16

THEKLYSTRONBOYSRadio'sMiracle Makers

WHEN the ßager, earnest Varian brothersturned up at the Stanford school of physicsone morning about four years back, they

were bursting with a great idea. Down at Halcyon,California, they'd been tinkering on a scheme forgenerating an invisible beam down which planesmight glide through soupy weather to safe landings,and up which antiaircraft gunners might sightthrough fog or clouds or night to pepper unseenenemy bombers harassing defenseless cities.

Though it seemed fantastic that these two coun-try inventors might achieve what had stumped thebest radio brains of the world, kindly Dean Web-ster said sure, go ahead and use the physics laband shop. That was all the Varians aaked, a placeto work the bugs out; of the idea.

By last December, when tbe Varian hrothers,Sigurd and Russell, packed up their kit of ideas andhopped the continent to Garden City, Long Island,where the Sperry GyrcBCope Company had built thelast word in research laboratories for their furtherexperiments, they were being feted as famous scien-tists. They bad worked the bugs out oí their idea,and they had delivered the klystron, a revolutionarylittle ultra-high-frequency resonator, inexpensive tobuild and light to transport, that hurled an aston-ishing new radio beam wbich promised to answerthe prayers of communications engineers.

The klystron beam is even more amazing than theinventors' dreams. A Jack-of-all-trades in the com-munications realm, it handles jobs that never oc-curred to them originally. Telephone engineers thinkthat with it they can shoot 600,000 conversationssimultaneously through a six-inch cross-countrypipe line and unscramble the talk at the other endas easily as you tune in your favorite radio program.Television engineers can do the same with pictures.Shot downward from an airliner, the klystron heamtellB the pilot how far above the ground he ia flying.Shot ahead, it warns him of hidden mountains intime to change his flight course. At many airports,U. St Army and Civil Aeronautics Authority planeshave made more than one thousand perfect blind

landings, in every kind of bad weather, using theklystron beam.

"You've seen history made!" exclaimed Col.Hugh Mitchell, of the U. S. Signal Corps aircraftradio laboratory, when the first plane rode down thebeam at Boston Airpori;. After exhaustive tests, theM. I. T. Technological Review acclaimed the k!ya-tron as "the most Important advance in radio sincethe invention of the audlon tube in 1906 by Lee DeForest." The antiaircraft uae of the klystron beamis a military secret; that in itself repeals the impor-tance which the Army and Navy attach to thia newdefense weapon.

There is hot Celtic blood in the tall, dark, bushy-browed Varian brothers, Sigurd Fergus and RussellHarrison. There is an inventive strain, too, in theVarians. It didn't crop out much in their father,John Osbome Varian, a masseur, horn in Dublin,who migrated to California and married AgnesDIxon, who was half Celt, half British. Uncle JohnOsborne, who migrated from Ireland to Australia toWashington, D. C, worked out some of the basicideaa of photolithographic printing and hlueprinting.

y/anted—a Surer Guide Than Luck

THE Irish in the Varians kept their chins upwhile they discarded theories month after

month, with the specter of hunger ataring them inthe face, until they hit on the right idea. RussVarian says Sig's ideas turned the trick. Sigurdthinks it was Russell's probing mind that made theideaa click. Both of them give a lot of credit to theirpal, big Bill Hansen, associate professor of physicsat Stanford, who first made electrons dance therhumba inside a copper apple, which is the nubbin ofthe klystron. It's a bit hard to pin the ribbona justwhere they belong, as between The Klystron Boys.

Sigurd Varian waa flight captain for Pan AmericanAirways on Mexican and Central American routeswhen the big idea began to take shape some fiveyears ago. During his years of flying through trop-ical storms, his plane hidden by clouds from the

cities and villages below, Sig Varian often broodedover the next war, conjuring mental pictures oíbombers hiding ahove the weather, with antiair-craft defense next to useless. There were peacetimeproblems too. More than once, counting the min-utes from the last fleeting glimpse oí 18,000-footPopocatepetl, guardian peak of Mexico City, Sigflew hy compass through lasbing rains to race anorther Into "Tampico, clipping the roof of the junglewith ceiling zero-zero to catch the Panuco Riverflashing underneath and slide into Tampico airport.Once, when such a storm caught Captain Varian onthe West Coast, he pancaked down to a forcedlanding on the beach. His plane nosed over, butnobody was serioualy injured.

