Westinghouse Research Laboratories

foreign ERS on television these days you see a lot of fascinating stories under the heading of Science Fiction but right now I'd like to talk about science that is fact but so exciting it sounds like fiction how will his work affect your life will he find new ways to cure our diseases cook our food heat and cool our home wash our clothes the answer to these and lots more questions are in the new Westinghouse Research Laboratories you know most buildings aren't too interesting in themselves but when you get a building filled with people whose minds are really boiling over as they are in this building you never know what they're liable to come up with maybe one of those spaceships your small son is always talking about maybe a new way to detect disease and thus save your life may be a way to make life safer for that son of yours in the Air Force or the Navy well anyway they're working on all sorts of things like that here and here to take us on a tour of this wonderful place is Dr John a Hutchison vice president of Westinghouse and head of all Westinghouse research activities hello Dr Hutchison hello buddy I'd be delighted to take you on this tour uh doctor isn't most of your work uh sort of for men only like oh spaceships and guided missiles and all that sort of thing not at all in fact the very first thing I'm going to tell you about is for the ladies it's a new kind of light we call electroluminescence electroluma Watsons well you know these scientists always pick out jawbreaking names for things like that but when we get a little farther along we'll give it to somebody in your department will think out a nice clean one for it you mean maybe in the three letters so we could put it on a box top you meanwhile let's call it electroluminescence well you call it whatever you like but you're gonna have to cut out a couple of syllables if you want me to wrestle with it okay here we go we shall we want to give the public a new kind of Light which comes from thin panes of glass like this see no lamps no fixtures the light just pours from the walls and ceiling and one of the most amazing things about it is that you can change the light from one color to another just by turning a switch it's so beautiful such interesting colors this one's blue this one's green and this one's gold then no matter what dress I wear I can change the whole color scheme of my room just to match my dress it sure can that's really one for the ladies what's next one for the men Betty I'm no Miser I'll give you another one for the ladies now what do you say this is in This House of Miracles I wouldn't vent you to say what do you say it is it's a refrigerator oh no no it can't be you can fool me on some things but not on a refrigerator you see if that were a refrigerator I would feel a tingling in my refrigerator door opening arm and I don't maybe your arm is right it isn't a refrigerator yet but someday it will be you see here's the remarkable thing about this if you pass an electric current through any other little bar like this it gets hot but an electric current passed through this bar makes it cold here for example is a little pillow device Frozen merely by running a current through this bar but let's get away from refrigerators have you read about automation someone figured out the other day that in the near future we won't be able to turn out enough Goods to meet the needs of our growing population if the people who work in our plants and factories do the same work they are doing now in the same way they are doing it today so we really need automation that's what baby said have you been talking to her to get automation you have to have long lines of machines all hooked up together and all operated by automatic controls which can start the production lines or stop them or speed them up or slow them down like this automobile assembly line for example like this food processing line the trouble with automation up to this time is that if anything went wrong with the control devices a mile of production lines or many miles of them would all be shut down at one time so research men out here invented a little electric brain that can control all these speeding lines and never break down or wear out and never let one get ahead of the other here's what they came up with doesn't look like much does it but this little thing has a brain and a memory and when you hook it and its brothers and sisters together they can make all kinds of difficult decisions and even know what to do in an emergency it doesn't have much grammar does it no but it can have a powerful influence on the price of your canned food or your automobile make mine a convertible with red wheel you sound just like a Californian a convertible with red Wheels when you were in California recently did you have a convertible with red Wheels that's exactly what I had well did you drive it down to Mount Palomar and look at the stars I looked at some stars but not at Mount Palomar I think they call the place Hollywood wrong Stars wrong place you should have driven down to Palomar because it would make it easier for me to tell you about this little Gadget Hollywood's pretty nice at my Palomar you'd have seen the 200-inch telescope it's been called one of the greatest works of man the 200-inch telescope cost 8 million dollars and it reaches out 2 billion light years into the heavens well lately a group of scientists out here have gotten Stardust in their eyes again they've been dreaming about what might be done to increase the effectiveness of such telescopes they are working on this little light amplifier Another Side pack another