Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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General Electric's revered Elihu Thomson was succeeding so well in making small quartz mirrors for telescopes that last week he reaffirmed his promise of delivering a 200-inch mirror to California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) in two or three years. It will be twice as wide and six or eight times as heavy as the Mount Wilson glass mirror (world's largest) of the Carnegie Institution. It will reflect four times as much light and probe eight times as far into space. Consequently, with it astronomers will be able to infer many new things about the structure...
...such vast mirrors glass shrinks or expands with every little change in temperature. Such distortion has bothered the Mount Wilson observers. With quartz, however, great temperature changes are necessary to cause distortion. Dr. Thomson developed the method of fusing clean sand in the electric furnace...