Word: vacuumed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...VACUUM TUBE Developed by Sir John Ambrose Fleming...
...professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and later at Clark, Goddard tried to figure out just how. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he calculated the energy-to-weight ratio of various fuels. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could indeed fly in a vacuum, thanks to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most important, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would need something...
...took a bemused backward glance at a tart little editorial it had published 49 years before. "Further investigation and experimentation," said the paper in 1969, "have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error." The grim Professor Goddard might not have appreciated the humor, but he would almost certainly have accepted the apology...
...Bell Labs, Shockley recognized early on that the solution to one of the technological nightmares of the day--the cost and unreliability of the vacuum tubes used as valves to control the flow of electrons in radios and telephone-relay systems--lay in solid-state physics. Vacuum tubes were hot, bulky, fragile and short-lived. Crystals, particularly crystals that can conduct a bit of electricity, could do the job faster, more reliably and with 1 million times less power--if only someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this...
Along the way, vital components began to shrink: the vacuum tube became the transistor; the transistor led to the microchip; the microchip married the phone and gave birth to the modem. Soon enough, sounds, photos, movies and conversations would be ground down into the smallest components of all: 1s and 0s. Was the digital revolution inevitable? In our brave new wired world, it certainly seems that...