mechanical brain no this is entirely different it amplifies light you put dim light in here and it comes out here a couple of thousand times brighter as you can see it's a pretty small device and it weighs only a few ounces but we figured that someday it might increase the power of the Mount Palomar telescope by 10 20 or even 50 times then we'll be able to see farther into outer space than ever before and then who knows what we'll find perhaps whole new worlds we've never even dreamed about another group out here working in a different direction made great contributions in the field of medical x-ray they found a way to amplify the light that creates the image the doctors see on the screen of their X-ray equipment this allowed them to see the image many times more clearly and more brightly you're wondering what this means to you well funny thing about research one thing leads to another you remember the story you once told on Studio One about the little boy with a cleft palate oh yes that's the story of how Westinghouse developed the cineflorics which makes movies out of medical x-rays like this one showing a person swallowing and x-ray movies like this helped doctors find a way to repair that boy's palate that's right in cineflorics the general principle is light amplification some deep x-rays used to be so dim that a doctor had to sit in a completely dark room for half an hour doing nothing until his eyes were accustomed to look at these dim x-rays now with this Westinghouse machine magnifying everything the doctor can look at the x-rays immediately and remember this story about the cat eye tube which lets airplane pilots see the ground on darkest nights same principle again with a Different Twist I know you fly a lot so that must get close to home with you what kind of people are these research men how do they go about inventing things well let me tell you a little true story about one of our men back around 1920 a Westinghouse scientist named Dr Rentschler was trying to find a better medal for filaments in Westinghouse landfalls know what that metal was uranium that metal was used in the experiments that led to the atomic bomb it helped Usher in the greatest single change in the 20th century atomic energy that's how research Works Betty you find out something and somebody somewhere sometime finds a way to use it take this man for instance remember you saw a picture of him a few minutes ago what's he doing he's working on rare Metals at Westinghouse these metals are so pure they can't be melted in any container without picking up impurities this man is bombarding this piece of metal with radio waves until it floats suspended in midair as this continues the metal eventually melts still hanging there unsupported in the air what good is it already pure metals like that are making it possible for us to design amazing new electric devices that you haven't even heard of yet well buddy that was a pretty quick look at a building that's full of fascinating things let's stop in here and see an old friend of yours who was a good friend of research Mark cressett Executive Vice President of Westinghouse I'd like that well hello Betty hello Mr krasif good to see you thank you good morning Hodge how are you Mark how are you yes well Hutch won't you and Betty uh have a seat for a minute Dr hutchison's been showing me some of the wonderful things that they're doing here at the research center I just can't get over the tremendous activity that's going on it must take quite a lot of Courage for the company to invest so much money in research yes Betty it would if we hadn't had such a wonderful record of successes in the field of research right now we are spending more than a 150 million dollars a year in research development and engineering besides this new Research Center there are almost 200 other Westinghouse Laboratories but money buildings and machines didn't produce this successful record this record was made by people today Westinghouse has over 13 000 talented people scientists engineers and technicians all working on research and Engineering development alone let's just consider a few of the creations of these men and women it was Westinghouse research that led to the world's first atomic power plant in the submarine Nautilus and that same research is helping us to build the country's first atomic power plant to generate electricity it's about 20 miles from Pittsburgh almost finished now then there's the Air Force radio network that can reach any American plane wherever it may be its messages are sent by Westinghouse transmitters the world's biggest electric motors the world's purest Metals the power of the world's fastest ocean liner these are just a few of the things Westinghouse scientists have helped make possible with their research right now for instance our research people are working on a metal so rare that it costs us about five thousand dollars a pound but I'm willing to bet that it's not going to be too many years before that medal will make possible television as thin as a picture on your wall and automobile batteries that will never wear out yes Betty we're sure the work being done in this laboratory right here and now will have a direct bearing on our life in the future and I'm the lucky one because I'll have the pleasant job of breaking the good news about all these bright new things after you and your Associates think them up and how I love that I hope that you will join me in saying thanks to Dr Hutchison and congratulations to Mr cressip they're going to make sure that you and I enjoy a wonderful new way of living in the future that may be closer than we think foreign