"Luck," Varian told his copilot. "Someday wewon't be so lucky. What we need is a reliable beamto bring planes down through weather like this."

When the Italians and Germans launched theirwholesale bombings of civilians In Spain, Varian'snightmare came true. One day he poured his wrathinto a letter to Russell. The Varians were alwayswriting long letters to each other, swapping ideas,Sig was the slender, nervous, dynamic Varian—asort of terrier. Russell, the younger, was huge, alowand patient—the bloodhound. Give him a scentand he never lost it. Sig wound up hia letter with," Something's got to be done to find a short-waveradio beam that will detect bombers in the clouds,and that will guide planes into airports in soupyweather."

At that time, Rusaell Varian was hack on theStanford campus, where he had worked his waythrough the school of physics, gardening for pro-fessors, doing odd johs in the lahorotories. With hismaster's degree won, Russ hud landed a job withHumble Oil Company, in Texas, doing geophysicalsurveys, then joined Famsworth Television Corpo-ration, to pioneer in television. In his late thirties,he returned to the Stanford physics laboratory tochase down some ideas. T.- . ,.

Sie Varian had skipped college. Finishmg a poly-technic school in San Luis Obispo, he headed south.

i

leamed to fly, bought awartime jenny, barn-stormed the country, flewthe mail, became a PunAmerican pilot, marriedthe daughter of the Britishconsul in Vera Cruz, hadtwo children. That madeit tough going for an un-derstanding the brothersreached when they werejuBt out of high school.Sig was to make somemoney, Russell was to getthe scientific background,after which they'd set upan invention factory andpolish out aome of theideas the world was wait-ing for.

Sig's letter - about thebombers set Ruas Varianon the scent of an idea.His one-time roommate atStanford was a lud fromFresno, six-foot WilliamWebster Hansen, associateprofessor of physics. BigBill Hansen waa a rarecombination, a theoristwho could work with hishands. Hansen wanted

17

than, it had both ends indented like an apple.The bud end was Bealed, but in the stem endthere was a grid through which Bill Hansenfired electrons from u cathode, with 5000 voitâbehind them. The electrons bounced back andforth at a terrific clip, doubling their voltageevery time they bounced until Hansen had fre-quencies approximating those of lightning. Theelectrons danced back and forth with a surgingmovement that tickled the fancy of LeonardPockman, a research student, now at Cornell.

"They're doing the rhumba. Bill," he said."You ought to call that thing a rhumbatron."

Swapping Eight Years' Work for an Idea

BUT scholarly Doctor Webater, uninterestedin tbe Cuban rhumha then sweeping the

dance floors of the country, insisted on a classicGreek name for the invention, and consultedProf. Ernest Whitney Martin, of tbe classicsdepartment.

"You've got a good Greek name already,"laughed the professor, "Rhumba is a good oldGreek word for rhythmic motion."

To Russell Varian, this rhumbatron was morethan a generator of high voltages for laboratoryatom smashing. It looked like the clue to thestrong, atable, ahort-wave radio beam thatSigurd wanted to make plane landings safe andto spot the ruthless unseen bombers of thedictatoni. He wrote Sig Varian that Hansen's

Above—Russell Varian and Professor WilliamW. Hansen with the Klystron, which plays thetune for electrons traveling 25,OO0 mites persecond. Right—Professor Hansen withneon tubes lighted by radiation (rom theKlystron's four-inch antenna. Bttow— SigVarian, who built the Klystron. Shown arethe "buncher" and the "catcher" rbumba-trons, which created radio's neweät miracle.

Ü-

higher voltages than woreuvailabli' in the laboratoryto umush atoms for someof his advanced-phytilcäexperiments. RussellVarian once suggested acheap way to get them, uresonator into which hecould bombard electronsand multiply their velocitymanifold.

Professor Hansen toukthe idea down to thephysics-department shopand came out, after con-siderable experimenting,with a gadget that lookedlike a copper upple. Some-what larger than a Jona-

rhumbatron might be the starting point forthe hunt for the infallible beam that aviatorswanted.

In Mexico City, Capt. Sigurd Varian took»tock of hia assets-four thousand dollur«savedup the hard way, perhaps enough to support hisfamily for a year. Then he asked hia superiorofficer for a leave of absence.

"Why do you want to quit now?""My brother and I huve an idea for a blind-

landing beam. I'm going back home to workon it."

"Sig, you're nuts. You're slated for a Pacificclipper command in a few weeks."

