Word: billionths
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...John T. Burwell Jr. of M.I.T. uses bearings made of radioactive steel to investigate the basic facts of friction. He can tell if one hundred-billionth of an ounce of metal is transferred from one bearing surface to another...
...year-old war veteran named Charles J. F. Porter went to New York's National City Bank, asked for a $312 loan, got it, and was then startled half to death. Bank officials discovered he had borrowed the billionth dollar granted by the institution's personal loan department and celebrated by airily telling him he wouldn't have to pay the money back...
...spinal cords of polio-infected cotton rats, froze it. Then, letting it start to thaw, they whirled their material in an ultra-high-speed centrifuge (60,000 revolutions per minute) to separate its protein, and with chemicals refined the protein further. Eventually they isolated a particle less than two-billionths of an inch in diameter. The protein particle proved to be 80 to 95% pure virus; a billionth of a gram of it, injected in a cotton rat, produced symptoms of polio...
...drop of water were enlarged to the size of the earth, each atom in it would be about the size of an orange. Yet most of an atom is empty space through which the electrons whirl. The nucleus itself occupies only one million-billionth of the atom's bulk...
Modern scientists have been able to study ever smaller particles of matter. Recently the pursuit of the infinitesimal reached a new vanishing point. An R.C.A. microphysicist developed an instrument which can analyze the atomic composition of a particle as small as a millionth of a billionth of a gram...