Word: starlight
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That jungle firefight took place more than two years ago, but it is still remembered as one of the first successful combat tests of the "starlight scope"-one of the prying electronic gadgets developed by the Defense Department "to take the night away from Charlie." Lieut. Hibbs was well briefed on the scope's importance; though mortally wounded, he smashed it against a tree rather than let it fall into the hands of the enemy. He won a posthumous Medal of Honor for his performance on that night patrol. Since then, thousands of starlight scopes have been shipped...
Last week the Army finally revealed some of the technical wizardry that makes the scopes work. Unlike the World War II infantry sniperscope that illuminated its target with an infra-red beam, the starlight scope needs no light of its own. Thus it is undetectable by enemy sensors. It uses only natural light, no matter how dim-moonlight, starlight, even the faint luminescence of decaying jungle foliage. Capable of amplifying light up to 40,000 times, it literally treats the darkest night...
Heart of the starlight scope is its image-intensifier tube, a sturdy combination of the home TV screen and miniaturized space-age electronics. Focused sharply by the scope's front lens, the slightest flickers of light are directed against a chemical film, causing it to discharge electrons. Boosted along by a 15,000-volt electrostatic field, those electrons smack into a phosphorcoated screen whose light then jars loose still another flock of electrons. The process is repeated three times, and the high-voltage electron acceleration, or energy buildup, produces a progressively brighter image. Besides the light, the only other...
Puzzled, a group of University of California astronomers ran their own tests at California's Lick Observatory. No luck. Then someone had a bright idea. While working with the same spectrographic equipment that the French had used to examine the dwarf starlight, one of the astronomers struck a match. Voilal Potassium lines! The Californians' conclusion, reported in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific: the potassium "flares" were probably produced when French smokers-not dwarf stars...
...popular teacher at Paris' Royal Academy of Architecture who designed giant globular monuments as a means of classroom elucidation. Among the remaining sketches of his works is one of a projected monument for Sir Isaac Newton, consisting of a giant sphere pierced by tiny openings to simulate starlight. Today's planetariums and, indeed, even Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes recall his precedent...