Word: scanners
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...radiation detector station in Turkey, where giant radar scanners monitor nuclear-bomb activities inside the Soviet Union by rotating full circle every 90 seconds, a computer began to chatter every time the dish passed an azimuth heading of 270°. This area, almost completely opposite in direction from Russia, showed up on maps as the desolate valley of the River Jordan in Palestine. At length, when the scanner was again approaching this heading, the puzzled controllers pushed the computer's "speak" button. Reels whirled, relays clicked, and the message came pounding out: NO, NEGATIVE, THERE IS NO BOMB...
...another with a different resistance. An examining physician can press on a patient's belly to feel how big his liver is, but he cannot get a clear outline of the liver, let alone tell how thick it is. With a simple twist of the dials, the ultrasound scanner will pick up first the near surface of the liver, then the back surface, and measure the distance between them, thus telling the doctor how much the liver is enlarged...
...living room. Pocket-sized communications devices will keep everyone in instant touch, and physical ailments will be diagnosed by computer and cured in many cases by replacing worn-out parts with factory-made ones. Money may be eliminated; customers will merely present their thumbs to an electronic scanner that will automatical ly deduct the purchase price from their distant bank accounts...
Such measurements are as important to spacecraft as the celestial fixes by which oldtime navigators found their way across the oceans. If the spacecraft is guided by a mechanical navigator, the findings of the star scanner can be fed directly into the navigator's electronic brain. If the craft has a human crew, the heading can be read from dials or other display devices. One promising version of the new system will use the sun as a kind of North Pole. But as man's machines get farther into space, the scanner might locate a prominent star such...
...bizarre locale-supposedly the terrain covered by "the lively set," whom the show's publicists define as Forddriving youngsters who have outgrown rock 'n' roll. Last week's show had Trumpeter Shorty Rogers at a Nike-Zeus site, Pianist Peter Nero playing beneath a radar scanner, the New Christy Minstrels on the Pacific beach near Los Angeles; also another show starred Ella Fitzgerald. Stan Kenton realized what must have been a lifelong ambition by directing a field of playerless instruments dangling from wires, while the real orchestra sat off in the wings and played a pretentious...