Transistorized Aid

Electronics men are especially fond of transistors, those wondrous specks of germanium that perform like vacuum tubes while demanding almost no current and generating almost no heat (TIME, Dec. 1).

Until recently the public has had no chance to try them out; transistors are hard to manufacture and are much in demand by the military. But last week Son-otone Corp. put on the market a partially "transistorized" hearing aid. Only one of its three miniature tubes has been replaced by a transistor, but Sonotone claims that the gadget "will give double the power of any comparable instrument, at half the operating cost."

More important in this case than the transistor's small size is its saving on electric current. It has no hot filament, and so needs no filament-heating A-battery. It is also much easier on expensive, high-voltage B-batteries. According to Sonotone, the semi-transistorized instrument gets twice the normal service out of an A-battery and makes a standard B-battery last six months instead of the usual three or four weeks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.