Word: servo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...make the idea work, the inventors had to develop a system of electric pulse motors that were able to direct a machine to perform all the intricate steps contained on the tape. Called pulse-servos, such motors have been in operation for years; the problem was that the fastest available could handle only 1,700 pulses per second, which was not enough for really sophisticated work. The great breakthrough came with the development of a super pulse-servo that could handle 6,000 pulses per second, fast enough to direct the most complex piece of milling work. To start...
This week Servo Corp. of America, which specializes in infrared, released pictures of the Long Island plant of Republic Aviation Corp. taken with heat waves emitted by its warm surfaces. The roofs of the plant show clearly. So do some of the runways on the flying field near by (see cut). This means that they have been warmed up by the exhausts of jet planes; runways that are not so busy show dimly or not at all. Two highways running past the plant are conspicuous because their pavement has been warmed by the tires and exhausts of heavy Long Island...
...Servo's infra-red engineers are not permitted to tell how their apparatus works. There seem to be several types. The picture of the Republic plant looks as if it were made by some sort of scanning technique. Servo says that its instruments take their pictures on ordinary photographic film, first translating the heat image into a light image. If necessary, the instruments can be made sensitive to very small differences of temperature. An object that is one degree warmer or colder than its environment is detectable under field conditions. In the laboratory much smaller contrasts are sufficient...
Brains for Automation. For industrial automation, the new computers can be hooked into other electronic-control devices such as servo-mechanisms, which sense and correct their own errors, run entire plants without human help. Beyond the computers, the age of electronics has produced hundreds of knowing gadgets for every use under the sun. There are electronic elevator systems with miniature electronic brains that automatically keep track of passenger demand, electronic "Ph meters" that can test with equal ease the acidity of California's lemon juice or the radioactivity of the AEC's plutonium, electronic "stopwatches" for industrial...
...automation, says a Bell Telephone Laboratories executive, miniaturization makes possible the tiny servo-mechanisms, i.e., electronic brains, which, built into machines, direct all their operations, automatically correct their errors...