1,000,000 Volts

General Electric Research Laboratories in Schenectady last week unveiled a giant new X-ray machine, 1,000,000 volts strong, the biggest X-ray machine harnessed to industrial research. It is intended to find flaws not in flesh & bone but in big steel castings. G. E.'s 400,000-volt apparatus took an hour to X-ray four inches of steel. The new machine takes less than two minutes.

Million-volt X-rays, like tigers, are safer when caged. The walls of the 100-ft.-by-35-ft. building housing the machine are 14 inches of concrete plus twelve inches of brick. At one end of the room is a big door of 18-inch concrete encased in one inch of steel. When the machine is ready to go, the researchers leave the room through this door. Then the machine is turned on at a remote control panel.

The X-ray machine was centre-staged last week in a sedate jamboree marking the 40th anniversary of G. E.'s first research laboratory. Almost unheard of in 1900 were science laboratories as adjuncts and stimulants of manufacture. Charles Proteus Steinmetz and a G. E. patent lawyer persuaded Edwin Wilbur Rice Jr.--then technical director, later president--to found one. To start it Rice picked Willis Rodney Whitney, a brilliant and forceful young chemistry teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bred in the academic tradition, Whitney at first ventured only a gingerly toe into the unknown water of industrial research. When he found that he really had a free hand, he took on the G. E. experiment as a full-time job. Things began to hum. The basic experiments of William Coolidge on tungsten, of Irving Langmuir on gas-filled (instead of evacuated) bulbs led to modern electric lamps. The Coolidge and Langmuir experiments also produced high-power X-ray tubes, portable X-ray sets, high-capacity electronic tubes.

Eight years ago Whitney turned over the directorship to Dr. Coolidge, since then with immense pleasure has puttered around on his own experiments. He is 72. Asked recently whether he would write a book, he said he was too busy, would write one when he was 80.

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