ELECTRONICS: The New Age

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The house was like none ever built before. Its roof was a honeycomb of tiny solar cells that used the sun's rays to heat the house, furnish all the electric power. Doors and windows opened in response to hand signals; they closed automatically when it rained. The TV set hung like a picture, flat against the wall—so did the heating and air-conditioning panels. The radio was only as big as a golf ball. The telephone was a movielike screen, which projected both the caller's image and voice. In the kitchen the range broiled thick steaks in barely two minutes. Dishes and clothes were cleaned without soap or water. -The house had no electrical outlets; invisible radio beams ran all appliances. At night, the walls and ceilings glowed softly with glass-encased "light sandwiches," which changed color at the twirl of a dial. And throughout the house, tiny, unblinking bulbs of a strange reddish hue sterilized the air and removed all bacteria.

Such a house, fully described in fiction and partly pictured in ads, is today a reality in the laboratories that are moving deeply into the coming age of electronics -the age that is ushering in a second Industrial Revolution. The first revolution taught man to build machines to accomplish tasks far beyond the power of his own muscles. Now, through electronics he is learning to endow his mechanical monsters with a sensory complex something like his own—eyes, ears, even a brain of sorts—so that they automatically perform his workaday chores and take on thousands of complicated new tasks.

To most Americans, what makes an electronics device work is almost as baffling as the secret of life itself. Yet so great are its accomplishments that electronics * is the fastest growing major U.S. industry. From a gross of only $2 billion in 1946 it has become the fifth biggest U.S. industry, with 4,200 companies, a work force of 1,500,000, and sales of $11.5 billion annually. In the next decade the electronics industry will double again to at least $22 billion, and beyond that the horizons are limitless.

From coast to coast the speed of the new giant's growth is staggering. In Pinellas Park, Florida last week, General Electric just opened a multimillion-dollar X-ray plant. At St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Orlando, Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator, Sperry-Rand and Glenn L. Martin Co. are planning three more plants and laboratories to produce guided-missile control systems and do advanced research in electronics. New England's electronics expansion has changed the name of Route 128 near Boston to "electronics highway" Massachusetts alone has some 500 electronics plants. And in Los Angeles, where a new electronics plant is built every fortnight, there are already 470 companies, which poured out products at the rate of $1 billion last year. Of them all, probably the fastest growing is Ramo-Wooldridge Corp., which is a bare three years, seven months old. When it was started in 1953, Ramo-Wooldridge had nothing except the brains of its brilliant founders. President Dean E. Wooldridge and Executive Vice President Simon Ramo. The company now has the vital task of running the technical end of the U.S. Air Force ballistics missile program, and its sales this year will hit $50 million.