On 6 Oct 2005 05:03:52 -0700, wrote:

The modern equivalent:
http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/

I built a real Atomic Watch once, based on a miniature EG&G Rubidium
physics package. The battery pack needed to operate the
temperature-control heater was about the size of a clock-radio.

jw

Hey Jim,

I recall very well in 1953 going on a special day trip to the local
high-school (I was in grade 8). A lot of the people in the little
town where I lived already had black and white televisions, but I had
still another couple of years to go to before seeing my first true
coloured TV. The trip was to see a demonstration of physics by two
gentlemen from a place called Bells Labs, which I didn't associate at
the time with Bell telephone! Anyway, one of the demonstrations was
about some new device called a transistor. They showed a really large
scale lab demo of one in operation, and then stunned us by controlling
the candle-power of a 150 watt lamp with a transistor about the size
of a school eraser. We were amazed.
But THEN one of these guys said that they would be used to make
coloured TV's in the future, and that someday a "chip" smaller than
the "eraser" would have ALL the electronics to operate that TV (no
hardware such as knobs, or the CRT), but that the cooling required
would be the size of an average refrigerator!! I've never forgotten
how stupid we thought that was! Not the heat sink part, but that you
could shrink all those vacuum tubes onto the head of a pin!! TV's
were nearly the size of a small fridge anyway, so that part wasn't
amazing.
Boy, how wrong both he and we were, eh!?!

Take care.

Brian Lawson,
Bothwell, Ontario