" I can't help it. We've got to bave a depend-able beum."

" Better think it over. You'll be toaaing awnyeight years of hard work to fool with a crazyidea." (Continued on Pof 64)

64 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 1941

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(Continued fmm Pagt 62)

than crooked—who will deliberatelylie about a catch. One, for example,weighed in a common shark, disposedof the carcass, and said he had caughta mako. On examination by a judge,he proved unable even to describe amako, which is different in color, shape,teeth and eyes, from all other sharks.I've never seen tried the old gag ofstuffing lead sinkers in a fish's throat,but I once found a man who attemptedto increase the weight of his catch bypushing into its maw another, smallerfish. Now, anything a fish has eatennaturally is reckoned in its weight.But thia man, unfortunately for him,had force-fed his quarry a fish thatsimply did not live in the same waters.Andthe tail stuck out ! An embarrassingerror which produced a red-faced con-fession. And, two or three times, a manwho laid claim to a big fish was seenduring the fight to change places withsomebody else in order to rest. Thewitness of that heresy—another angleron a distant boat, or a skipper idly peer-ing through binoculars—reported thefact to me and the fish was not entered.

It can be seen that cheating of anykind may result in humiliation. Itshould he repeated, however, that thefishing fraternity—and sorority —isprobably the most dutifully honestbunch of people in the world.

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over the country. Miami has gbdlysupplied full particulars to any com-munity desirous of inaugurating suchan event. Inquiries come from as faraway aa Auatralia, where the fishing isfine and a good catch gets a three- Jcolumn picture on the front pages with *a banner headline. The presa and radioin Miami bave learned, year by year,that angling is Florida's biggest sportand they bave given it increasing at-tention. Men have come all the wayfrom Englandto compete in our tourna-ment. Some of those men, now, to myknowledge, are out on their fishingcruisers sweeping mines from the Chan-nel. Others—several of them—com-muted in sports fishermen for ten dayBbetween Ramsgate and Dunkirk.

This year, on the twelfth of Janu-ary, the glamorously decorated fishingfleet paraded along the Causeway andout to sea, opening the 1941 tourna-ment. There was. as always, a specialprize for the firat eligible fish broughtto a weighing station on that starting |day. Perhaps some millionaire, with acruiser that coat forty thousand dol-lars, hung a sailfisb the minute hedropped a bait overboard and racedback to collect that prize. Perhaps, asin 1940. that prize was taken by ayoung man in a rowboat with an out-board motor, who started to fish whenthe gun was fired and actually cutthrough the marine fiotilla to win he-fore the more ostentatious anglers hadwet a single line!

THE KLYSTRON BOYS(Continued from Page 17)

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Two months later, with high hopes,the Variana opened their Invention fac-tory in the sleepy microscopic villageof Halcyon. They settled on Halcyonbecause it was their old home town,and they figured Sigurd's four thou-sand dollars would last longer theretban anyv,'here else. Russell was theidea man. Sig, who could make any-thing with his hands, was the me-chanic. Their firat discovery was that,though they worked hard, they weregetting nowhere fast.

"We've got to have a physics lab,"said Russell.

"We need a precision machine shopjust as much," insisted Sig.

"We'd better go up to Stanford andsee if we can make arrangements touse the university's," suggested Russell.

With their belonpngs, and Sig'a fam-ily, tbe Varians headed for Palo Alto.When they laid their idea before Dr.Da\id L. Webater, head of tbe Stan-ford physics department, be said: "Wecan stretch a point and make you re-search associates without pay; thatwill give you the use of the laboratoryand tbe shop. We can furnish you withmaterials. But we haven't any money.' '

Sigurd Varian found a tiny cottageacross the creek from the campus. Russlocated a cheap room in Mayfield.The pair came to work early, quit lateat night, working against time andSig's slim bank account. Big BillHansen joined them before and afterclasses. Likewise, Doctor Webster,with his fiair for higher-mathematiccomputations, took a lot of the guess-work out of eleetronics. Sig sat arounddrumming with his fingers, restless andimpatient, rearing to reduce ideas tometal and glass and plastics. Slow anddeliberate Russ was forever citing someadvice about inventing that bis fatherpicked up from Uncle John Osborne.

"There are only two ways to in-vent," quoth Uncle John. "One is to

make a model of every idea you haveand try it. That's the slow way. Theother is to discard all your ideas onpaper but the last one. That's the fastway."

