Dart-Shooting Fish Gun Has Pistol Grip

Angling with a dart gun, a sport that has steadily increased in popularity, especially along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in France and Italy, is expected to be improved by the recent invention of a fishing gun that is fitted with a pistol grip so that the weapon may be aimed and fired like a rifle. Placed midway along the length of the gun, which resembles a hollow fishing rod, the pistol grip has a trigger for releasing the spring mechanism to fire a sharp, dartlike projectile that drags a line in its wake from a reel mounted a short distance in front of the grip. The weapon may also be used under water, when the angler wears special goggles that enable him to see the fish.

Wow, this one comes with a robot!

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Are These GM’s Cars of Tomorrow?

By Bernard W. Crandell

PROBABLY you’ll never see any of the fanciful sketches on these pages coming down a production line or in your dealer’s salesroom. Nobody at GM intends that you should. The sports car designs here are an important phase of automobile styling done by the General Motors Styling Section and the sketches fulfill a function of professional car designing for which there is no substitute—uninhibited creativeness and daring imagination.
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Glare-proof Glasses Aid Drivers

HEADLIGHT glare from approaching cars is practically eliminated by the cup-shaped aluminum shields shown on the left, which fasten onto regular spectacle frames.

Holes are cut a little to the right of the apex of the cones, which are one inch deep. When meeting a car, driver turns his head slightly to the right. This automatically cuts off the glare from the lights and enables him to watch the side of the road.

Holes in the sides of the cups aid wearer in watching cars at intersections.

Exciting!

Gym Horse From Hot Water Tank

A GYM horse that can stand the weather and delight youngsters can be made and set up in half an hour by the method shown in the accompanying photograph. The pipe is readily driven into the ground, after connecting to the tank, of course. A little concrete may be poured around the pipe afterwards if greater rigidity is desired.

There is something about this image that I find very disturbing.

SQUEEZE (not the girl, the container) and heated food put in by Mommy squirts onto spoon and is shoveled into baby’s mouth.

The Switchboard
An Advertisement of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company

A web of cords plugged into numbered holes. A hand ready to answer signals which flash from tiny lamps. A mind alert for prompt and accurate performance of a vital service. A devotion to duty inspired by a sense of the public’s reliance on that service. Read the rest of this entry »

Beautifully colored article from 1940.

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New Boom in Gliders

Thrilling Aerial Sport Gains Wider Popularity Through Knockdown Kits That Enable Anybody To Build His Own Sailplane, Buying All the Materials on a Pay-as-You-Go Plan

By ANDREW R. BOONE

SOARING on wings assembled in back yards and home workshops, hundreds of glider enthusiasts are piloting their own sailplanes. Bought on the installment plan, their ships come in knockdown kits. Piecemeal buying enables boys and men alike to build gliders. As a result, flying without power is sweeping the nation. More than forty meets will be staged this year, from the big national events like the one held annually at Elmira, N. Y., to small sectional competitions on farm lots, desert lakes, and mountain pastures. Two hundred clubs have been formed with 2,000 members. Aside from the kits, would-be soarers need purchase few accessories. Tow rope, a couple of wrenches, air-speed meter, and a sensitive variometer fill the bill. In many towns groups club together, building their own soaring planes and cooperating in flying. At a cost far less than that of a powered plane, their members enjoy the thrills and pleasures of flying. Danger of injury is less, too, for they can land the light craft at comparatively slow speeds.
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I think they might be missing a few issues here…

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A Subway Through the Sahara

A tunnel railway beneath the shifting Sahara desert sands of northern Africa, covering the thousand miles between Morocco and Timbuktu, is proposed by a French engineer as a solution of desert travel.

COINCIDENT with the project of a tunnel under the English channel to connect France and England, a French engineer, Paul Remy, has conceived the idea of a 125-mile subway through the Sahara desert in northern Africa. The route of the railway would cover the 1000 miles between Morocco and Timbuktu, but all except 125 miles of this distance can be built on stretches of rocky and barren land which offer no obstacles to a surface railway. The 125-mile stretch of country known as the Shifting Sands in the heart of the Sahara, is filled with sand dunes which blow up overnight to tremendous heights, only to disappear on their endless march where the hot winds bore through them and urge them onward. Surface rails, of course, would be impossible in this land where mountains of wind-blown sand would cover them overnight.

For this reason Remy’s tunnel project seems the only practicable idea yet advanced for speeding up desert travel. As proposed, the tunnel would be a huge metal tube supported on a skeleton viaduct of cross-ties and piles sunk into the sand.

It would be a simple task to construct pipe lines through the shell of the tube so that water, gas, electric cables and telephone lines could be run through them. Power for the trains would naturally be electric, since it would be impossible to use coal or oil-burning locomotives because of the ventilation problems involved.

In time the desert sands would submerge the tunnel entirely, insulating it from the intense heat so that travel would be far more comfortable inside the tunnel than upon the surface. Were it not for the fact that there is no water available, it would be possible to plant grasses in the sands and anchor them with plant growth so that they could not shift overnight. As it is, however, the tunnel seems to be the only possible means of bridging the heart of the desert.

Fantastic as such a scheme sounds at first, and high as would be the initial cost, no other entirely satisfactory method of rapidly crossing the shifting sand area has been offered. For both economic and military reasons France is determined to build a railway across the Sahara. Some means of rapid transport of troops in case of a national emergency, is very desirable.

Yup, global warming is a just a crazy, new theory.

Carbon Dioxide Heats the Earth
DR. E. O. HULBURT, physicist of the naval research laboratory, Washington, has found conclusive mathematical evidence that the earth’s temperature is being warmed by the increased amount of carbon dioxide present in the air. Smoke stacks emit huge volumes of this gas, which is also found in the breath and waste products of humans and animals.

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How Frank Buck Filmed His Tiger-Python Battle

Everyone who has seen Frank Buck’s “Bring ‘Em Back Alive,” that amazing movie of jungle life, is asking the question: “How did they ever film that spectacular battle between a Bengal tiger and a 30-foot python? Was it faked? How did the cameramen happen to be on the scene—and how did they escape with their own lives?” Read the answer in this article.

WHO won — the python or the tiger? This is the question which is bothering thousands of folks who have seen Frank Buck’s startling movie of jungle life, “Bring ‘Em Back Alive,” and who have been vividly impressed by the incomparably spectacular scenes shown therein where a Bengal tiger, dreaded king of the jungle, battles the flashing coils of a deadly rock python thirty feet in length.
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meet a “flyer” with over 250,000,000 hours behind him!

“He’s” a new Lycoming air-cooled engine. He’s backed by Lycoming’s experience in creating and producing – 50,000 aircraft power plants . . . each with a flight-proved life expectancy of at least 5,000 hours.

You learn a lot about flying in 25 years . . . and 50,000 engines!
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Shutting Hell’s Mouth

SCREAMING sacrifices to strange gods, corpses of medieval victims of persecution, even the grisly results of Chicago gangster activities have hurtled down to oblivion in the gaping earth slit that is called The Mouth of Hell. That’s all over now, for the citizens of Taxco, 105 miles south of Mexico City, have, with the help of an American and a Mexican engineer, sealed it up forever. Formerly believed to be a mile deep, the hole has been shown by scientific measurements to go down 475 feet. To remove this relic of barbarism, heavy timbers were braced on jutting rocks a few feet below the orifice; when dynamite charges were set off near the surface, tons of rocks keystoned across the horror hole, closing it for all time. The operation, which cost about $500, was undertaken after exhaustive exploration by Dr. Ezequiel Ordonez, leading Mexican geologist, and other scientists.