set-up used to record the passage of an armour piercing shell through steel plate
Toronto. The July, 1945 issue of Popular Mechanics has a brief article on using rapid fire flash tubes to record the passage of a .50 calibre bullet through armour plate. The experiment was performed by the ATSC of the American Military. The experiment made practical use of the ‘strobe’ concepts arrived at by Harold Edgerton (M.I.T.) just a few years earlier.
Old timers may recall ‘pentode’ tubes. These were vacuum tubes with three active grids between the cathode/heater and the plate (hence the name pentode or five active elements).
The last paragraph in the article refers to using high speed x-ray tubes developed by Westinghouse for a similar experiment.
Thanks go to my good friend and fellow PHSC member, George Dunbar, for discovering this slice of photographic history and sharing it with us.
