Word: vacuumers
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...most exciting new development in electronics is the transistor, a tiny, simple device that can do the work of most vacuum tubes. Transistors are generally mounted in plastic or metal for easy handling, but the essential works of the smallest models are only one tenth of an inch long and fifteen-thousandths of an inch in diameter, hardly big enough to see without squinting. Last week Dr. A. E. Anderson of Bell Telephone Laboratories told a Manhattan meeting of the American Association of Aeronautical Engineers about the latest transistor progress. The airmen listened intently, because modern aircraft, especially military models...
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...
...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...
...such complicated devices as radars and computers, which use hundreds or even thousands of vacuum tubes, supplying the power is a serious problem. The heat developed by the tubes is even worse. To keep the temperature down, they must be well spaced and cooled by an air stream. Transistors cause no such problems; they can be "potted" in plastic and whole arrays put close together...
...section cut from a fountain pen. When a faint voice current is fed to this trifle, it gives a signal loud enough to blast the eardrum. Scores of such amplifiers could be packed in a coffee can. One device at Bell has transistors that do the work of 44 vacuum tubes. The whole thing is housed on a panel no bigger than the page of a novel...