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Dozens of industries are already well aware of the lesson. To handle the vast increase in telephones and calls, for example, American Telephone & Telegraph Co. must make its equipment smaller or choke on its own wires. The complex long-distance "carrier" equipment which transmits as many as 1,800 separate conversations over the same pair of cables once filled a 20 ft. by 30 ft. building; this year, telephone companies have cut the carrier to the size of a kitchen icebox, will soon have one for rural systems as small as a police call box. The miniaturization of the future will make today's Lilliputian marvels seem huge by comparison. A hint of the advances to come is Project Vanguard to fire an earth satellite high into outer space; all the instruments in the satellite itself total only 10.5 Ibs., include a radio transmitter that weighs only 13 oz. Beyond today's transistors, the Air Force's civilian scientists are working on an even tinier device called a Cryotron, which looks like a wire sliver with another wire coiled around it. Because a Cryotron duplicates many of the functions of both transistors and vacuum tubes, yet is so small that 40 will fit on a 3-in. pencil stub, scientists think they will some day be able to cram what is now a giant electric brain into a single cubic foot of space.
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Miniaturization will in time spread through civilian U.S. life. Americans already have vest pocket radios and virtually invisible hearing aids. Soon they win have battery-operated portable TV sets, and miniature hi-fi sets; automen see the day when miniature radar sets will prevent collisions, when every motorist will have a transistorized two-way radio to keep him in instant communication with traffic-control centers. In the 18th century. Miniaturization Prophet Johnson wrote that "there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man." The U.S. of 1956 has taken him at his word.