Word: transistor
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...demonstrated new applications for the germanium transistor, which can be used in place...
Until recently the public has had no chance to try them out; transistors are hard to manufacture and are much in demand by the military. But last week Son-otone Corp. put on the market a partially "transistorized" hearing aid. Only one of its three miniature tubes has been replaced by a transistor, but Sonotone claims that the gadget "will give double the power of any comparable instrument, at half the operating cost...
More important in this case than the transistor's small size is its saving on electric current. It has no hot filament, and so needs no filament-heating A-battery. It is also much easier on expensive, high-voltage B-batteries. According to Sonotone, the semi-transistorized instrument gets twice the normal service out of an A-battery and makes a standard B-battery last six months instead of the usual three or four weeks...
When scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories produced the first germanium transistor, they knew they had found a long-awaited short cut through the great glass jungle of the electronics age (TIME, Feb. 11). With the ease of the old-fashioned carborundum crystal, it can change alternating current to direct; and like a vacuum tube, it can amplify faint, fluctuating currents. But where the vacuum tube is often bulky, fragile and uses large amounts of power, the rugged little transistor, no bigger than a thumbnail, works on minute amounts of energy. Last week in Princeton, N.J., the Radio Corp...
...transistor portable radio that can operate for 100 hours from five tiny batteries...