ELECTRONICS: The New Age

• Share

(3 of 9)

In dozens of plants closed-circuit TV systems are used as watchdogs over machinery, note and automatically correct or forestall errors in operation. In hospitals doctors use closed-circuit TV to teach other doctors the intricacies of heart surgery, while dentists have electronic drills that do not build up heat, are less painful than ordinary drills.

Brains for Survival. Nowhere is the age of electronics more advanced than in the U.S. armed forces, currently the industry's biggest and most demanding customer. The electronics defense budget for the current year is $3 billion, more than any other single item except aircraft. The U.S. military establishment is rapidly becoming one vast electronics system, whose probing antennas and twirling radar reflectors are so sensitive that an upended card table floating off the Florida Keys was recently reported by a rookie radarman as "four unidentified submarines." Virtually every modern weapon depends upon electronics in some way, and the Army keeps track of its 100 million-item spare-parts inventory by electronic computers, which do the work of days in seconds. "Files," said one general, "are just things to keep your personal letters in today."

Of them all, the biggest and most important electronics project is the development of the Air Force's intercontinental ballistics missiles, the 5,500-mile Atlas and Titan and the 1,500-mile intermediate missile Thor. The heart, nerves and brains of the giant warbirds are fantastically complex electronic-guidance systems. That the job of" supervising this project, on which the survival of the U.S. depends, was not given to one of the familiar electronic giants—American Telephone & Telegraph, Radio Corp. of America, International Business Machines, General Electric, Sylvania, Westinghouse—but to Los Angeles' Ramo-Wooldridge is a perfect example of the way in which brilliant, little-known scientists are shooting up from obscurity to fame and sizable fortunes in the new age of electronics. The only atypical thing about Ramo-Wooldridge and its founders, Dean Wooldridge and Si Ramo, is the scope of their job and the size of their success.

The Paper Factory. R-W makes none of the actual hardware for the ICBM program. What it does is act as technical boss for a project rated twice as complex —and twice as costly—as World War II's Manhattan Project. With Major General Ben Schriever in overall command (TIME, April 1), R-W acts as his technical staff overseeing the 220 major companies in the ICBM missile program. So secret is the job that R-W's green-and-pink headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport is among the most closely guarded plants in the nation. So complex is the task, so voluminous are the analyses, reports, computations and recommendations that pour from its electronic brains that R-W is known in the trade as "the paper factory."