Word: space
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cluttered room that was once a hallway, Van Allen checked over a tangle of small, glittering electrical parts weighing a pound or so, which might be a transmitter designed to broadcast its voice over thousands of miles of empty space. Near it was what looked like a cylinder of dirty pink soap. It was plastic foam, encasing apparatus that might be destined to orbit the sun until the end of the solar system. Puffing on a battered pipe, Van Allen peered, commented, sketched an idea for a new circuit, then was summoned to take a long-distance call from...
Majestic Feature. In the race into space, the Russians can claim bigger satellites and more powerful rockets. If the U.S. can retort that it has a big lead in scientific achievement, the man most responsible is James Van Allen, whose instruments, designed and largely constructed in his basement laboratory, brought back from space discoveries the Russians never made...
...cannon in the nose of a shell. At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md., just outside Washington, Van Allen was a junior scientist in the proximity fuse business, but it made him an expert on how to pack complex circuitry into a small space and make it rugged enough to survive abuse. Working closely with the Navy, Van Allen was commissioned as a Lieutenant, j.g., made two trips to the Pacific to instruct gunnery officers in the use of proximity fuses...
Obviously, concluded Van Allen, "there was something wild and woolly going on." The aurora borealis is most intense at latitudes north of Newfoundland. It was believed to be caused by charged particles of some sort raining down from space and concentrated around the Magnetic North Pole by the earth's magnetic field. Though Van Allen could not guess it then, the "cosmic rays" detected by his Rockoons were directly related to the northern lights, and were really a fringe of the worldwide radiation belt that he was to discover five years later...
Despite his candid partisanship, Van Allen's status as the best instrumentator of space was so indisputable by this time that he found himself commissioned to provide Vanguard's instrumentation. He dutifully set to work. But he took the precaution of finding out just what the Army had planned for its banned Explorer I satellite. The Army informed him that it had in mind a cylinder 6 in. in diameter. By no coincidence at all, the instrument package Van Allen produced for the 21-in. Vanguard sphere proved to be cylindrical, and just 5½ in. in diameter...