News Briefs, February 1964 Radio-Electronics

Lots of happenings in the tech world were reported in the February 1964 "News Briefs" section of Radio-Electronics magazine. The winner for best item has to be where a little girl bit into a TV power cord and got launched a couple feet into the air. The aftermath was gruesome. UNIVAC 1 was retired from service at the Bureau of the Census where it crunched numbers since March 1951. Awarding of engineering PhD and Master of Science degrees were on the rise, while Bachelor of science degrees were in decline. No explanation was offered. Maybe the relatively new hippie movement was causing too many students to miss class from being on drugs and/or participating in sit-ins. A new automated ship navigation system using sonar was demonstrated by Raytheon. Bell Labs announced a miniature helium-neon laser working at 632 Å, which is infrared light even though the title claims "visible light."

News Briefs

New nautical navigator's sonar devices continuously bounce four simultaneous Signals. off ocean floor. Returning echoes are compared with transmitted signal. Combined results make ink trace on ship's chart, showing ship's exact position.

A Doppler navigator that automatically and continually plots a ship's position underway has been developed by Raytheon for the Navy. This works much like the Doppler radar now used to guide airplanes (Radio-electronics, August 1962, p.42).

As the ship moves forward through the water, sound waves are beamed to the ocean's floor in four directions corresponding to the cardinal points of the compass. The returning echoes, changed slightly in pitch from the frequency of the original beam, are compared with the outgoing sound. The change is called the Doppler effect and is a direct measure of the motion of the vessel in the respective directions.

This change occurs only when the ship moves. The bottom echo from the sound signal beamed ahead of the vessel strikes the receiver sooner than it would if the ship were standing still. Therefore, the pitch is slightly higher. Echoes from the beams directed astern and to port and starboard of the ship likewise change in pitch in proportion to the motion of the vessel in these directions.

These differences in frequency are processed and compared electronically. The outputs are fed into step motors which drive the plotting pen over a standard US Coast and Geodetic Surveyor Navy Hydrographic Chart. The result is a precise tracing of ink across the face of the chart, the contact point of the pen being the actual position of the vessel with respect to the surface of the earth.

An earlier underwater Doppler radar was mentioned in Radio-electronics, February 1963, on page 16.

Joyce Ellen Cartwright, age 2, of Old Hickory, Tenn., pulled the cord out of the family TV set, put it in her mouth and bit it. Her mother reports that she saw her about 2 feet off the floor, coming down. "I thought she had climbed up on something and fallen off," Mrs. Cartwright said.

At the hospital, it was discovered that the child had third-degree burns at the corner of her mouth and partly down her throat. She had swallowed two of her teeth and a fragment of the TV cord.

Apparently the back of the set had been removed for some reason (possibly amateur troubleshooting) and the set was being operated with a simple cheater cord.

Dr. Eugene I. Gordon demonstrates the new laser. Spacing between end mirrors shown by dividers is 4 inches; length of active discharge tube is 2 inches, The mirror at Dr. Gordon's right is attached to a piezoelectric crystal. A voltage applied to the crystal changes its length, moves the mirror slightly, tuning the laser.

A helium-neon gas laser only 5 cm long and 1 mm in diameter has been developed by Eugene I. Gordon and Alan D. White of Bell Telephone Labs. Due to its shortness, the new laser oscillates at only one frequency. Larger gas lasers tend to operate at several frequencies simultaneously and are hard to stabilize against frequency fluctuation. The smaller lasers are much less susceptible to vibration and thus more stable.

The combination of stability and single-frequency oscillation makes it possible to use the laser as a very precise measuring instrument. If one of the end mirrors is connected to a positioning device, very slight changes in position will cause the laser to shift frequency. Displacements considerably less than one-millionth of an inch can be detected and, with an oscilloscope, readily measured.

Changing the spacing between the end mirrors varies the frequency of laser oscillation within a 1,500 mc range centered at 473,000 gigacycles. To tune the laser over this frequency range, one of the end mirrors must move less than 12-millionths of an inch.

To increase laser gain so that the very short lasers could be made to oscillate, the helium 4 gas used in earlier lasers was replaced with the lighter helium 3 isotope, and the diameter of the laser discharge tube was reduced to 1 mm.

UNIVAC I, Serial No.1, which went into operation for the Bureau of the Census in March 1951, has been retired and presented to the Smithsonian Institution.

UNIVAC I was developed by J. Presper Eckert and Dr. J. W. Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania, following work they had done with electronic devices to compute trajectories of artillery missiles during World War II. The Eckert-Mauchly Co. had affiliated with Remington Rand before UNIVAC was completed.

The computer was operated first in the Remington Rand plant in Philadelphia, processing data from the 1950 census. In 1952 it was transferred to the Census building at Suitland, Md., from which date it operated practically continuously 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until its final run.

The number of doctor's and master's degrees in engineering continues to increase, as it has been doing for the past 6 years, but the number of bachelor's degrees continues to decline.

A report released by the US Office of Education and announced jointly by the American Society for Engineering Education and the Engineering Manpower Commission of the Engineers Joint Council, stated that during the past 6 years engineering doctorates increased in number at least three times as fast as the total number of doctorates in all of the major academic fields.

Sgt. First Class Taro R. Shimomura, of Honolulu, speaking into the I5-ounce transmitter, while wearing the army's new small receiver on his helmet.

Degrees have increased on the master's level also, at twice the rate of increase for the total number of master's degrees awarded in the US.

Bachelor's degrees, however, continue to decline in number, but preliminary figures indicate that the total engineering enrollment rose slightly this fall. Thus, a reversal of this trend is hoped for.

A new signal system devised by the Army Electronics Research & Development Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, N.J., will make it possible to supply receivers to every infantryman in certain combat groups. Transmitters would be supplied to the sergeants, who would thereby be able to keep in touch with their squads, even though the men were widely scattered.

The receivers weigh 9 ounces, and the transmitter 15 ounces. The 9-ounce receiver has 13 transistors and 7 diodes together with batteries good for 24 hours.

With the receiver clipped on his helmet or in his pocket, each member of the squad, even though in a relatively remote location, can be as closely in touch with the leader as in the past, when it was often necessary to remain so close that a single enemy shell could wipe out an entire squad.

"Whistlers," those low-frequency noises produced by thunderstorms and traveling along the earth's magnetic lines of force, can produce variations in the strength of very low frequency (vlf) radio signals.

This discovery was made by Michael Trimpi of Stanford U. at a vlf Research Station in Antarctica.

News BriefsFebruary 1964 Radio-Electronics

News Briefs

News Briefs
February 1964 Radio-Electronics