sea, 1,076 ft. deeper than the record. On the sphere's outer surface was fastened a dead fish. Through thick windows of fused quartz the divers could peer out at deep sea creatures, lured near by the fish bait, never before seen by man in their natural state. So great was the depth that only the blue and violet rays of the sun's spectrum penetrated, yet the submarine scene seemed brilliantly lighted compared to the gloom of the diving...
General Electric's revered Elihu Thomson was succeeding so well in making small quartz mirrors for telescopes that last week he reaffirmed his promise of delivering a 200-inch mirror to California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) in two or three years. It will be twice as wide and six or eight times as heavy as the Mount Wilson glass mirror (world's largest) of the Carnegie Institution. It will reflect four times as much light and probe eight times as far into space. Consequently, with it astronomers will be able to infer many new things about the structure...
...such vast mirrors glass shrinks or expands with every little change in temperature. Such distortion has bothered the Mount Wilson observers. With quartz, however, great temperature changes are necessary to cause distortion. Dr. Thomson developed the method of fusing clean sand in the electric furnace...
Great have been donations to Caltech: The Rockefellers' general education board $3,000,000; the Carnegie groups $250,000 and more; Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics $350,000. Southern California Edison Co. gave a laboratory. General Electric is giving the great quartz mirror at cost. Within reason Caltech can get what it needs from U. S. eleemosinary and industrial institutions and its enthusiastic personal backers. Its preeminence as a research and teaching school, the high-grade of its staff and the prestige of its trustees makes this possible. Twenty years ago there was a Throop College...
...obstacles seem almost insurmountable, but many have been solved, and those that remain very likely will be in time. The difficulty of fusing quartz for so large a mirror at the great temperature required, the problem of supplying heat for such an undertaking, and the ultimate question of how to mount such a heavy thing without having it bend and distort the curvature--all these are as yet not definitely solved, but they will soon be considered...