Word: betatron
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...radiate all the extracted radium supplies on earth-and its further abilities have scarcely been explored. While U.S. scientists speculated upon the discoveries the device might lead to, they welcomed to their front ranks its brilliant young inventor, Donald William Kerst, 30, who calls the machine a "betatron." The cyclotron, whose invention won a Nobel Prize for University of California's Ernest Orlando Lawrence, hurls positively charged particles, the nuclei of atoms. But the betatron hurls the negatively charged particles which spin about the nuclei of atoms. Unlike the cyclotron's positive particles, the betatron's hurtling...
...heart of the betatron," explains Inventor Kerst, "is a doughnut-shaped glass vacuum tube between the poles of a large electromagnet" (see cut). Inside the tube, a hot filament gives off electrons. Magnetically guided, each electron circles about the tube 400,000 times, accelerated at each rotation by small 70-volt kicks whose cumulative push gives the particle an energy of 20,000,000 volts within a fraction of a second. These fiercely energized electrons are then either: 1) Released continuously from the tube as a beam of beta rays-whence the betatron's name-which...
Hitherto X-rays have been produced by stepping up an ordinary 110-volt current to perhaps 1,000,000 volts in a transformer, then jumping it through a straight vacuum tube at a target from which X-rays are emitted. Now, in effect, the betatron combines transformer and vacuum tube. Instead of circling round & round a magnet in a coil of wire, as in a transformer, the electrons whirl through the empty space inside the doughnut-shaped vacuum while their voltage increases...