Word: tubefuls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Between the Atoms. In an ordinary electron tube, electrons "boil" off a heated filament into a high vacuum. There, unhampered by clogging air, they dance around obediently in response to electrical forces provided to act upon them. A transistor has no filament or vacuum, only a speck of hard germanium cut from a silvery crystal. But the mobile electrons are there, flashing through the empty channels between the ordered atoms of the crystal fragment...
...these chores are performed by the transistor with startling economy of materials and power. There is no glass envelope, as in an electron tube, and no complicated insides. The current price of germanium is more than $100 a lb., but so little is used that its cost is negligible...
...transistor's greatest advantage is its lack of a heated filament. Most of the currents that pulse through electronic apparatus are extremely small, but when they are amplified or relayed by a conventional vacuum tube, its filament consumes a full watt. It is the same, says Dr. Ralph Bown, vice president in charge of research at Bell Laboratories, as "sending a twelve-car freight train, locomotive and all, to carry a pound of butter." A transistor gets along with a millionth of a watt, not enough in most cases to make it faintly warm. The Bell men take...
...wide tunnel will have four lanes and a 15-ft. ceiling, two feet higher than in New York's new Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. It will be more than -three times as long as the present longest highway tunnel, the 2.16-mile tube under the Mersey at Liverpool, England. A 9-ft. duct under the roadway will bring in fresh air, and a duct in the ceiling, with blowers, will take off carbon monoxide...
Fifteen-Minute Toll. To dig the tunnel, contractors will use a mammoth U.S. cutter which fits the tube, rides along on rails, permits 24 electric drills to work at once. Most of Mont Blanc is solid granite, and (with electric drills) this is to the good: in 1880 workers digging the St. Gotthard tunnel in a less solid mountain were killed by rock lapses...