MINIATURIZATION.: How to Grow Bigger By Growing Smaller

Miniaturization

It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

—Samuel Johnson—1763

TODAY, nearly 200 years later, U.S. industry has coined a clumsy but descriptive 20th century word for Essayist Johnson’s 18th century goal: miniaturization. As never before, businessmen are “studying little things,” and through them, learning to accomplish more and more with ever-smaller, but enormously more efficient, machines.

Nowhere has the miniaturization trend brought greater rewards than in electronics. In place of old-style vacuum tubes, science has developed miniature tubes and tiny transistors no bigger than a shoelace tip to perform most of the same functions (TIME, March 12). The soldered-wire mazes of pre-war radio sets are giving way to electronic circuits printed on blotter-thin panels. Electric motors have shrunk to the size of a man’s thumb, delicate gyroscopes to the size of a bottle stopper.

–

Thus far, miniaturization’s greatest advances have been the result of military necessity. “Without miniaturization,” says Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, Chief of Naval Research, “much of the electronics equipment now in ships and planes and many of the Navy’s newest weapons would be impossible.” Miniaturized computers, radar sets, fire-control mechanisms and radios are the heart of every U.S. jet bomber and fighter. Today’s war planes are controlled by little black boxes so compact that to service a unit, Air Force mechanics simply remove the box, install a new one.

For its deadly Falcon air-to-air guided missile, Hughes Aircraft Co. has squeezed a guidance system equal to five TV sets into a space 6 in. by 10 in. World War II’s 200-lb. automatic pilot is obsolete; a new model weighs only 75 Ibs. and performs six times as many functions. One item on the way: a small automatic pilot for helicopters, which are so difficult to fly that pilots sometimes pray for an extra hand. U.S. Time Corp., which makes 400, liny gyroscopes a month for guided missiles, is working on a plan to combine them with servomotors to control the bucking whirlybirds with a miniature autopilot.

In automation, says a Bell Telephone Laboratories executive, miniaturization makes possible the tiny servo-mechanisms, i.e., electronic brains, which, built into machines, direct all their operations, automatically correct their errors.

Scientists at Barnes Engineering Co. have developed an automated lathe that obediently turns out a variety of parts by following the coded instructions printed on a tape, which in turn direct a servomechanism system. Says International Business Machines’ Di rector of Applied Science Dr. Cuthbert C. Kurd: “If we don’t have min iaturization, we’d soon have plants measuring ten miles by ten miles.”

Dozens of industries are already well aware of the lesson. To handle the vast increase in telephones and calls, for example, American Telephone & Telegraph Co. must make its equipment smaller or choke on its own wires. The complex long-distance “carrier” equipment which transmits as many as 1,800 separate conversations over the same pair of cables once filled a 20 ft. by 30 ft. building; this year, telephone companies have cut the carrier to the size of a kitchen icebox, will soon have one for rural systems as small as a police call box. The miniaturization of the future will make today’s Lilliputian marvels seem huge by comparison. A hint of the advances to come is Project Vanguard to fire an earth satellite high into outer space; all the instruments in the satellite itself total only 10.5 Ibs., include a radio transmitter that weighs only 13 oz. Beyond today’s transistors, the Air Force’s civilian scientists are working on an even tinier device called a Cryotron, which looks like a wire sliver with another wire coiled around it. Because a Cryotron duplicates many of the functions of both transistors and vacuum tubes, yet is so small that 40 will fit on a 3-in. pencil stub, scientists think they will some day be able to cram what is now a giant electric brain into a single cubic foot of space.

–

Miniaturization will in time spread through civilian U.S. life. Americans already have vest pocket radios and virtually invisible hearing aids. Soon they win have battery-operated portable TV sets, and miniature hi-fi sets; automen see the day when miniature radar sets will prevent collisions, when every motorist will have a transistorized two-way radio to keep him in instant communication with traffic-control centers. In the 18th century. Miniaturization Prophet Johnson wrote that “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man.” The U.S. of 1956 has taken him at his word.