Pin Head Detector For Space Signals

Innovation from December 1963.

The tiny white button in the lens can detect and amplify, by 100 times, signals carried to it on less than a billionth of a watt of light.

The transistor-like device, a quarter-inch in diameter, would be the heart of a matchbox-size receiver, enabling space systems to pick up light-borne signals beamed from millions of miles away.

Sperry Rand researchers, who developed it, hope to make it still a billion times more sensitive-comparable to seeing, from the moon, the glow of a 400-watt bulb on earth.