And no craftman, or whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee …
—Rev. 18:22
3419 Those Integrated Circuits
Computers used to be lumbering, room-sized monsters. Now they come in relatively minute items.
The technology of miniaturization can be said to owe its greatest debt to the development of integrated circuits.
The manufacturing process starts with electronic engineers designing a circuit which is drawn on a chart and then reduced photographically to, say, the size of a pinhead. The ’picture’ of the circuit is then printed on a slide which is made into a mask. This is put over a tiny sliver from a crystal of silicon, and through lines cut in the mask the silicon is etched to reproduce the lines of the circuit. The transistors and other components are deposited on the circuit. Then a girl using binocular microscopes solders fine gold wire less than 1/1000 in. thick onto the ends of the circuit, so that it can be connected to other components in the finished article.
Using this technology, a computer, which 20 years ago occupied a room and needed refrigerators to keep it cool, can be reduced to the size of a typewriter.
3420 Photo-Miniaturization
The National Cash Register Company has a piece of film only two inches, onto which the entire Bible has been condensed.
And the United States National Bureau of Standards has developed a microcamera that can put a page of the Bible on a bit of photographic film much smaller than a pinhead. On this scale all the pages of a Bible would barely cover Lincoln’s head on a 1¢ piece; the 27,357 pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica could be reproduced on the back of a matchbook.
—Time
3421 Writing On Human Hair
One of the great miniature writers is James W. Zaharee who, when not on tour demonstrating his skill, resides on a ranch in North Dakota. One of his incredible feats done with a fine pen and a microscope, was the printing of Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address (268 words) on a human hair less than three inches in length.
3422 Seventeen Lord’s Prayers On Dime
A man by the name of Joseph A. Bertasso of Albany, New York, accomplished the feat of writing the Lord’s Prayer seventeen times on a space the size of a dime. It seems impossible but with years of practice Bertasso accomplished the wonder.
3423 Twenty Bibles On Square Inch
In the early 19th century, Prof. Webb of the Royal Microscopical Society has written the entire Lord’s Prayer in a space one-twentieth of an inch one way and one-twenty-fifth of an inch the other. Later he wrote it in a much smaller space, so that a microscope magnifying six hundred times was required to make the writing readable. Mr. Stephen Helm of New York states that the entire Scripture can be legibly written twenty times repeated within the space of a single square inch.
—W. J. Hart
3424 Brush Made Of One Hair
A unique hobby of making miniature works of art has produced an oil painting, a winter landscape, only 1–65th of a square inch in area, or so small that it had to be painted with a brush consisting of a single human hair.
3425 Nutshell Scenes
Wood carvings so small that their details cannot be seen without a magnifying glass are cut inside both halves of a rosary’s terminal bead which is owned by the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Although the scene in each half occupies less than two cubic inches, one, depicting the Day of judgment, has 47 figures, while the other, depicting Heaven, has 58 figures—with wings.
See also: Skillfulness ; Technology ; Dan. 12:4.