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New Electrical Wonders Work Living Room Magic

How do they work? Take a look inside the wireless TV control, switchless lamp, cordless clock.

By Martin Mann

AMAZE your friends! Just look at the TV and make it change channels or silence the commercial—while your hands are in your pockets. Make a lamp light when you wave your hand and mutter abracadabra. Lift the electric clock, its second hand sweeping merrily —but look, no wires!

Magic? Yes, sir. But not the kind you laboriously rig up yourself. These are new commercial marvels, available in stores around the country.

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PHONE-HOLDING BRACKET LEAVES HANDS FREE

Acrobatic skill in holding the receiver between shoulder and chin when telephoning, in an effort to free both hands for something else, is no longer necessary if a receiver-holding attachment is fitted to your phone.

The new appliance is merely a bracket that bolts to the phone back of the transmitter and holds the receiver at the proper elevatiou and angle for convenient use. Slipping back a latch releases the hook and opens the line. When the call is completed, pressing down the hook automatically- locks it shut. The holder attaches in place of the rivet found behind the transmitter.

The device should prove particularly welcome when it is necessary to “hold the wire” for a considerable time.

Vacuum Cleaner Does Wash
The mass of soapy bubbles in this wash-tub was formed by the perforated steel tubing in the hands of its German inventor. Attached to the blower of a vacuum cleaner and placed in the bottom of the tub, it is said to do an effective job of clothes-washing with a third the soap normally used.

Denby Trucks

For Trail or Pavement

Denby trucks are superior trucks at lower prices. Denby methods make Denby prices possible. Denby standards guarantee Denby quality
DENBY MOTOR TRUCK COMPANY
DETROIT, MICHIGAN

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Tire Tales
AT LONG last, tire manufacturers are no longer snowed under with war orders and are able to concentrate on tires for civilian cars, old and new. With natural rubber still in acutely short supply, synthetics like buna styrene will be used. Thanks to war research and experience, the substitute material makes tires that are as good as, and in some ways better than, those made of natural rubber.

Roto-Chute for Rocket Pilots

SUICIDE is the word for the pilot who tries to escape from a supersonic plane by parachute. The billowing fabric ‘chute was -a wonderful aerial lifesaver —till Air Force pilots started streaking faster than sound in rocket planes like the Bell XS-1. The impact of the air at such speeds is so terrific that it will not only shred the parachute like a burst of shrapnel but also peel the flesh off the pilot’s bones.

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How Your Daily Life Will Be Changed After the War

LET’S dress you from skin to topcoat, to dramatize the coming clothing revolution. You break out your socks, underwear and shirt from factory-fresh packages. When you undress tonight you’ll toss them aside like disposable tissues. The laundry man is practically out of business, for it’s cheaper to have a standing order of new garments delivered every week or two than to have the old ones washed and ironed.

As you slip into your underwear and shirt you marvel at their form-fitting comfort. They ought to be comfortable, for they are moulded to the contours of the body and there is not a single seam, ridge, button or buttonhole. No wonder your Shirts are throwaway-cheap: there’s no hand labor of cutting to patterns, assembling, sewing, buttonholing. Rolls of fabric are fed into one end of a machine like a newspaper press, to emerge on a delivery belt at the other end at the rate of several hundred an hour.

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Exit, Ragweed! is the cry of Miss Lake Michigan (Rae Stratton) as, portable sprayer on her bare back, she makes a sample attack with 2, 4-D on Chicago’s poison ivy. Miss LM is contemptuous of poison ivy, we see; male workers on this job wear pants.

Very cool. This article was written back when they still had a big network of pneumatic tubes connecting all of the post offices in Manhattan.

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What Happens When You Mail a Letter

By Herbert O. Johansen

With the Christmas rush on, the complex network of men and machines that speeds the mails is working in high gear.

WHEN you drop a letter in a mailbox and hear the slot lid click, you probably give the lid a couple of extra flips for good measure. In return for that effort, plus licking the stamp, you take it for granted that your message of love, business, sorrow, cheer or complaint will be delivered to the right person at the right place in the shortest possible time.

And it almost certainly will be—along with the other 127,677,738 letters that are mailed in the United States on an average day—enough letters, if their envelopes were laid end-to-end, to reach from New York to Shanghai.

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At least until the invention of the Bic Pen.

NEW CAR LOCK THWARTS THIEF
Using a cylindrical key, a recently marketed auto-bile lock for doors or ignition is said to afford protection against thieves. A thief attempting to open the lock would have to pick each of its seven plungers separately. Drilling or shearing off the lock is said to be impossible because of the hardened steel shell. The lock does not bear a number, a secret number being furnished the owner. Duplicate keys can be obtained from the factory only on presentation of the complete lock, which prevents thieves from securing a duplicate key for unlawful use.

It’s all in the name. Once they changed the name of this from “FIRE ESCAPE” to “sun roof” sales took off.

FIRE ESCAPE TRAP IN TOP OF AUTO
A motor car with a fire escape is a novelty introduced by a British inventor. The top of the car is cut away to provide a large rectangular aperture, which is normally closed by a fitted panel that excludes rain and snow. If an accident should turn the car on its side, however, the panel automatically falls out, thus allowing the occupants to escape or be helped out quickly. In case of fire following a collision, the inventor declares, his innovation would be an invaluable aid to life-saving and would probably greatly reduce the number of serious injuries that occur when driver is trapped in car.

This makes those dorky 3D walk-throughs seem a lot more useful doesn’t it?

Lilliputian’s-eye viewer puts you inside tiny model

A slender optical tube fitted with 18 miniature lenses provides realistic views inside architects’, landscapers’, town planners’, and other scale models. With a camera and adapter on the eyepiece, you get photos like the circular ones at left.

The British-made Modelscope is a combination microscrope, periscope, and telescope with an aperture at one side .3 inch from the end. On the floor of a 1:200 model, this corresponds to eye level at the same scale. At other heights, it shows vistas from windows, balconies, and other points. Made by Optec Reactors, Ltd., of London, the unit is distributed in the U.S. by H. C. I. Sales Corp., NYC.