One interesting side note about this passage:
“Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.”
Why, you might ask, couldn’t they just put the dye in the margarine? Well it turns out that the dairy lobby in this country had/has some serious pull. They saw margarine as competition to butter and had many laws passed that restricted the it’s appearance, primarily making it illegal to dye it to look like butter. The last state to repeal these laws was Wisconson in 1967. In Quebec, Canada it is STILL illegal to sell yellow margarine. More information on wikipedia.
Oh, and does anyone think that machine below looks at all “human-like”?
GADGETS Can Make Your FORTUNE
By West Peterson
THIRTY-FIVE thousand inventions will be patented in the United States this year. If one of them is yours— possibly a simple gadget with universal appeal—you may reap a fortune!
Anything from a new household appliance to an improved method of food processing, from a unique use of plastics to another member of the wonder drug family can pay off huge dividends to the lucky— and skillful—discoverer. While it’s true that many inventions are now made by research teams in well-equipped laboratories, there’s still plenty of opportunity for the scientific or gadget-minded individual.
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Not too shabby for $62K in 1952, this thing operates at .12Mhz has roughly 2K of memory and each tape holds around 360K.
Plus for all you case modders, it already comes with 200 glowing tubes. Try to beat that with your little LEDs.
ANNOUNCING A GENERAL PURPOSE DIGITAL COMPUTER
to meet all your
COMPUTING NEEDS
Price $62,500
complete with tape drive and typewriter
Available 120 days*
ELECOM 110 — SPECIFICATIONS
MEMORY—magnetic drum, 512 word capacity. WORD LENGTH—30 binary digits and sign.
ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS—Addition; Subtraction; Multiplication (with round-off); multiplication (complete product); Division (with round-off); division (with remainder).
LOGICAL OPERATIONS— extraction; shift right; shift left; tally; overflow branch; conditional transfer of control (branch); halt; input and output operations.
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This machine was also known as the UNIVAC 1103
ANOTHER REMINGTON RAND ELECTRONIC DEVELOPMENT
Remington Rand introduces the ERA 1103 general-purpose computer system
ADVANCED LOGICAL AND ENGINEERING FEATURES
â– ACCOMMODATES WIDE OPTION OP DIRECT INPUT-OUTPUT DEVICES
Punched-card equipment Communications circuits Punched-paper and magnetic tapes Process-actuating mechanisms High-speed printers Graphic visual displays
â– FLEXIBLE DATA REPRESENTATION
Alphabetic and numeric data in any code
â– INHERENT HIGH SPEED AND LARGE CAPACITY
Coordinated electrostatic and magnetic drum storage Magnetic tape storage
â– EFFICIENT, VERSATILE PROGRAMMING
Powerful instruction repertoire Flexible two-address logic
â– UNEXCELLED RELIABILITY
Components of service-proved design Preventive diagnostic features Integral air conditioning
â– LOW DATA-PROCESSING COST
For complete information about the application of the ERA 1103 to your problems, write on your business letterhead to Room 1734, 315 Fourth Ave., New York 10.
It seems to me that anyone who would use the phrase “Getting Closer to Infinity” does not really understand the concept of infinity.
GETTING CLOSER TO INFINITY
Businessmen, engineers, and scientists now are solving problems in scientific and industrial data processing which, a few short years ago, would have been considered well-nigh infinite.
IBM Electronic Business Machines are making an important contribution to this progress. These machines accomplish once-overwhelming tasks with incredible speed and accuracy … freeing thousands of valuable minds for creative effort.
IBM
ELECTRONIC BUSINESS MACHINES
International Business Machines
This is the first in a series of 5 articles I’ve scanned from an amazing 1952 issue of Scientific American about Automatic Control. It discusses automatic machine tools, feedback loops, the role of computers in manufacturing and information theory. These are really astounding articles considering the time in which they were written, plus they have some great pictures (not this one so much, but the others).
I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
AUTOMATIC CONTROL
An introduction to seven articles about self-regulating machines, which represent a scientific and technological revolution that will powerfully shape the future of man
by Ernest Nagel
AUTOMATIC CONTROL is not a new thing in the world. Self-regulative mechanisms are an inherent feature of innumerable processes in nature, living and non-living. Men have long recognized the existence of such mechanisms in living forms, although, to be sure, they have often mistaken automatic regulation for the operation of some conscious design or vital force. Even the deliberate construction of self-regulating machines is no innovation: the history of such devices goes back at least several hundred years.
Nevertheless, the preacher’s weary cry that there is nothing new under the sun is at best a fragment of the truth. The general notion of automatic control may be ancient, but the formulation of its principles is a very recent achievement. And the systematic exploitation of these principles—their subtle theoretical elaboration and far-reaching practical application—must be credited to the 20th century. When human intelligence is disciplined by the analytical methods of modern science, and fortified by modern material resources and techniques, it can transform almost beyond recognition the most familiar aspects of the physical and social scene. There is surely a profound difference between a primitive recognition that some mechanisms are self-regulative while others are not, and the invention of an analytic theory which not only accounts for the gross facts but guides the construction of new types of systems.
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The Truman one is kinda cute and the De Gaulle one looks like it should be in the Dark Crystal.
LOBSTERS ARE LIKE PEOPLE
Jean Sulpice, Parisian restaurateur, believes that lobsters and people have similar features. These “portraits” seem to prove the artist’s contention.
With a few props (a cigar, glasses and hats) and his lobster shells, the Frenchman created these caricatures of two famous international figures.
ANYONE WHO HAS seen Paris knows about Place Pigalle—and knows that almost anything can be found there. That is why it is no surprise to learn that in the city of artists, one Pigalle restaurateur is an artist who hangs his work from the ceiling. More surprising is his medium—lobster shells!
Page 2 Captions:
Left, no label is needed to identify De Gaulle. Right, not so easy to recognize is the figure of the French president. Vincent Auriol
Fine wire holds the various parts of the figures together in their lifelike poses
Hanging from the ceiling in a somewhat frightening array are scores of examples of the artist’s work in a variety of subjects
What this really reminds me of is the car from The Ambiguously Gay Duo
Jet-Age Custom Car
No flames spout from the tail pipes of a custom-built three-wheeled car, but that is about the only difference between it and a space ship! The engine is a 60-horsepower V8 mounted in the rear. A single front wheel is suspended on a motorcycle fork. The sheet-metal body is welded to the frame. Air scoops on each side of the body ventilate the engine. The 10 tail pipes permit the hot air from the engine to escape. The unusual car was built by Stanley M. Eakin of Grove City, Ohio. It took six years of his spare time. Top speed is about 90 miles per hour.
