The Inventive Mind

Margery Sterling, who took a master's degree in home economics at Cornell, is a young housewife who knows how to turn out a lemon pie. One day husband Robert, a chemist in Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s Pittsburgh laboratories, got to wondering if anything on earth was fluffier or lighter than Margery's meringue topping. That helped him along with a scientific idea.

In the lab, aided by twice-a-day phone talks with his wife, Sterling broke eggs, separated the whites and whipped them up. Then he measured the physical properties of his meringues. After using dozens of eggs, he switched to other materials, finally hit on a phenolic resin as the best. This week, Westinghouse claimed that Sterling's "meringue," made by heating the resin with a catalyst to 350DEG F., was the world's lightest solid. At any rate, it was ten to 20 times lighter than the fluffiest pie topping.

Westinghouse could see it used as an insulator in appliances such as refrigerators and stoves (it stands heat and cold well) and between metal sheets in prefabricated building units. Non-inflammable, it has a specific gravity between .008 and .012; among currently popular insulators, rock wool ranges from .15 to .25, fiber glass from .02 to .15. (Margery Sterling's meringue grades from .12 to .15.) Enough plastic foam to insulate a six-room house can be shipped in a single barrel, saving storage and trucking space, to the site where it will be used. A workman can soon learn to cook it on the spot.

Other new scientific notes: P: A surveying gadget built into two small boxes mounted on a trailer (to be pulled by a car or jeep), has been developed by the Sun Oil Co. Starting from a known elevation, an odometer records distance traveled. A pendulum indicates up & down grades, and an electronic calculator works out, by trigonometry, net changes in altitude. Valuable in oil prospecting, the apparatus enables height surveyors to work three times as fast as they could by rod sighting, saves them from such occupational hazards as sunstroke and frostbite. P:An electronic I.F.F. (identification, friend or foe) device which can be coupled directly with gun-aiming equipment was announced by the National Security Resources Board. In World War II, when an I.F.F. reported that a target was friendly, the message had to be relayed through two or three human elements. The result: at best, delay--at worst, disaster. The improved apparatus now locks a gun so that it cannot be fired when aimed at a plane, ship or tank which I.F.F. indicates is friendly. To get such automatic protection, the target craft must have its own part of the I.F.F. equipment (the "transponder") switched on and working properly. CJ A new microphone, weighing less than oz. and smaller than a stack of six dimes, had its radio try out. Developed by California's Altec Lansing Corp., it does not hide a speaker's face, does not boom when he gets too close, is omnidirectional and can be hidden anywhere on a television production stage. The fact that it can be hidden in a boutonniere might make it useful to sleuths--friend or foe.

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