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Show "Things Vhich Lie Ahead" By Bill Jury General Electric News Bureau Hanford Atomic Plant (The following is the fourth of a series of seven articles disclosing disclos-ing the highlights and sidelights which have accompanied the nation's na-tion's development of atomic energy. en-ergy. Prepared at the Hanford atomic energy plant, the series deals with the human things which followed in the wake of the first historic announcement that man had harnessed the atom. It touches touch-es upon the things which lie ahead.) Strange and awesome devices are among the tools with which scientists' today are probing the hysterious world of the atom. By-products of the atomic age and America's search for nuclear knowledge, many of the new instruments in-struments might have been fostered foster-ed in the mind of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and later discarded because they were considered 'too incredible." Yet, their collective presence in the laboratories and workshops of American industries and research laboratories, eventually may have as profound an effect on the lives of the nation's farmers and city-dwellers city-dwellers as the steam locomotive or the automobile. The nation's atomic scientists today are employing these hypersensitive hyper-sensitive instruments to explore minute worlds to a degree never before imagined possible. With the electron microscope used by General' Electric Company scientists in research work at the Hanford Atomic Energy Works, for example, particles one ten-millionth of an inch in diameter can be observed. Viruses and certain molecules became visible under this magnification magnifi-cation for the first time in the history of the world, and if you could write letters that small, you could cram 40,000 printings of the Gettysburg Address onto the tip of a human hair. Members of the Biology section of the GE or ganization operating the Hanford' plant for the Atomic Energy Commission Com-mission use the microscope to observe ob-serve animal tissues and other materials ma-terials which have been exposed ' to radiation. Seeing to it Hanford vacuum and gas-filled tubes used in research re-search work are "leak-free' is the job of a mass spectromete leak detector. de-tector. The device is so sensitive that if used on a fully inflated passenger automobile tire, it could detect a leak so small that it would require 2000 years for the tire to lose all of its pressure. Weight - measuring instruments used at the Hanford plutonium-producing plutonium-producing plant register weights of particles so small that they are beyond human comprehension.. A micro-balance, one of three supersensitive super-sensitive instruments in use by GE scientists, can measure particles weighing no more than one one-hundred one-hundred -thousandth of a gram. There is no place for such a device as this in the butcher shop around the corner, but to the scientist in his laboratory, it is an indispensable tool in his quest for greater knowledge about the amazing world of the atom. (Next Week: 'Atomic Age Sheep') |
