Science: Three-Day Wonder

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Among other. things, onrushing Allied armies have been capturing a good deal of topnotch German technical equipment. Last week Dr. Vannevar Bush's OSRD told how U.S. ingenuity had put some of this equipment to use in spite of Nazi effort to sabotage it.

The retreating Germans left behind them an extensive system of telephone communications which they thought would be useless because they had removed key radio vacuum tubes. U.S. officers found one tube was a unique German design; none like it had ever been made in the U.S. But engineers of the Bell Telephone Laboratories mastered its secret in less than 24 hours. Within three days they had made eight exact copies. Within three weeks 1,000 tubes were at the front and the telephone system was in operation.