Word: electromagnetic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When 14-year-old James H. Gronen of Boulder, Colo., was disqualified two weeks ago for rigging his car with a secret electromagnet to win the 1973 All-American Soap Box Derby, it seemed that he was a boy whose all-American ingenuity was exceeded only by his guile. Now it turns out that his uncle and legal guardian, Robert Lange, founder of a ski-equipment firm called the Lange Co., taught him all he knew. In a letter to the derby director in Boulder, Lange said not only that the magnetic nose "has been around for years" but that...
...simple fix, either. An electromagnet in the vehicle's nose was connected by wire to a battery in the rear. The nose of each car lined up for the race rests flush against a hinged metal plate that drops forward into the asphalt at the start, allowing the vehicle to roll forward down the inclined raceway. As he settled back into his racer, Gronen's helmet touched off a lever that activated the battery and magnet, and as the metal plate fell forward the magnet's pull toward it gave his vehicle enough extra starting impetus...
Rand's plan for destroying tumors required an even more powerful magnetic field. To get it, he used an electromagnet cooled by liquid helium to near absolute zero. That produced superconductivity: the virtual disappearance of electrical resistance in the magnet. This allowed a greatly increased flow of current and boosted the strength of the magnet to 3½ times that of the best alternate magnet available...