Electronics News
June 1947 Popular Science

June 1947 Popular Science [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Popular Science, published 1872-2021. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

Popular Science magazine, as did Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics, included a wide variety of science and mechanics topics in every issue - as the titles imply. Sometimes brief news reports were used, and other time entire multi-page articles were written. In a case of the former, this collection of items appeared in the June 1947 issue. Digital computers were replacing analog computers due to their more flexible programming ability and lower inaccuracies. Data storage was easily handled with magnetic tape, but the speed of read/write operations was usually a bottleneck in the process. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) developed what they called the Selectron vacuum tube, which used phosphorous dots to store a charge representing a digital "0" or "1." Operation was somewhat akin to dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that required periodic refreshing of the storage cell value before it fades to obscurity. Before the Selectron could make it to prime time, magnetic core memories were invented. Also in the report was a method the Dutch used for hiding radios in books during World War II.

Electronics News

Tube with a Memory

Developed to help electronic computers "remember" the factors involved in long mathematical sequences, RCA's Selectron is expected to permit the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers in about one hundred-millionth of a second. A screen of tiny wires forms a checkerboard of windows through which electrons can pass to store electro-static impulses, representing up to 4,096 mathematical factors, on a target insulator. The tube's circuit "opens" the windows individually to receive impulses and to release them again whenever they are required for the calculation.

How Dutch Hid Radios

When the Nazis confiscated Dutch radios in 1945 to restrict foreign broadcasts, pocket-size receivers by the thousand were secretly turned out for the resistance movement by workers of the Philips Research Laboratory, Eindhoven, Holland. The one shown in the cutout portion of a book is typical of their design. Using only one or two midget tubes, they were hidden in lamps, powder dusters and other everyday objects. One, inside a can of vegetables, was even sent safely into a Nazi prison camp.

FM Aids Railroads

This mobile FM transmitter-receiver, part of equipment recently tested on the Southern Pacific Railroad, provides a stormproof party line for train crews and dispatchers (PSM, April '45, p. 130). In the tests, engineers in the cabs of long freight trains checked their orders with conductors riding in the cabooses, with stations along the line and with San Francisco headquarters via telephone relay. Use of the experimental equipment was reported to have saved time and trouble in handling trains.

Posted January 15, 2024