6.
Sweepnik
Frisch
spent several years designing and building new machines
for measuring the bubble chamber tracks. Some worked
better than others - and some didn't work at all! Frisch
explained 'if an expert is one who has made every conceivable
mistake, I became very expert in this field'.
Frisch
came up with the idea of his most successful track-measuring
device in 1964. He was at a Physical Society Exhibition
in Manchester, showing one of his failed devices. Few
of the visitors were interested, so Frisch spent the
time thinking about ways to improve the machine.
The
idea he came up with was a machine that didn't need
an operator to move the film under a cross-hair, but
instead used a beam of light to follow the tracks automatically.
The light beam could be steered by two mirrors, one
to move it horizontally and the other vertically across
the image on the bubble chamber film.
Frisch wanted to use a line image rather than an individual
dot of light. The line image could be rotated in a circular
sweep until it most closely fit the track it was following,
telling the machine the direction in which a track was
going.
Frisch
named the device the 'Sweepnik', thinking that the fast
circular sweep would be 'flitting around the film like
a little Sputnik'. The Russian satellite, launched seven
years earlier, could orbit the Earth every 98 minutes,
while Sweepnik's tiny beam of light would complete its
rotation nearly 50 times a second!
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