Magnesium the BANTAMWEIGHT METAL
How Chemists Have Put It to Work as a Jack-of-All-Trades.
By KENNETH M. SWEZEY
DURING the war magnesium was extensively used as a lightweight structural metal for aircraft parts and as pyrotechnic material for star shells, signal flares, tracer bullets, and flash and incendiary bombs. Strong, silvery white, and only two thirds as heavy as aluminum, it is the lightest of all construction metals. In the form of powder, thin sheets, or wire, it burns with a dazzling flame that water or even carbon dioxide will not put out. Never found alone in nature, magnesium is made on a tremendous scale by the electrolysis of its compounds. These compounds are among the most plentiful substances in the crust of the earth. Whole mountain ranges consist of dolomite, a double carbonate of magnesium and calcium. Asbestos, talc, and meerschaum are magnesium silicates. Epsom salts, named after the springs at Epsom, England, where they were first isolated in 1695, are magnesium sulphate. In the form of its chloride, there are nearly 6,000,000 tons of magnesium in every cubic mile of-the sea, a vast storehouse of supply.
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Rosie gets all the press, but very few people know about Ronnie the Riveter, the WWII icon of gay war-workers in the U.S.
Where I work It’s Chesterfield
Here’s the answer to that. . . Chesterfields are Milder, Cooler-Smoking and definitely Better-Tasting in just the way you want a good cigarette to be. And no question about it, there’s a lot more smoking pleasure in Chesterfield’s Right Combination of the world’s best cigarette tobaccos. ,
For steady enjoyment, make your next pack Chesterfields… regardless of price, there is no better cigarette made today.
Chesterfields are on the job with Smokers everywhere
They Satisfy
Wow. Particle detectors have gotten a bit bigger in the past 70 years or so. Check out this picture of the new ATLAS detector going online at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Here’s a cool movie about it too.
Particles of Smashed Atoms Traced by Special Camera
Sixty-six separate photographic plates are employed in an atom camera with which Prof. T. R. Wilkins, of the University of Rochester, Rochester, N. Y., hopes to gather new scientific data on the repulsive force within the nucleus of an atom. Bombarded in a cyclotron, or atom smasher, atomic particles enter the circular camera, approach a central target, and are “scattered” through pinholes into one or more of sixty-six slots, each of which has a photographic plate bearing a special emulsion on which the atom particles leave “tracks.”
How to Handle a Rope
A CHAMPION GIVES YOU A LESSON WITH THE LARIAT
By TOM ROAN
THE use of rope as a catcher goes back to the days when primitive man spread vine loops and crude grass ropes to snare animals for his food. But it took the American cowboy to become an artist with a rope. In long days in the saddle, drifting lazily with a trail herd, or hours alone during the night herding, the rope became his plaything. The comparatively simple routine of roping a horse, calf, or steer was not enough. He worked out new tricks. Step by step he progressed, until today the American cowboy is the wizard of the lariat.
To bring the fundamentals of roping to our readers we found a champion in D. H. Frank Biron, now operating the Cowtown Guest Ranch near Ramsey, N. J. Biron is an all-around “cow hand”—bronco buster, trick rider, wild-steer bulldogger. As a trick-rider and trick-roper champion he has his picture in the cowboy halls of fame from coast to coast.
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He’s the Audubon of the Automobile
C. P. Hornung stalks the rare and early birds of motordom and draws their portraits.
By George H. Waltz Jr.
AMERICANS scarcely knew one bird from another, unless they were edible, until John James Audubon painted their portraits, exact to the tiniest speckled feather.
Now a whole generation of car-loving Americans is getting acquainted with the gaudy and gleaming automobiles of the past—some of them very rare birds indeed—because a modern Audubon is drawing painstakingly authentic pictures of them.
Clarence P. Hornung of New York City, whose gallery of America’s earliest cars already includes 75 portraits, didn’t take up the hobby that has become his booming business until 1949. Until then he was an industrial artist and specialist in creating trademarks and package designs.
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On Trial . . . America’s First Jetliner
By A. M. “Tex” Johnston
Chief of Flight Test, Boeing
as told to Thomas E. Stimson, Jr.
CRASH BOATS are standing by off Mercer Island!” “All airports in vicinity of Seattle are closed to normal traffic!” “Rescue helicopter now on patrol off Seward Park!” “Fire fighters standing by!” “Your chase plane is airborne!”
Reports like these were part of the pre-flight preparations in July when copilot “Dix” Loesch and I prepared to streak down the concrete runway at Renton Airport and lift the prototype of America’s first jetliner into the air on its initial test flight.
Boeing’s 707 “Jet Stratotanker-Strato-liner” is considered the safest passenger transport ever built, yet Dix and I were happy about the elaborate precautions to rescue us if anything went wrong. All our recent preflight and ground tests had been perfect. We were expecting a normal routine ride on the first flight, but there’s always a chance that the unexpected can happen.
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