Puzzler....

Well, nobody got the right answer to last week's puzzler: how did the vacuum tube manufacturers get the high quality vacuum in such an inexpensive, mass-produced item? The correct answer is the inductively heated barium reactor, known colloquially as a “getter”. These were very simple and cheap: just a piece of sheet metal coated with a barium compound. The barium, when heated, absorbed any gas remaining inside the tube. Typically the manufacturers heated this little piece of sheet metal inductively (meaning by placing the tube in a powerful, rapidly changing magnetic field). This caused currents (“eddy currents” to flow in the sheet metal, and that caused it to get very hot. So hot, in fact, that the barium coating would flash-vaporize (absorbing gas as it did so). This vapor would then cool and adhere to the inside of the glass envelope of the vacuum tube, causing the silvery coating familiar to anyone who has handled vacuum tubes.

This week's puzzler is back to history – in this case, 20th century U.S. history. What was the middle name of a former U.S. Senator who was a judge early in his career (and was a notorious gambler while on the bench), enlisted in the Marines in 1942 to fight (despite his exclusion from obligatory service because he was a judge), came back from the war and successfully ran for the U.S. Senate (despite well-documented lies and self-serving distortions about his military service record), became a highly polarizing figure in the Senate and finally died in office, a bitter and often inebriated man? The clincher is that modern historians are starting to look at his Senate record a little more positively; in fact, some have posited him as one of the early victims of wrongful media demonization.