While Sigurd fretted, Rusaell Varianwashed out twenty-six different ideasfor landing bean« that looked rosywhen they started. He washed themout on paper with the help of Profes-sor Hansen and Doctor Webster. Aafast as the group doused cold water onone idea, imperturbable Russell Variancame up with a new one.

There was one tremendous draw-back to using Bill Hansen's copper ap-ple. The stream of electrons it built upinto eucb terrific voltages waa directcurrent. For their beam, tbe inventorsneeded oscillating energy. Tbey couldthink of no mechanism fast enough tobreak up energy traveling at such ter-rific speed, 25,000 miles per second. Itlooked as though they were stumped.Then, aa Russ Varian sat at his desklate one night, his twenty-seventh ideabegan to take shape.

"I t was a kind of fancy idea, and Iwas skeptical at first because all ideashave bugs," recalls Ruas. "Still, itlooked like a darn good lead. So I toldSig and Bill tbe next morning and tbeythought it might work. It sounded bet-ter yet when we outlined it to DoctorWebster."

Offhand, the notion sounds as fan-tastic as a Rube Goldberg cartoon.First you join two of Bill Hansen'srhumbatrons with a short copper pipe.Then you shoot power into the firstrhumbatron, known as "the buncher.'The grids at both ends of this copperapple slow down some of tbe electrons,while the others speed ahead at theirregular gait of 25,000 mues a second.Speeding through tbe copper pipe, thefaßt electrons begin overtaking theslower electrons ahead of them, veryniucb as the cars in a fast trafiüc lane

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST 65

overhaul those in the slower lane. Thiscauses the electrons to spew into thesecond rhumhatron, "the catcher," inbunches. Between the bunches arespaces, maybe l/25,000th of a secondin length, with few electrons in them.The alternate bunches and spacesmake pulsatioTis and, presto, there'syour oscillating energy in frequenciesrunning up into the billions.

At least that'a the way the notionshaped up in Russell Varian's mind. Itstill looked that way wben DoctorWebster had covered the blackboardwith equations, and Bill Hansen badreduced the theory to sketches. SigVarian fidgeted around while they fig-ured and drew pictures. The twenty-seventh idea waa one they couldn't tearto pieces and, at last, as Russell Varianputs it, "after four months of tossingout bum ideas, we hit on the klystron."KlystTon,incidentaIly.isfromtheGreekword for the breaking of waves on aheach. " Tbat is what the electrons doin the klystron," explains Doctor Web-ster.

Neglecting even to eat, Sig Varianworked night after night until theothers drove him home. The parts heneeded were parts nobody could buyanywhere. He made them all fromcopper, brass and plastics. Exactly sixmonths after the brothera hit thecampus, Sig Varian invited the threeothers to come down and inspect thefirst finished klystron, a neat little ma-chine weighing about five pounds.

"I wonder if she'll really oscillate?"Russen asked.

"Boy, she'd better osciUate!" ex-claimed Sig. "We're down to our lastfifty bucks."

The test of whether the klystronworked was a tiny beam focused on aplate of willemite, which is a fluorescentmaterial that glows when radioactiveenergy strikes ¡t. If the beam registereda lively little line on the willemite, itmeant the current was oscillating. IÍ itmade a dot, it spelled failure.

While Sig Varian pumped tbe air outof the rhumbatrons, then turned onthe power to warm up the machine, theethers returned to the laboratory to

'finish their tasks, anticipating a night' of tinkering and adjusting to synchro-nize the activities of the two rhumba-trons. They had barely climbed thestairs when Sig came tearing after them.

"Hey, Ruaa, Bill, Doctor Webster.She oscillatesi She oscillates!" heyelled.

They rushed pell-mell to the base-ment. There, on the first throw of theswitch, the first klystron bummed andBUrged, and on the plate of willemite alively little line leas than an inch longdanced like a neon sign.

Looking for a Sponsor

On the bench was a flashlight. BillHanaen unscrewed the bulb and held itnear the Íour-Ínch antenna at the out-let of the klystron. The bulb glowedlike a tiny bright star from the energyreleased. Next he held an electric-Ughtglobe near the antenna. It glowed, too,as did a cluster of globes upon whichthey focused the beam fiity feet fromthe machine.

