Word: volts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years of industrial X-ray development have been telescoped into one urgent year of armsmaking. Six months ago, for example, there was only one giant 1,000,000-volt industrial X-ray machine capable of clearly radiographing seven inches of steel. Today there are upwards of half a dozen in use. Similarly, in the last year manufacturers have booked more orders for 200,000-and 400,000-volt X-ray machines than in the six previous years; more than 100 are now in industrial...
...those of radium's gamma rays. The shorter waves are the farther they penetrate into matter before their energy is dispersed. The stronger the voltage the shorter the resulting X-ray wave length and the greater the penetration. Thick Navy steels can be radiographed with 400,000-volt machines; but the pictures are not clear and require an hour of exposure for every minute required by the 1,000,000-volters...
About four years ago, 1,000,000-volt machines began appearing in a few great U.S. hospitals on a new, more compact model, weighing about 4,000 pounds, one-quarter of this weight being lead to keep the rays from getting out into the hospitals. Costing some $40,000 apiece, every 1,000,000-volter is the equivalent of $90,000,000 worth of radium.* (Radium is still widely used in therapy because of its compactness: it can even be planted inside a patient and left there for a while to do its work...
Industrial use of 1,000,000-volt machines had to wait until they became compact and light (1,500 lb.) enough to be slung easily from a crane and aimed this way & that upon intricate pieces of machinery. The new giants have two great industrial advantages: 1) they can see through thicker metals, 2) they can do the work of smaller machines in less time...
...criticize the frequent lower-case spelling of Diesel but to spotlight the fact that the name of the engine had eclipsed the name of the man. Some other scientific words (besides watt and ampere) from the names of great pioneers: ohm, coulomb, gauss, henry, maxwell, gilbert, volt (from Volta), galvanize (from Galvani...