all I know is the sensitivity and enhanced s/n ratio of the
Gallium-Arsenide semiconductor can be used to great advantage in ones
front end... (don't know about girls though, their front ends are best
handle with bras I believe--or no bra even works for me! grin)

John

"Dave Heil" wrote in message
ink.net...
wrote:

From a quick trip to the living room bookshelves -

"...the fountain pen was invented in 1884. Then in the 1930s
Ladislau Biro, a Hungarian artist and journalist, invented the
ball-point pen in Budapest. He fled when the Second World War
broke out, eventually reaching Argentina."
" With the help of his brother Georg, a chemist, he perfected
the pen and manufactured it in Buenos Aires during the war. In
1944 he sold his interests in the invention to one of his
backers, who produced the Biro pen for the Allied air forces
because it was not affected by changes in air pressure."

From Reader's Digest "How In The World?" 1990, published
in Pleasantville, NY, and Montreal, Canada, page 14.

In fiction, novelist Len Deighton's excellent 5th book in his
'WWOCP' espionage series, "Horse Under Water," 1963, is the
discovery of a ball-point pen in the submerged wreckage of
a German submarine, said submarine supposedly sunk prior to
1944 (it wasn't and was used in post-WW2 times to smuggle
contraband and heroin - the "horse" of the title).

A ball-point pen requires SOME air pressure INSIDE the ink
reservoir in order for it to feed ink. Without that, there
would be a partial pressure loss inside the ink tube that would
inhibit ink flow. Yes, it works by capilliary action at the
TIP, but that requires feeding from the ink reservoir INSIDE
the pen. The ink is oil-based, of more viscosity than the ink
in fountain pens (which are entirely operating on gravity and
capilliary action). While a ball-point pen can operate at
high altitudes much better than a fountain pen, both are
inhibited in writing action in microgravity. The "Biro Pen"
use by the RAF in 1944 may lead, erroneously, to its alleged
ability to be used in microgravity.

Similarly, the Phase-Locked Loop or PLL was invented in France
in 1932! The basic PLL principle was not adaptable to any
consumer electronics frequency control applications until the
1960s and the availability of digital circuit packages. That
principle led to the Fractional-N frequency synthesis and,
quickly, to the Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) now found in
single chip products of Advanced Micro Devices. An offshoot
of the original PLL was the "locked oscillator" operating at
a multiple of a reference frequency. The locked oscillator
principle was used in early TV receivers for sweep circuits
but its fussiness in operation confined it to limited
commercial applications.

Fascinating! It is really tough to write with one of those PLLs.

How about filling us in on Gallium-Arsenide substrates, Len?

Dave K8MN