Word: volts
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National Lead bought the property in September 1941. Before it could start building, it had to spend $480,000 for an 8¼-mile road to the nearest highway, $500,000 more for a 42-mile, 100,000-volt high-tension line. Meanwhile its engineers lived like explorers in tents and ghost-city shanties. Now the huge crushing plant, wet mill and dry mill are almost complete; operations will be full-scale by mid-July. Total cost: $9,000,000-every cent from National Lead's own till...
...electrical charge on a single muscle cell has been precisely measured for the first time, announced Dr. Ralph Gerard of the University of Chicago last week. Using needle-fine microelectrodes on 3/1,000-inch cells from frog muscles, he detected charges of 6/100ths of a volt. This surprisingly large potential is lost when the muscle moves. Thus, said Gerard, stimulation of a muscle consists in momentarily short-circuiting its electrical balance...
Then General Electric, which long ago learned that such theoretical research means dividends for its stockholders in the not-too-long run, asked him to come to its Schenectady laboratories and help in the construction of the present 20,000,000-volt machine...
Inventor Kerst first learned his physics at the University of Wisconsin, then taught at the University of Illinois, where last year he built his first small betatron - a 2,300,000-volt table-top model. He saw at once that similar machines capable of imparting energies of 100,000,000 volts, and even higher, could readily be built...
This week, while G.E. is starting work on a giant 100,000,000-volt model, Kerst is shipping his betatron to his laboratory in Illinois to see what discoveries he can make with it. Its electron beams have already penetrated inch-thick aluminum, made copper radioactive. Its medical applications, like those of the cyclotron which once struck the bewildered public as a useless device, must be explored. In time the betatron may be able to produce earthborn artificial cosmic rays, whose fantastic energies - hundreds of millions of volts - now smite the earth mysteriously from among the stars...