ELECTRONICS - The New Science

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 225, 15 October 1943, Page 4

ELECTRONICS - The New Science

eT Hs is Aladdin and a lamp. This is Icarus, rising to the sun. This is Midas, and Mercurius, and Paul Bunyan. This is a boy on stilts. Again, this is Herschel, scanning the clustered skies; Marco Polo, Priestley, Lister... . This is a striving in the heart. This is Electronics!"

N such language as that quoted above, a new science is being proclaimed to Americans, and to the world. "Electronics" may soon be as much a household word as "plastics," and now is the time to separate the bragging and ranting from the quiet revolution that is going on in the laboratories. Periodicals and newspapers in England and America have already begun to explain to the layman the significance of some of the recent discoveries that have been accelerated by vast wartime research, although their possibilities have been known for 20 years or more. The layman’s first question might be: "What is electronics?" and he might be told in the words of an expensively illustrated booklet recently sent to The Listener by General Electric Company, Schnectady, New York: "Electronics is the science of the electron-a tiny, invisible particle of pure electricity, the basis of all familiar matter. A rose bush, the planet Jupiter, a child’s blue dress-everything in the universe-is formed of an incomprehensibly vast number of electrons, whirling around their nuclei. Only within the last two generations has science discovered How to control electrons by the vacuum tube, and put them to work for the good of mankind. To-day, through electronics, tiny marks on a strip of film become the voice of the Hollywood actor on the screen. . astronomers, calculating by electronics, can measure iron in the dust of interstellar space." The larman still seems puzzled, and he remembers the definition of an atom given to him at school: "The smallest indivisible particle of matter." The Concise Oxford Dictionary will confirm him, calling it "a body too small to be divided." How, he asks, can you go beyond that? The answer is that for about 50 years now the atom has been known to be a sort of infinitesimal solar system-a nucleus with tiny particles of energy (not matter, because the-~smallest particles of matter are atoms), rushing round it in their various orbits. The character and behaviour of the atom-and therefore of the element which it con-stitutes-is determined by the number and character of these rotating particles. They include electrons, and protons and neutrons, with possibly a few more whose nature is being investigated. Some truth, then, is seen in the words of one of the earliest experimenters with wireless communication, Prospero,

Rightful Duke of Milan, who said to his daughter, Miranda: "We are such stuff As dreams are made on." Scientists who have taken up the theories of the great English physicist, Sir J. J. Thomson, have born out Prospero; to them, all the substance of the universe is melted into air, into thin air; . And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dis-

"But hold on," the layman says. "Real scientists can’t afford to talk like that. They have to keep calm and get on with the job, and not let the importance of it go to ‘their heads-not even for the sake of quoting Shakespeare." Yet their extitement can be excused, as we can see when some of the practical applications of electronics are explained. And for the high-pitched language which is being used to communicate it to the layman, we can blame the fact that in America as Fortune says, "this year the electron will be the cornerstone of a fourbillion dollar industry-more than the whole pre-war U.S. auto industry. Millions in advertising dollars since the first of the year have painted strange futuristic pictures of the coming age of electronics." Thus a vast concern such as General Electric, which is probably leading the world in the deévelopment of civil uses for electronics, is announcing its discoveries in terms that recall the extravagant tales of travellers in the 16th century, rather than the almost tentative statements of the scientists of that age. But in these days, it is not a heresy that may cost you your head to reduce all matter, living or inanimate, to mere mathematical . patterns. And no scientist need sign a recantation such as Galileo did, to save his life. The Philosopher’s Stone Put in crude terms and not those of lecture room or technical journal, the ' procedure by which the electron is being harnessed is something like this: The scientist takes Thomson’s conception of atoms as being all aspects of the one thing; whether

atoms of gas, solid or liquid, and he sees that there are 92 known elements. of matter made up in (Continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) . . Ves " ~ way, mere patterns of energy, mately transmutable one into the other -or, as Fortune says, "interconvertible." And upon this he superimposes a second concept in which all energyphenomena — heat, light, radio-waves, X-rays, and intangibles beyond-are also seen as aspects of the same thing; the wave-like movement of free electrons through space, each class of phenomena (heat, light, etc.), having its own distinctive wave-length, and again "interconvertible". . . . "This," says our layman, "is getting quite beyond me." But the tool that opened up this new world to science is something that the layman has in his own home and uses daily-the vacuum-tube. If the layman wants to know how this operates in the science of electronics, he must understand the inventions of

