Physically, a magnetic amplifier is built around a metallic core of material that can easily be saturated, typically a ring or square loop with a wire wrapped around it. Saturation is usually undesirable, but the mag amp exploits this effect. When that happens, current passes through the coil virtually unimpeded. If such an inductor carries a lot of current, the rod can reach a state called saturation, whereby the iron cannot become any more magnetized than it already is. And that varying magnetic field induces voltages in the wire that act to oppose the alternating current that created the field in the first place. That’s because when current flows, the coil creates an alternating magnetic field, concentrated in the iron rod. Such an inductor will tend to block the flow of alternating current through the wire. To understand how it works, first consider a simple inductor, say, a wire coiled around an iron rod. From top: Fox photos/Getty Images Remington Rand Univac Smith Archive/Alamy The British Elliot 803 computer of 1961 used related core-transistor logic. Magnetic amplifiers were used for a variety of applications, including in the infamous V-2 rockets that the Germany military employed during the Second World War and in the Magstec computer, completed in 1956. So here I’ll offer the little-known story of the mag amp. Nowadays, that history is all but forgotten. They even appeared in some early solid-state digital computers before giving way entirely to transistors. As a result, the 1950s and ’60s saw a renaissance for magnetic amplifiers, during which they were used extensively in the military, aerospace, and other industries. engineers were soon able to reproduce those alloys. Among this mass of information and equipment was the secret of Germany’s magnetic amplifiers: metal alloys that made these devices compact, efficient, and reliable. Four hundred experts sifted through billions of pages of documents and shipped 3.5 million microfilmed pages back to the United States, along with almost 200 tonnes of German industrial equipment. intelligence officers scoured Germany for useful scientific and technical information. What did the Third Reich’s engineers know that had eluded the Americans?Īfter the war, U.S. military-electronics experts of that era were baffled by the extensive German use of this device, which they first learned about from interrogating German prisoners of war. In the United States, mag amps had long been considered obsolete-“too slow, cumbersome, and inefficient to be taken seriously,” according to one source. Yet the V-2, along with much other German military hardware, depended on an obscure and seemingly antiquated component you’ve probably never heard of, something called the magnetic amplifier or mag amp. V-2 rockets it used to rain destruction on London. During the Second World War, the German military developed what were at the time some very sophisticated technologies, including the
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