Word: thousandths
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...this Erhard Milch, wartime flier, contributed what is probably the greatest advantage the German Air Force has: rigid standardization. His aviators are as much alike as piston rings, and his piston rings are uniform to the ten-thousandth of an inch. Remotely Jewish, born of a druggist, with experience in bigtime civil aviation, Lieut.-General Milch has such a passion for pattern that when a Berlin squadron leaves its barracks and flies to Königsberg, its men are given identical pajamas in identical rooms in identical barracks, and clean their teeth with duplicate brushes bearing their names...
...duration of the flash can be timed approximately by noting the amount of blur (equal to the distance traveled during exposure) on the bullet. If the bullet travels at 1,000 ft. per sec. and the blur amounts to one-thousandth of a foot, the time interval is one-millionth of a second, fastest exposure ever accomplished...
...clear spectrum it is necessary to work with a very narrow band of light; but, because of atmospheric distortion, the image comes in as a diffuse, approximately circular blob. In practice the light is therefore fed through a narrow slit, perhaps one-thousandth of an inch wide. This screens off most of the diffuse image, but wastes 90 to 95% of the light, squanders countless hours of exposure time on big telescopes, prevents spectroscopic analysis of the farthest visible nebulae or "island universes...
...quiet, brilliant Ira Sprague Bowen. No bigger than a child's fist, this gadget splits up the blobby image of a star or nebula into a number of thin strips by means of a combination of mirrors which feed each one of the strips through the one-thousandth-inch spectroscope slit. After passing through, these slices of light are recombined into a single band, suitable for analysis, by a cylindrical lens. The Bowen image-slicer makes it possible to use 50% to 75% of the available light, instead of 5% to 10%. Physicist Rudolph Meyer Langer of Caltech declared...
...thousandth of a second longer than it was a century ago. Although this change has had no effect on clocks, it is highly significant for astronomers. Just before he died last July, venerable, 71-year-old Professor Ernest William Brown of Yale, who spent half a century studying the passage of time, sent the Smithsonian Institution an original hypothesis on the lengthening...