ELECTRONICS: The New Age

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Genius at Work. The face of this new industry is as different from old-line industries as a candle from electricity. New companies need little equipment or capital, but they need plenty of brainpower. In the air-conditioned calm of office cubicles, grey-flanneled young Ph.D.s sit sipping coffee and chalking abstruse formulas on a blackboard jungle of schoolmasters' slates. Though some production lines, such as those for radio and TV sets, look much like those of any other industry, most electronic lines are as peaceful as libraries; ranks of nimble-fingered women, carefully smocked and snooded to keep down lint, sit quietly assembling a mysterious array of small "black boxes" to do such tasks'as fly planes, guide missiles, run machines and whole plants, automatically and easily solve scientific and mathematical problems that were impossible to do only a decade ago.

Radar & the Breakthrough. The age of electronics, born of radio, was force fed by military necessity during World War II, when widespread use of radar and sonar extended man's eyes and ears far into the skies and deep into the ocean. With peace came radar's civilian counterpart : a vast new TV industry that has already put 42 million sets in U.S. homes. But the great breakthrough in electronics came in 1948. Bell Telephone Laboratories discovered the transistor, which took over many of the functions of temperamental glass vacuum tubes. Along with other new semiconductors such as power diodes and capacitors, some as small as a grain of wheat, it opened up a vast new field of miniature components for better machines. Made out of solid materials, the new components were less susceptible to heat, dust and vibration, had but a fraction of the weight and bulk of old-fashioned tubes. Equally important, science also learned to replace the familiar maze of soldered wires with new printed and etched circuits as flat as playing cards.

The new components—basis of a subsidiary electronic science called miniaturization—opened the way to an endless harvest of smaller, cheaper, more efficient labor-saving devices. The first digital computer in 1944 filled an entire room, cost around $1,000,000. Today an equally efficient computer fits in a 5-ft.-by-5-ft. filing cabinet, and sells for less than $200,000. Some day, soon, big computers will be reduced to the size of a shoe box and sell for several hundred dollars.

Brains for Automation. For industrial automation, the new computers can be hooked into other electronic-control devices such as servo-mechanisms, which sense and correct their own errors, run entire plants without human help. Beyond the computers, the age of electronics has produced hundreds of knowing gadgets for every use under the sun. There are electronic elevator systems with miniature electronic brains that automatically keep track of passenger demand, electronic "Ph meters" that can test with equal ease the acidity of California's lemon juice or the radioactivity of the AEC's plutonium, electronic "stopwatches" for industrial and nuclear use that can time movement down to one-billionth of a second v. one-hundredth of a second for mechanical watches.