Word: tape
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Tapes & Pink Soap. First chance that offered, Van Allen ducked down to the basement. There, in an area that was originally used for storage, is the most famed space-instrument laboratory in the U.S. The walls have turned a dingy yellow; the ceilings and walls are laced with pipes and conduits. In one room were stacks upon stacks of tape recordings of satellite data, neatly sorted according to tracking station-Singapore, Ibadan, Lima, Heidelberg. In another, students pored over the squiggly lines that are man's first clues to the geography of outer space. Other students tested electrical components...
...Laboratory at Pasadena. Then he flew back from New Zealand. In Pasadena, he and Pickering decided that the payload-basically a Geiger counter to detect cosmic rays in space and two incredibly light but powerful radio transmitters-would have to be modified in one respect. It contained a miniature tape recorder to record the cosmic-ray data during a trip around the earth and then transmit it quickly when triggered by a coded signal sent up from the ground. Designed for Vanguard, this elegant apparatus would not work in Explorer I, which would spin too fast. So it was removed...
Explorer II splashed into the Atlantic early in March, but Explorer III was launched successfully on March 26. It contained a modified version of Ludwig's tape recorder-an amazing little instrument full of tiny, glittering parts that weighed only 8 oz. If it worked, it would gush out in five seconds all the cosmic-ray data from an entire orbit...
...March 28 Van Allen got the first tape and sat up all night poring over it. The cosmic-ray count seemed reasonable as long as the bird was at low altitude. When it climbed upward, the rate increased rapidly. Then, for some unaccountable reason, the count fell to nothing, stayed at nothing until the bird was back at lower altitude again...
Sulking Tube. Mystified, Van Allen hurried back to Iowa, where his assistants, Drs. Carl McIlwain and Ernest Ray, were puzzling over a copy of the same tape. The three almost simultaneously hit a solution. The high-flying Geiger tube was being swamped by too heavy a dose of some kind of radiation. This is a weakness of Geiger tubes. If required to count too many times a second, they sulk and do not count...