Edison, J. A. Fleming, Lee de Forest, Irving Langmuir, and others. Skipping what most of us do not understand, we can turn to the practical applications and see what uses are likely to be made of the science which gave us radio, Xray, the electric eye, television, and so on. The Electron Microscope There is. the electron microscope, which was described in simple language to the BBC’s listeners last June, by Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the author of The Origin of Species). "Its great virtue is that it can magnify things something like 50 times as miurh ee an ardinatvy micro-

scope," Darwin said. "This makes it reveal a lot of things that were quite invisible before. For example, there were many diseases which were known to be due to microbes, but the microbes were too small to see in the best existing microscope, whereas now we can photograph them. "The essential things in this microscope, as in an ordinary microscope, are the lenses, but the lenses are quite different here. To make an enlarged image of anything, the essential thing is to be able to ‘bend the rays coming from it. When the rays are rays of light, the way this is done is by glass lenses, as in a telescope or a camera. But in the electron microscope we are not using light, and so the lenses have to be quite different. We are using a beam of electrons, which are the ultimate stuff of electricity, tiny particles which go to make up a great part of matter. Rays of electrons can be bent either by electric fields or by magnetism, and so we have either electric or magnetic lenses. Both work, but on the whole, the magnetic ones have been more used. The lens consists of a circular coil of wire in a specially-designed iron frame. "Now why is this new elaborate gear better than the old microscope? The answer is that in the old microscope, though you can magnify the image indefinitely, you gain nothing by it beyond a certain point, as you see only a large blurred image instead of a small blurred image. There is a definite limitation to the size of the things you can see. There is a similar theoretical limitation for

electrons, but it only comes in for sizes many thousands of times smaller, and if it were the only limitation, we could hope to be just able to see individual atoms. At present, most of the successful photographs are magnified not much beyond twenty thousand, though there are some very good ones at a hundred thousand. "As to what the microscope can be used for, there is the trouble that the object has to be in a vacuum, and so it is much easier to work with dry things. Particles of smoke of various kinds can be seen; some smokes are stringy, some are in little cubes, and some in needles. "But probably the chief interest is in microbes and such things. Many of these can be seen with an ordinary microscope, but we now know that some of them, that looked like a blob, really had a swimming tail. I have seen one beautiful photograph made in Germany, which shows the mysterious thing called bacteriophage, a beast which attacks and kills bacteria. You can see a large black object, the bacteria, and a crowd of things like tadpoles round it, swimming towards it and attacking it."

FM Radio, or Frequency Modulation radio, is a new development already in use in one or two places in America, and those who can afford the receivers, are said to have an entirely new conception of radio-listening. Interference is eliminated, and fidelity of reproduction assured. The industry hopes for profitable post-war developments, And here are some of the other uses for electronic devices: Analysing Colour: The "spectrophotometer" can define two million different shades, and record specifications so that an exact match can be made without having the original colour for comparison, Detection: Stir one of two cups of boiling water with a piece of metal and an electric eye can tell afterwards which one it was.

The same principle can operate a burglar alarm, fire alarm, "speed-cop," and so on. Agriculture: New flowers have been produced by the genetic effect of X-rays on seeds, but industrial developments are still in the hopeful stage. Medicine: X-rays are the most familiar application. Induced heat is used to treat internal tissues without surgery. The human brain has been found to generate electrical patterns, for which normal standards are being established. In America, scientists have contemplated superimposing artificial wave patterns on those generated by the

abnormal brain, jolting it back to normal. The microscope described above, will play a big part in the advance of medical science. Miscellaneous: Radio location; navigational aids; counting traffic in tunnels; matching false teeth; comparing tyre noises; furnace temperature control; coating sandpaper; humidity control; safety doors in mines; detection of gases in tunnels; filling toothpaste tubes; inspecting razor blades. Research in New Zealand In New Zealand, electronics has wre cently come into the news with the establishment at Canterbury University College of an electronics laboratory, and the quick response of the Christchurch City Council and industrial firms has ensured a sound financial backing for research. The engineer in charge is T. R. Pollard,senior lecturer in electrical engineering. At present there are about 40 men in the group, graduate engineers, men lent: by Navy and Air Force, expert tradesmen, and young men undergoing training. The foreman is a fitter, of the old English school, and the Navy’s influence is seen in a ship’s bell. which strikes every hour. Contrasting with these objects of the visible world of Aristotle are the crankiest looking gadgets, with the air of being properties for a futuristic ballet. In these surroundings, not very many yards from "The Den" in which Lord Rutherford did his early work, some young New Zealanders will have the opportunity to peer into the strange new world of electronics.