The next day Sig Varian spruced upand caught a train for the city to callupon the Civil Aeronautics AuthorityOÍRCÍBIS, Army and air-line pilots, andanyone who would listen at OaklandAirport, where both the Governmentand commercial air lines were e.xperi-nienting with a blind-landing systemSig aaked the airport authorities to senda competent radio engineer down toStanford to see the klyatron work.

"Send somebody who understandshigh frequencies," he warned. "Wedon't want any ordinary knob turner."

"I gueas we don't have anybodyaround here like that," he was told.

Tired and discouraged, Sig Varianreturned to the Stanford campus withonly forty-seven dollars in the kitty.The next morning, while the inventorswere debating what to do with theirnew beam maker, now that they hadit, the phone rang in the physics lab.Long-distancG calling from OaklandAirport, Irving R. Metcalí, of the CivilAeronautics Authority, in Washing-ton, D. C, calling the inventor of thenew radio beam.

^ Research Fund

Mr. Metcalf himself was the origina-tor of the Metcalf blind-landing a>'s-tem, which reduced the technique ofbringing a plane down through fog orrain to an airport, so far aa the pilot wasconcerned, to keeping three lunoinousdots on a plate in the plane's cockpit ina straight row. AU the system neededwas an infallihie radio beam to deliverthe dots on the plate. Aa he traveledahout the country, Mr. Metcalf neverfailed to run down leads on any newbeam that might do the work. Drop-ping unexpectedly into Oakland Air-port, with John Easton, another keyCAA official, he had overheard pilotadiscussing Sig Varian's visit of the pre-vious day, and lost no time getting tothe phone to ask the inventors if he andEaston could see their new beammaker in action.

"By the way," he told Sig Varian,when the latter had urgently invitedthem to the Stanford campus, "there'sa fellow from Sperry here with me. CanI bring him down with me?"

The inventors were a little dubiousabout showing their invention to man-ufacturers untU they had applied forpatents.

" Oh, he's all right," Metcalf assuredthem. " Better let me bring him down."

The "fellow from Sperry" was Dr.H. Hugh Willis, chief research en-gineer for the Sperry Gyroscope Com-pany. Doctor Willis' eyes lighted ashe watched the glowing line on the^villemite plate when the Vurians tunedup their klyatron,

"You've got an osciUator that reallyworks," he told them. "You'll hearfrom us shortly."

Wben they heard, it was in the formof a $25,000 check from the SpenyGyroscope Company to Stanford Uni-versity, an outright gift to financeklyatron research. The gift enabled theuniversity to add the Varian brothersto the faculty pay roll, with paydayevery month, and to employ competentresearch assistants to make moreklystrons and find out what they woulddo under working conditions.

At tbis point, thinga began to bap-pen thick and fast. Sig Varian, hisphysical stamina diminished by longhours in the shop, collapsed one day, tospend the next six months in a nip-and-tuck battle with tuberculosis.Sperry Gyroscope Company contractedto produce the klystrons for commer-cial and military usea, paying royaltiesto he shared jointly by the Variana andStanford University. At San Carlos, afew miles from the campus, the com-pany established a staff in a laboratoryto double-check the Stanford experi-ments and to turn out the first klys-trons.

One of these was flown by JohnWoodyard, a Stanford research associ-ate, in February, 1939, to Boston Air-port, and set up on a dismal rainy day

Snapshotof an

I.C.S.gradúale

Bora in BoHlon, MiuaocliuialtK.... Attend o d MschcmicAria High School and MaaaachuBcllB tnatitul« oiTechnology. . . , While amptoyad a» chemical eagi-neor. onio11«d ior I. C. S. Machine Shop Couraa, com-pl«lod in 1912. . . . Becama CoiuuitiDg Euginoar in1914 VicB-PtoBÎdont ol Torbi»nflBn Axlo Companyin 19ia. . . . At piaaent. Présidant of PittsbiughEquitable Moler Company and Morco NordstromVnlvo Company. . . . Board Cheiinnan of Tlmlton-Dolioil Axle Company. Wiacotulii Axlo Company,Delia MoDulacluriiig Company and Standard Slo*ISpring Company. . . . Director ol CommercialNational Bank and Trust Company of Now York. . . ,Has taken DUI many important patents, oneauragedand stimulated reaeaich. . . . Roceotly honored byHalional Association of Manulactuiore, for outstand-mg contributions to America's progiou.

