Word: radar
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This is the century that split the atom, probed the psyche, spliced genes and cloned a sheep. It invented plastic, radar and the silicon chip. It built airplanes, rockets, satellites, televisions, computers and atom bombs. It overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time. And behind each of these great ideas, great discoveries and great inventions is, in most cases, one extraordinary human mind...
...Hitler had not hounded Jewish scientists out of Europe, the Anglo-American atom bomb program sparked by the discovery of fission late in 1938 would have found itself shorthanded. Most Allied physicists had already been put to work developing radar and the proximity fuse, inventions of more immediate value. Fermi and his fellow emigres--Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, German Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium...
Percy Spencer didn't know better than to bring candy with him into his microwave lab in 1946. When the American engineer, who was developing radar components for the Raytheon Corp., let his chocolate bar get too close to a piece of equipment, it turned into chocolate...
...RADAR...
...thing for engineers at the start of the century to dream of filling the skies with airplanes and the roads with cars. It was another thing to figure out how to keep all that traffic straight. The solution turned out to be radar, an application of electromagnetic radiation that forever changed the nature of travel, warfare and even space exploration...