Atomic Age Brush

A brush built on the principle of a thunderstorm one of the first commercial products of the Atomic Age to come out of Oak Ridge, Tenn. has been designed for the market by the Henry C. Keck ('43) Associates in Pasadena, Calif., and is being manufactured by Nuclear Products.

Known as the Static-Master, the brush is equipped with a chamber charged with polonium and is primarily designed to clean plastic surfaces. These collect dust because of the static charge contained in plastic and other nonconductive materials. The problem, as Henry Keck stated in a recent interview in the Pasadena StarNews, was to make a brush which would clean plastic surfaces and at the same time break through the layer of electricity generated in the cleaning process. Radio-active polonium by reducing the charged air into ordinary air, which is a non-conductor of electricity, seemed to be the answer. As Mr. Keck puts it, "A thunderstorm tells the whole story in a more dramatic fashion."

At present industry uses Static-Masters principally for cleaning expensive phonograph records, film and instruments with valuable lenses.

Mr. Keck, who was a Tuck-Thayer major, graduated in 1947 from the California Institute of Technology's School of Industrial Design.