Queer Facts about Star Gazers
HAVE you ever seen a picture of a square star? Why do astronomers live longer every year than anyone else? Would you believe it is impossible to look through the world’s largest telescope? Do you know astronomers don’t always point their telescopes at the stars they really want to observe?
There are no square stars, of course, although the scientists make photographs that show them as squares. They do it with a special camera equipped with a traveling back that moves up and down so the rays from separate stars are recorded as square patches on the film. This makes it easier to measure their comparative brilliance.
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That’s a rather interesting border the Kalamazoo Stove Company has. I wonder if their catalogs were popular in Germany?
I also think that “Speed! I Guess Yes!” is an awesome tagline for a car company and should be recycled today.
MODERN EQUIPMENT EASES PRESIDENT’S LIFE
AN ARRAY of modern inventions, products of twentieth century ingenuity, are part of the White House equipment to make the President’s day less strenuous. A host of mechanical aids are at hand.
The White House kitchen is a model of efficiency. A 24-foot electric range prepares a single pot of tea or a sumptuous state banquet. To conserve his time and energy, the President has lunch served’ to him on a specially designed wheeled cabinet. It keeps food ice cold or piping hot.
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This is a really fun read for anyone who has ever ridden the NYC subway and wants to know how it works. I think that besides the fact that subways are all one unified system now not much has changed since this article was written 70 years ago.
Flying the Subway Express
by Donald G. Cooley
YOU shoot through a winding tunnel streaked with colored lights, dive under a river, zoom up on the other side, fly past crowded platforms, sway dizzily as you dash around a curve at breakneck speed—it’s a crashing, flashing, thrilling scene that thunders past as you ride the subway express!
Sightseers in New York soon discover the subway to be one of the city’s miracles. For five cents they can ride for hours or for days on the world’s most exciting underground railroad. When the American Legion held its big 1937 convention in New York, hundreds of Legionnaires stated that the big thrill of their outing came when they stood in the first car of a speeding subway train and found adventure around every curve.
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Freak Vehicles for Air, Land, and Water
Birds, Dogs and Other Animals Used to Propel the Odd Boats, Wagons, and Airships Inventors Have Devised in Their Efforts to Bring About Faster, Safer,
and More Certain Ways to Travel
RIDING to the North Pole pulled by a kite! Crossing the Sahara in a juggernaut with fifty-foot wheels! Galloping along the ground on a mechanical horse with steel-pipe legs! Rolling over trees and houses in a 115-foot canvas ball blown by the wind like a tumbleweed!
Such are the curious, fantastic forms of conveyance inventors have proposed in the long search for swifter travel. Digging into the files of old newspapers and patents, you find a fascinating record of the inventive mind grappling with the problems of increasing human comfort and speed. It is a chronicle of queer ideas, of freak vehicles, of oddities of transportation.
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