Word: ultraviolet
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...corrosive poison (TIME, March 7). Quicksilver helped Joseph Priestley discover oxygen (1/74) and thus start Antoine Laurent Lavoisier on modern chemistry. It dissolves most metals (iron and platinum are among the few exceptions). Besides its familiar uses- gold and silver amalgams to fill teeth; filling for thermometers and ultraviolet ray lamps-it goes into explosives and drugs. Recently it has been used to run electro-turbines at Hartford and Schenectady (TIME, July 8, 1929). The world annually produces about 150,000 "flasks"* of mercury, gets almost all from Spain and Italy, yet appreciable quantities come from the U. S. (California...
...learning more & more about the nature of cells, and with each new bit of cell knowledge comes new knowledge of the nature of human beings, who are just cells multiplied and grown up. Last spring Dr. Francis Ferdinand Lucas, microscopist of Bell Telephone Laboratories, perfected an ultraviolet ray microscope capable of showing living cells in action. He set it to work photographing brain, cancer and sperm cells (TIME, March 2). Last week was tested a device to extract new cell secrets...
More than 50 years ago, the late Dr. Ernst Abbe, optical expert of the Zeiss laboratories, decided that the wavelengths of visible light were too long to produce perfect small details. Zeiss scientists 25 years later constructed an instrument which utilized only short invisible ultraviolet. But the importance of this microscope was not realized. The few instruments made were regarded as curiosities...
...Lucas, who wanted to see the smallest detail possible, revived the German's idea, designed an ultraviolet microscope for experimentation. Because ultraviolet is invisible to the human eye he had to focus the rays upon a sensitive fluorescent plate, take pictures of the objects under his microscope. He wanted the instrument primarily to study metals, but since it was so powerful he and other scientists applied it to living cells. The shallowness of focus allowed them to take horizontal cross sections 1/100,000 of an inch apart...
...this time, the largest ordinary microscopes gave a practicable magnification of 1,500 times. Microscopists thought that the instrument had reached the limit of its development. Because he found ultraviolet difficult to control, Mr. Lucas also worked with visible light, developed an instrument which was about four times as powerful. It magnified 6,000 times. The newest microscope which Mr. Lucas announced last week is twice as powerful, makes possible the small detail of the ultraviolet and the greater magnification of visible light...