Random Sampling: Scientific American, October 1960

These days I came by chance across some older issues of the Scientific American, out of a collection Bee had inherited some time ago from a former science professor. I find it always fascinating to browse through old, yellowed magazines. We can see what kept busy the minds of people at that time, and witness now well-established knowledge in the making.

The oldest number in the collection is the issue of October 1960, and the feature articles form a mix that is very similar to what we could find in the magazine today: Archaeology ("A Forgotten Civilization - Bahrein Island in the Persian gulf was a link between Sumer and ancient India"), Biology ("Electric Fishes - Not only the electric eel but also other fishes can generate a respectable charge"; "The Eradication of the Screw-worm Fly - A serious pest of cattle has been combatted by sterilizing its males with X-rays"), Geology ("The Rift in the Ocean Floor - The great ridge that bisects most of the oceans is split by a remarkable fissure"), History of Science ("Count Rumford - Born Benjamin Thompson in Massachusetts, he was a great investigator of heat"), and Physics ("Optical Pumping - Light is used to pump electrons to higher energies for spectroscopic purposes"; "The Physics of Wood Winds - Modern physics makes possible a closer analysis of how these instruments work"; "High-Speed Impact - Bodies collecting at speeds higher than 8000 feet per second behave like fluids").

Of course, there are some curiosities: the article on the mid-ocean ridges still predates the firm establishment of plate tectonics, and discusses the "Expanding-Earth Theory" based on a decrease of the Newtonian constant G over geologically relevant time-scales as a possible explanation of the data. Optical pumping is today usually referred to in connection with the laser - but the laser, whose first realisation by Theodore Maiman was just published two months earlier, in August 1960, is only mentioned in the very last paragraph of the article (... T. H. Maiman at the Hughes Aircraft Company has already observed some degree of coherent emission from a ruby, and he as well as workers at several other laboratories are trying to put R light to practical use. Although a working light amplifier may still be some time away, its prospects now seem excellent.)

But the really cool stuff which conveys the spirit of the time is not to be found in the editorial content of the magazine, it's in the advertisements! I was fascinated to see just how many advertisements there are - the index of advertisers lists more than 120 companies, and most of the advertisements cover at least one page, inflating the issue to 224 pages total. In these ads, we can learn that

• Teflon was not a spin-off of the Flight to the Moon, as I was told when I was a kid - at least, as we can see, DuPont de Nemours was placing advertisements for this stuff before Kennedy's bold speech...


• Tubes are still essential parts of electronic equipment - that's what we are told by RCA, whose tubes are used "to listen to the sound of colliding galaxies 300 million light-years away" and equip "satellites and space probes [...] gathering information about the van Allen belts and other hitherto unknown phenomena of outer space" ...


• "At Raytheon, Scientific Imagination focusses on Ferromagnetics", to be used in microwave and radar equipment - and these guys are working with second-quantised Hamiltonians on the blackboard...

Science as showcased in these ads is an all-male business, and focusses to a large part on military applications: Electronic equipment to study what happens when launching rockets,



... steel to construct silos for housing ICBMs in the Plaines of Wyoming, ...



it's all "rocket science":



But wait: Not everything in the advertisements is manifestly military stuff: There is a group of ads scattered throughout the magazine around the ECHO satellite project, the first experiment to test telecommunication via satellite:




Are you also puzzled by that funny-shaped antenna displayed in the ads of the JPL and Bell Labs?



But yeah - that is the antenna which came to true scientific fame three years later, when Penzias and Wilson recognised that it was constantly registering some funny, isotropic microwave noise corresponding to a temperature of 3 Kelvin - the Cosmic Microwave Background!