Word: transistor
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Scientific snooping is not new, but it has been virtually transformed in the past decade by the transistor and its relatives, which can be made almost invisibly minute. A practical radio transmitter with battery and microphone today may be as small as a lump of sugar and yet powerful enough to send a message several hundred feet...
Science keeps discovering new worlds and industry keeps conquering them-sometimes absorbing a few casualties in the process. After the transistor was invented, it caused trouble for many vacuum-tube producers, later suffered itself from overproduction and slashed prices. The transistor went on to spur the growth of the U.S. electronics industry to a record $16 billion. But now it has a rival-the microcircuit, a tiny device that represents a bigger advance over the transistor than the transistor did over the bulky vacuum tube. Last year some $20 million worth of microcircuits (mostly as missile components) were sold...
Split-Pea Circuit. The transistor took the complicated network of wires in a vacuum tube and condensed it into a simple, solid piece of silicon or germanium; the microcircuit reduces an entire electronic circuit composed of dozens of transistors and other components to a tiny latticework of thin metal conductors mounted on a base of such material as glass or silicon. At Texas Instruments, which shares leadership in the microcircuitry field with Motorola and Fairchild Camera, engineers have developed a piece of silicon the size of a split pea into which they have fused the equivalent of 38 transistors, five...
...trouble is that the bargains usually turn out to be something quite different. That transistor radio not only did not cost $41.50, but can actually be bought at retail for less than $10; though the ads make the blenders out to be a high-quality product, they are inferior models retailing for $12. By taking on names and trappings that made them sound like legitimate liquidators (who often do sell at distress prices), a new breed of mail order firm has made pseudo liquidating one of the nation's most successful selling rackets, condemned by the Federal Trade Commission...
...Last week the bogus liquidators were hotter than they wanted to be. New York State's attorney general won a court order dissolving a Manhattan firm with the impressive name of U.S. Liquidators Inc., which had sold 16,000 cheap transistor radios that it claimed were drastically marked down for liquidation; the company was fined $500 and forced to refund the price of all its unfilled orders. And more action is on the way. The F.T.C. plans to take steps against another operator next month, and the' U.S. Post Office is seeking indictments of two others for fraud...