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LASER RIFLE. ELECTRONIC LASER, LASER COMMUNICATION, HELIUM-NEON LASER, $4.95 ea. Directions, Instructions. Parts Lists. Manufacturer’s Addresses, LASER PROJECT CATALOGUE….25c.
Listed as an advantage of light beam weapons (lasers): “There is an unlimited supply of light.”
Death Rays Are Here… NOW
IF you had a security clearance, you could walk into any of about 30 laboratories in the United States and Canada and watch a death ray in action. You would hear absolutely nothing. You would see only a harmless looking bluish ray of light emerging from a small hole in one end of a long, complex, electrical apparatus.
The device is an ion beam projector. The blue ray is a stream of ions—charged particles that, in the vacuum of space, could catch and destroy a spy satellite or an orbiting weapon.
Color It Anything …first continuous dye laser gives science tunable tool
By ARTHUR FISHER / Group Editor, Science and Engineering
I watched the familiar cold blue light of an argon laser lance into the center of a shiny stainless-steel device festooned with lengths of plastic piping. My host, Dr. Otis G. Peterson of Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, N. Y., made a few final adjustments of the vernier controls. Then he said “There it goes.”
Last-minute news and notes to keep you up-to-date
By ARTHUR FISHER
NASA fights auto pollution
The big guns of aerospace technology are being enlisted in the battle against the major source of air pollution in this countryâ€”automobile exhaust. The mission: to reduce the one-quarter to one-half ton of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons each car spews into the atmosphere in a year, as a result of incomplete fuel combustion. The battle plan: Develop a thermal reactor that would replace the standard exhaust manifold and serve as an afterburner. But such a reactor must withstand temperatures occasionally exceeding 2,000 degrees F, thermal shock from cold starts, and jarring vibrationsâ€”all problems routinely encountered in space exploration.
Not bad, this was published six months after the first laser was demonstrated.
A True Light Amplifier
UNTIL now, no one has been able to take a light ray and amplify it thousands of times as we can with radio waves. Some attempts have been made using photomultiplier tubes and similar means, but the success has been limited and the amount of amplification possible by these methods small. Now, by modifying the Maser (see “The Amazing Masers” February, 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated), Hughes Aircraft Company scientists have been able to produce an experimental light amplifier that treats light as if it were just a radio wave, which it really is.
Cutting wood with a beam of light
A new technique in woodworking may be on the way. The University of Michigan has developed a tool that cuts through maple and other hardwoods with bursts of light that act like the science-fiction writers’ disintegrating-ray gun. The experimental drill operates with a laser (light amplification by stimulated electron radiation) head that contains a coiled xenon flash tube and a ruby rod. It builds up intensely hot light pulses, focuses them through a lens to vaporize a hole in a block of wood instantly without leaving char. It’s not ready yet for the home workshop.
The coming record revolution: digital discs
A laser “reads” the compact, no-wear disc to deliver superior hi-fi
By LEONARD FELDMAN
A Sony technician slipped a small disc into the slot of a player no larger than a portable cassette machine. I noticed the record’s shiny surface broke light into rainbow colors. Seconds later I was bathed in rich, wide-ranging stereo music that sounded better than anything I’d ever heard from discs or tapes.
Sony Corporation’s Dr. Toshi Doi, a leading digital-systems designer, explained that this was a true digital record: Information stored as number codes on its surface was being converted into music. Instead of grooves, this disc had an optical track “read” by a laser beam. I heard absolutely no surface noise or distortion and no pitch fluctuations from the spinning disc. Dynamic range, or the difference between the loudest and softest musical sounds, was awesome.
The Laser Pointer projects a visible bright red spot of light several hundred feet under normal lighting conditions-great for lecturers with slides. The $800 helium-neon laser has an output of 0.5 mWâ€”not enough to harm eyes or body, says RMF Products, Box 413, Batavia, III., 60510.
How Lasers Are Going to Work for You
The light fantastic is no longer a scientific curiosity: It’s now being used for just about everything from moon measuring to tire checking
By C. P. GILMORE / PS Consulting Editor, Science
At RCA’s David Sarnoff Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., Dr. Henry Kressel handed to me what appeared to be an odd-looking gold-colored bolt about three quarters of an inch long. The threaded part was ordinary enough. But a small block perhaps a quarter of an inch long and half that thick was built onto one side of its flat head. A wire from the head arched up and connected to the side of the block.
“That’s the laser,” he said, pointing to where the wire joined the block. “This metal block?” I asked.
He took the device, walked into a laboratory next door, put it under a powerful binocular microscope, and peered into the instrument as he adjusted it.
Laser May Guide Space Ships
GREATLY amplified light beams may provide optical lane” navigation systems to guide planes or spaceships of the future, using a newly-developed material.
Scientists at the IBM Research Center, Yorktown, N. Y., have announced a laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) that gives the first continuous beam of amplified light. It uses uranium ions in a cylindrical 1-1/2-in. crystal instead of the ruby in a previously-announced laser (see p. 94, Nov. ’60 S&M). The earlier amplifier could transmit light only in widely-spaced pulses of about .001 second and needed about 500 times as much power as the uranium type. IBM says future refinements now depend on improved optical design rather than advances in materials research.