New Gadgets

OMan. For doing both heavy and delicate jobs under remote control, General Electric has built a monstrous, sensitive machine it calls "OMan" (for "overhead manipulator"). OMan is not beautiful; he looks like a Brobdingnagian dentist's drill. But he is a remarkable mechanical man. Obeying electric signals from a distant control console, he can lift 3,000 pounds off the floor and carry 1,000 pounds with a single arm extended horizontally. He can twist thick steel bars into pretzel shapes or tie them in knots. He can use power tools such as drills, hammers or wrenches and can assemble or disassemble all kinds of machinery.

OMan is also gentle. He can pick up an egg in strong steel fingers and never crack the shell. He can make a cake and slice and serve it as deftly as any housewife.

OMan will probably make few cakes. He will retire soon to one of those dread no-man's-lands behind the concrete shields of nuclear reactors or plutonium processing plants. There he will work in a bath of radiation that would strike a human dead, and his massive steel body will become so radioactive that his human creators can never come near him again.

Drilled Transistor. The big trouble with transistors is that they are hard to mass-produce with sufficient accuracy. The tiny specks of germanium that are their essential parts must be made with extreme precision. Even with the best of workmanship, many finished transistors have to be rejected.

Last week Philco Corp. announced that it has licked this production bottleneck by a delicate electrochemical method of "machining" germanium. Two hair-thin streams of a liquid indium salt are squirted at opposite sides of a tiny slab of germanium. The streams carry an electric current, and their electrified liquid slowly dissolves the germanium. When they have almost drilled through the slab, leaving only a few ten-thousandths of an inch, the current is quickly reversed. The drilling stops, and the reversed current deposits metallic indium on both sides of the thin germanium wafer. The result is a transistor with two indium electrodes to which wires can be attached.

Philco thinks that its new "surface barrier" transistors can be mass-produced with great speed and accuracy. They will be able to handle higher frequencies than other kinds of transistors, and they are tough enough and stable enough to be used in military equipment that takes a terrible beating.

One use suggested by Philco: a high-frequency radio receiver powered by two flashlight batteries and no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Another: a rescue transmitter for lifeboats. Built into boat or raft, it will get all the power it needs from a battery that starts operating as soon as it is dunked in sea water.

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