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66 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST Fëbrvajy S, 1941

Fioal remits of KÍ-entific tests showyou lave SOK ia eoergy

when you iwitch frominferior pencils to

Dixoo Ticooderogo. Tenswere made ia the Uboratory

of B leadiag uoivcrtiiy.

* A FINE ^ X T N * ^ NAME

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Illf: lOUnON fAfKINr. fO.,

with a zero-zero ceiling on an Armytruck, under the direction of EdwardL, Bowles, professor of electrical com-munications at Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology, While CAA andU. S. Army Signal Corps authoritieswatched intently, Doctor Bowles shotthe klystron beam into apace througha directional horn originated at M. I,T. Ten miles out of the airport. PilotJack Jaynes, flying blind in the clouds,picked up the beam and, using theMetcalf blind-landing metbod, glidedsmoothly down to a perfect landing inthe middle of the main runway.

"It worked awell," declared Jaynes," I couldn't see a thing up there in thesoup. All I did was stay on the beam."

Since then pilots have learned a lotabout coming down safely through thesoup. The klystron hurlsa strong, stablebeam in a wave length about four incheslong, as compared to the forty-inchbeam now used by air lines. It cutsthrough static and every otber type ofinterference. It radiates on a narrowangle of six tenths of one degree, en-abling pilots Uterally to "ride thebeam" like a trolley instead of gravi-tating between the edges of two nearlyparallel beams, as they do with existingequipment on the country's air lanes.

In the two brief years that they havebeen able to play with the klyatron, ex-perimenters in both university andconunercial laboratories have foundthe amazing beam with the diminutivewave length a veritable Jack-of-all-trades in tbe communications realm.

Like light rays, X rays, heat raysand the other radio rays, the 'beamshot out hy the klystron has its eccen-tricities, Someof these are ad^Tintagea.and some are not. One of the eccen-tricities of the klystron beam is that,where ordinary radio waves go bound-ing around tbe globe, bouncing backand forth between the earth and a mys-terious ionized ceiling, sixty milesabove terra firma, known aa theHeavi-side layer, the new rays sboot off intospace as straight as sunbeams. An-other peculiarity ia that when they hitsomething solid, they bound back ata terrine clip approximating that oflight. The "boomatron" is the petnickname of Bill Hansen for the klys-tron, because of this odd boomerang-ing habit,

BoomerangiDg will undoubtedly beone oí the klystron beam's most impor-tant jobs. Pointed groundward from a

" We could get Dewey to fire the hutsfor us," Turner suggested. "I'll arrangeit with him,"

From where he sat, Crawford couldsee Dewey just inside the guest hut,stewing fresh leaves which Ibrahim hadgathered for him tbat morning,

"Queer bloke!" Turner said. "Alittle keen on Zia, I think." Crawforddid not answer, and Turner went on,"How was sbe laat night?"

"She seemed all rigbt," Crawfordlooked at him, "I had to go over,Roddy. It WHS the decent thing to do,"

" I suppose so," Turner agreed."Oiily that girl's subtle!"

"I don't think she is,""No? Then you're practically sunk."

Turner waa smiling oddly, " You'd bet-ter be careful. Bill."

He said no more. They worked onover tbe gun while isolated soundscame across the post, dulled in the heat,Crawford was wrapping the removedmechanism in a cloth when they heard

speeding plane, a rebounding klystronbeam furnishes the basis for an infalli-ble absolute altimeter. Pointed hori-zontally from the plane, the beam de-tects mountains miles ahead and re-ports how far away they are. I t"sees"through darkness or clouds or snow-storms aa clearly as it does throughdaylight.

Even more startling in the "booma-tron" angle when the klystron ispointed from the ground through fogsor clouds to tbe sk>'. Every time aplane crosses its path, the beam boom-erangs. Tbougb tbis pbase of the klys-tron's use is shrouded in military se-crecy, the klystron beam seems all thatSig Varian hoped for as a sure-firemeans of locating enemy bombera hid-den by clouds or darkness over defense-less cities. Faster than the most expertgunnery range finder could do it on aperfectly clear day, the klystron can"sight" invading bombera and registertheir range. It promises to make anti-aircraft guns more deadly at night andin cloudy weather than they are now infair weather. It looma now as the pos-sible secret weapon that will restore thebalance in war once more to the de-fense.

Another gay eccentricity of the livelylittle klystron beam is that, though itshoots as straight as a sunbeam intospace, it readily takea curves in high,if they are not too sharp, when firedinto a copper or bras^-lined pipe. Thispeculiarity intrigues telephone, tele-graph and television engineers, par-ticularly the former, who have battledsnow and ice winter after winter tokeep their lines up in storms.

