Word: seismographs
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Science is burgeoning rapidly if somewhat unsteadily in the new land of the U. S. S. R. At the town of Yalta, in the Crimea, the Soviet Government has installed a seismograph station with sensitive instruments capable of recording the slightest tremors of the earth. Recently, the savants in charge have been nonplussed by a queer epidemic of quakes. One which agitated the instruments appeared to be in Angora, another in Asia, a third on the Adriatic coast. An extremely violent series of jiggles made the seismologists believe that a quake was occurring right there in Yalta. Oddly enough, however...
...Semitic museums. A few even might remember having heard rumors of a vague institution known as the University Museum. But it is indeed a difficult task to find men who are in the know about such establishments, officially going under the title of museums, as the Harvard Seismograph Station, the Institute of Geographical Exploration, the Yenching Institute, or the Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research...
Farther away from home we find such things as the Harvard Seismograph Station and the Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research. The former is located 25 miles north of Cambridge at the Oak Ridge Observatory, while the latter is an almost equal distance in a southerly direction, in Sharon. For those concerned with foraminifera it may be interesting to note that there is a library of 2,000 works about foraminifera at the Cushman Laboratory. Those not concerned with foraminifera are probably glad to learn that the subject is being investigated anyway...
...Carnegie Institution's seismograph station on Mt. Wilson in California, Dr. Hugo Benioff has built recorders which work by electromagnetism. The weight is a magnet hung so that its poles are a tiny fraction of an inch from the armature. When an earth tremor twitches the armature, the distance between it and the magnet changes slightly, altering the magnetic field and creating a tiny electric current which is amplified by vacuum tubes. This current fluctuates the light beam which makes the record, also twitches a galvanometer needle. In the Benioff seismograph, earth movements are magnified 200,000 times...
...This seismograph is rugged enough to withstand severe quakes close to the observatory-an important consideration in California. An accurate time record of the earthquake waves is also important, however, and pendulum clocks of high accuracy are likely to be thrown out of kilter by strong temblors originating nearby. Dr. Benioff has now devised what he calls an "earthquake resistant time- piece"- a clock driven by a 1,000-cycle tuning fork, which is in turn driven by a fourstage amplifier. This apparatus is accurate to one-tenth of a second per day and Dr. Benioff was sure last week...