convertern.

1533 W. Tyndale Supper of Lord in Wks. III. 261 Let our covetous converters chop and change bread and wine, till we there feel, see, and taste neither bread nor wine.

1687 N. Johnston Assurance Abbey & Church-lands 26 A converter of Ecclesiastical Mony to his own use.

1825 New Monthly Mag. 13 510 Modern converters of field-sports into butcheries.

1811 Naval Chron. 25 88 One of the timber-convertors of the dock-yard.

1875 R. Hunt & F. W. Rudler Ure's Dict. Arts (ed. 7) III. 898 Réaumur..first [brought] the process of conversion to any degree of perfection..The first principles laid down by him are now the guide of the converter.

1881 Mechanic §198 Buyers and converters of all kinds of English timber.

1959 Listener 5 Nov. 768/1 Is the horizontal structure a weakness with yarn spinners selling to cloth manufacturers and manufacturers selling to converters who deal with separate finishers to complete the cloth for final use?

1889 Nature 24 Oct. 631 A vessel, called a converter..whose use is to permit the water to resolve itself into steam.

1867 Morning Star 20 Sept. 7 The converters can thus be worked with liquid iron direct from the blast furnaces, the iron remaining perfectly liquid during the short time of transit.

1883 Harper's Mag. Aug. 334/2 The Bessemer [process]..decarbonizes melted iron in huge converters by forcing an air stream through it.

1897 Daily News 4 Jan. 2/1 18,300 ounces of gold, contained in either converter bars, cast and refined copper, or bullion.

1906 Westm. Gaz. 22 Aug. 9/1 The works, which consist of three blast furnaces and two converters, are capable of treating 10,000 tons of ore per month.

1958 Everyman's Encycl. III. 754/2 Converter, iron retort used in the Bessemer process of making steel, and for obtaining metal from matter (metal sulphides).

1888 S. P. Thompson Dynamo-electr. Machinery (ed. 3) 484 For transforming from high pressures to low, several kinds of apparatus are known, namely:—..Induction-coils, also called for this purpose Secondary Generators, or Transformers, or Converters.

1889 Pall Mall Gaz. 25 Jan. 6/1 The mains are underground, and..the current generated is of high tension. At each house lighted, the current is changed into low tension by means of converters.

1890 C. W. Vincent in 19th Cent. Jan. 147 In electric lighting, induction coils of converse construction are employed, the primary coil being of fine wire, and the secondary or induction coil of the thicker wire. These coils convert high-tension into low-tension electricity, and under the name of ‘converters’ are already in use in several electric lighting systems.

1906 G. F. Goodchild & C. F. Tweney Technol. & Sci. Dict. 783/1 Another class of transformers are more often termed converters or rotary converters; they are used in the transformation of alternate currents to continuous currents (or vice versâ), or for changing the voltage of continuous currents.

1911 Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 912/2 The converter cannot advantageously be used to control the power factor by variation of the field strength.

1911 Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 912/2 The synchronous converter finds its chief use in electric traction.

1958 Spectator 1 Aug. 167/2 The car radio, which does not need a converter and runs direct from the car battery.

1942 U.S. War Dept. Techn. Man. (title) M-209 converter.

1959 C. Ogburn Marauders (1960) v. 167 A libel upon our faithful M-209 converter by the radio operators, whose transmissions were far more likely to be to blame for unintelligible messages than the little cipher machine.

1950 C. B. Tompkins & J. H. Wakelin High-speed Computing Devices (Engin. Res. Associates) xv. 386 An analog-to-digital converter is a device which accepts instantaneous values of continuously variable quantities and expresses them in discrete numerical form.

1950 C. B. Tompkins & J. H. Wakelin High-speed Computing Devices xv. 393 A digital-to-analog converter employed in the Bell Telephone Laboratories p.c.m. system makes use of the exponential decay characteristics of the RC circuit.

1951 M. L. Kuder (title) Anodige, an electronic analogue-to-digital converter (Report 1117, Nat. Bureau of Standards (U.S.)).

1962 Gloss. Terms Automatic Data Processing (B.S.I.) 83 Converter, a unit which changes the representation of data from one form to another so as to make it available or acceptable to another machine, e.g. a unit which changes data punched on cards to data recorded on magnetic tape. A converter may also edit the data.

1962 M. G. Hartley Introd. Electronic Analogue Computers vii. 143 Appropriate analogue-to-digital converters provide the digital equivalent of the various voltages in the analogue machine.

1953 Rep. U.S.A.E.C. on Nucl. Power Reactor Technol. 80 If the reactor is operating as a converter, the U²³⁵ remaining in the core must be decontaminated.

1956 S. Glasstone Princ. Nucl. Reactor Engin. i. 39 In these reactors the neutrons accompanying the fission process are used to convert..non-fissionable material (uranium-238) into one (plutonium-239) that is fissionable... Such reactors have been called production reactors or converters.

1962 Gloss. Nuclear Sci. (B.S.I.) 80 Breeder and converter reactors may also be power reactors.