Science: Wartime Technology, May 10, 1943

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Scientific war work had advanced in these ways last week:

> Garand rifles need no longer be fired to line up the sights for factory tests. A new method of testing the sights, developed in the General Electric laboratories, uses a plug holding a mirror inserted in the barrel to line up images of front and rear sights on a screen. Time, ammunition and manpower are thus saved.

> The photoelectric spectrophotometer, so sensitive it can measure the light thrown on a human hand by a candle a mile away, is now used to standardize camouflage colors for the Army. This electronic device can distinguish two million variations of color, including some invisible shades.

> Metal sheets to be cut, stamped and drilled for ships, planes and tanks can act as their own blueprints when coated with a photographic emulsion used in peacetime to make pictorial advertising displays.

> Glassless windows, made of transparent plastic sheets laminated to standard wire screening, were developed by Monsanto Chemical Co. to reduce wartime danger from flying glass. Also used at the Ensign-Bickford fuse factory, this reinforced Vue-lite promises postwar office and home partitions so light and strong that they may be easily rearranged.

> Plastic tubing, announced by Goodyear, is ready to replace rubber tubing now prioritied to such users as breweries and creameries. As flexible as rubber, the new tubing has about the same strength and resistance to high & low temperatures, can be transparent, opaque or colored.

>To protect Army & Navy fur-lined flying suits from moths, Westinghouse has installed refrigeration equipment in storerooms at airports. The moths are killed by a shock cycle which plunges temperatures to -17°F., then warms up to 50°F. Surviving eggs are hatched by heat, the larvae destroyed by a second below-zero treatment.