Word: watt
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...torpedo finder. Able to swim 2,000 ft. beneath the surface, it was built for the U.S. Navy by Vitro Laboratories, can be adapted for commercial use. The Solaris is an eerie, Jules Verne monster that probes the ocean floor with four 500-watt floodlights and a television eye. When it spots a lost torpedo or other wanted object, a giant crab's claw snaps out, hoists the catch back to the surface...
...scientist delivered a memorable report: Radio-Astronomer A.C.B. (for Alfred Charles Bernard) Lovell, director of Britain's Jodrell Bank station, told President Eisenhower about the historic last days of the U.S.'s Pioneer V, man's most successful deep space probe. Pioneer's tiny five-watt radio transmitter had been designed to send messages until the probe was 5,000,000 miles away from the earth. Instead it kept sending and sending, getting its power from the solar cells on the probe's four "paddles." The 250-ft. radio telescope at Jodrell Bank kept listening...
...Teletype-lined room at Space Technology Laboratories in El Segundo. Calif, gathered a group of tense men. There was a chance that the big transmitter might malfunction and that in its failure it might silence completely its five-watt companion, leaving Pioneer V with no voice at all. Before being sent into space, the big transmitter had been tested rigorously. It had been shaken, spun, heated and cooled. It had survived all such tortures, but no test on earth could duplicate the hostile environment of space...
Then a second signal commanded the probe to send full current through the tubes. Both tests were successful, a fact reported to earth by the barely audible voice of the five-watt transmitter...
...listened to the proceedings over an open-voice channel. At intervals of one minute, not long enough to get a response from 8,000,000 miles away. Jodrell sent orders speeding into space. First it told Pioneer V to switch half-power current through the filaments of the 150-watt transmitter. Then it called for full-power current. Then it gave the payoff order: to turn on the high plate voltage that would actually start the big transmitter. Eighty-six seconds after the final command left the earth, the signal strength from Pioneer V increased twentyfold...