Using klj-atron beams to carry mes-sages through pipes, 600,000 telephoneconversations could be ñred simulta-neously tbrough a aix-inch pipe laidcroaa-country. Furthermore, one or onehundred thousand conversations couldbe detoured from the pipe to Detroit,Chicago, St. Louis or any other city,just as easily. And there'd be no listen-ing in on the line!

This funtastic concentration of talkor telegrams or tele\'ision images in asix-inch pipe is easy, the klystron in-ventors explain, because the number ofwave bands available at the ultra-shortend of the radio spectrum rivals thenational debt in ciphers. In the firstcomparatively crude klystrons, thefrequencies ran up to 6,000,000,000cycles. In the improved models they

SVNBOWN{Continued from Paft 33i

Coombes shouting. His voice was loudand rousing in the quiet, and he camejumping onto the veranda,

"Bill, here's a runner from one ofthose tribal policemen we sent out!He aaya there are camels on the oldKassaba track!"

The native appeared behind him, ar-ri^'ing at a trot, mired to the waistfrom stretches of black cotton soil,sweating and panting.

"Kassaba track?" Crawford stared,and Coombea reached for the hand-drawn map of the district, which stoodrolled up in a corner. He opened it onthe table,

"There you are!" Hiafingerstabbedto where a camel track came up fromKassaha on the coast. It waveredacross Somaliland, across the interiorbelow Manieka, then cut over thefrontier into Shifta country and rantoward the Hahash hills beyond.

"There you are!" Coombea saidagain. "And I bet you there's guns on

are expected to hit 30,000,000,000—ten thousand timea the number nowbemg uaed by tbe broadcasters andthe air lines,

"Tbe radio industry began at thehard end of the frequency band," ex-plains Doctor Webster. "Now that wehave the klystron device, it looks as ifthe extreme short-wave band will bethe simpler end of the radiation spec-trum to work on and understand. Whatmade modern radio broadcasting poa-aible is De Forest's audion tube and itadevelopment into all tbe modern radiotubes. The klj-stron promises to taketbe same place in the ultra-ahort-waverange."

Among the other jobs they havefound for the klystron beam is boom-eranging through fogs to warn shipsoff rocks or from crashing into oneanother. Used as a communicationsbeam, the klystron permits shipa totalk with one another without eaves-droppers picking up the messages.Still another task is the one Bill Hansenfirst set out to handle with his originalrhumbatron, that of developing inex-pensive high voltage for testing metalsand for therapeutic work. The klystronweighs from five to ten pounds, wherethe present coil and condenser high-voltage machines run into tons. Aklystron costs about fíve hundred dol-lars to build, but shortly will be turnedout for a tenth that sum in a metal orglass vacuum case aa compact aa aportable radio.

In December of last year, because ofthe military secrecy surrounding theklystron's use as a much-needed de-fense weapon, the Sperry GyroscopeCompany concentrated research workin a brand-new laboratory built espe-cially for the purpose at Garden City,Long Island, Just before Christmas,with real money jingling in their jeans,tbe Varians turned their experimentsin the Stanford physics laboratory overto severat research fellows supportedby Sperry, and headed for Garden Cityto join the Sperry research stau. Theireyes glowed at tbe prospect of workingin what is probably the country's new-est, most modern invention factory, ifnot the world's. Just before he left theStanford campus, a friend asked RUBSVarian what they were going to doback there. He thought it over seri-ously.

"Oh, we'll just keep on eliminatingbum ideas," he said. "That's all,"

'em! That'fl the way they've been get-ting in!"

"It 's what we've been talkingabout!" Turner pointed to the map."Arab dhows land them at Kassaba,and that's how they smuggle them uphere!"

"Well, we sent the tribal police outto watch for something like this,"Crawford answered. "Whose camelsare they, Herbie?"

"He doesn't know," Coombes said.They looked at the runner. He was

holding a veranda post, gripping ithigh up, pulling gently to keep theweight off his legs and rest them. Hehad run fifty miles and he knew that ifhe were to crouch or «it doftTi it wouldbe a long time before he could moveagain, so he was careful to remain up-right.

"They found a day-old trail by theborder," Coombea added. "And atl heknow» is that there are ten camela."

(Coatlnaed on Pag» 69}