Word: scanners
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...trains and planes. As soon as it hits a post office, though, the mail creeps through the hands of human sorters who faced 72 billion pieces of mail last year. To speed up sorting, the Post Office Department is pinning its hopes on a new electronic gadget: an optical scanner that reads machine-printed addresses and sorts mail 15 times faster than the most efficient postal clerk. Introduction of the device, says Postmaster General Larry O'Brien, "is as much an historical event as the issuance of the first U.S. stamp in 1847 or the first city delivery...
...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...