Science: A Cool Library

At its Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission had a peculiar problem with its library. Scattered widely around the great reservation are many individual laboratories, and the scientists could not use the central library without great waste of time in transit. Worse yet, some of Oak Ridge’s laboratories are “hot” (radioactive), and borrowed papers which might pick up radioactivity in a hot lab could not be returned to the library.

The AEC asked Radio Corp. of America to design a special apparatus to copy pages from books or bound periodicals and send them quickly over a wire. Last week the new high-speed “facsimile transmitter” started working. A chemist at Y-12 site called the library at X-10 site and asked for a two-page article in a chemical journal. In 4½ minutes a copy came out of a receiving apparatus at Y12. No matter how hot the copy might get, it need never contaminate X-10.