$15,000 Auto: good things may come in small packages—but they also seem to come at high prices. This little Ferrari has a 12-cylinder motor which develops 140 hp. It’s the first of its kind to be imported from Milan, Italy.
That shoe tester looks like it has been taken right out of a Rube Goldberg contraption.
Torture Tests Tell The Truth
Ingenious Machines in the National Bureau of Standards help bring to light unknown facts about peas, pants, pots and paints.
by James N. Miller
EVERY time you visit the dentist, break in a pair of new shoes, buy an electric light bulb, heat your home, drive an automobile, wind your watch or weigh your groceries, you are directly or indirectly affected by the work of scientists located in an enormous network of laboratories in an obscure section of Washington, D. C. This is the National Bureau of Standards, where a group of technical men seem to live in a complicated mechanical world that appears far afield from that of Mr. Average American Citizen. This Bureau of Standards, without the slightest exaggeration, is the nation’s and probably the world’s, greatest quality testing laboratory. Every day, in almost every conceivable way, it performs monumental tasks which help make life healthier, safer, happier, more comfortable and more convenient for every one of us.
Why Don’t We Build… Voice Bombs
Dropped from bombers over hostile territory, midget tape recorders suspended from balloons could speak messages of propaganda directly to enemy soldiers.
By Robert Hertzberg
IT is an hour before dawn. Exhausted from long nights and days of continual battle, enemy troops are enjoying a brief respite, sleeping fitfully in their foxholes.
Suddenly the night air is shattered by a voice thundering from above. In a few minutes hiding places are emptied as the bewildered soldiers, startled into alertness, seek to identify this strange, new apparition. They listen as the voice speaks in their native tongue.
“Oppressed citizens of the dictatorship, this is the voice of friends advising you to surrender. Unless you turn on the cruel masters who forced you into a senseless war—unless you lay down the arms you have taken up against us—we will be forced to destroy you with our superior numbers and deadly weapons. Be smart—live! You outnumber your superiors a hundred to one—obey their treacherous orders no longer! Surrender! You will be treated fairly …”
How to Dream Up a Car
The creation of Pontiac’s Club de Mer dream car took years of work.
PONTIAC’S Club de Mer is the stuff that dreams are made of—dreams that result from years of painstaking planning and hard work by stylists and engineers at GM’s lush new Technical Center. A dream car begins when vice-president in charge of styling, Harley Earl, and other top executives decide what type of car is to be created. In
the case of the Club de Mer, the brass wanted a racing car which would embody comfort, safety, performance and beauty—all in one sleek package.
Once the goal is set, Paul Gillan, boss of the Pontiac Styling Studio, and his staff go to work. Drawings of the proposed car are made by the thousands. No idea is too radical, no design too extreme. These drawings are then sifted by top experts and a basic design incorporating many features from the sketches decided upon. Then back to the drawing board for a final sketch. When this has been approved, a life-size rendering in color is made to show exactly how the completed car will look.
Next the basic car body is made of wood laths around which a clay shell is built. The metal or Fiberglas mold for the finished car will come from this.
While you won’t be able to buy the Club de Mer, the design and engineering features in it will help to set the standards for the car you will buy sometime in the future.
This is a wonderful ad. You see, hunting is not about quantity, it’s about quality. Quality mounting that is. And this guy Jack, well it’s nothing but quality for him. Just look at his beautiful living room. Is that a leopard on his mantle? You bet it it is! A baby leopard at that! And, is that rabbit actually firing a rifle? That Jack, what a kidder! On the other side of the mantle, what is that? A meerkat? Lemur? Guessing is all part of the fun with taxidermy!
Don’t forget to make your very own squirrel lighter. Nothing says pleasure like lighting your pipe with a dead rodent!
Fred’s Workshop Now Brings New Pleasure and Profit. He Learned Taxidermy - You Can also - Send this Coupon for free book
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Builds Giant Television Tube
DESCRIBED as the “Big Bertha” of cathode ray tubes, a new television tube developed by Allen B. DuMont, of Montclair, N. J., has a diameter of 13-1/2 inches. The largest tubes heretofore available for oscillograph work have been of a 9-inch diameter. The new television tube is distinguished by its rounded sides, which provide the necessary added strength to withstand the atmospheric pressure on the highly evacuated glass bulb of the tube.
Thermos Container Insures Constant Milk Temperature
Placed over a bottle of milk at the time of its delivery to a customer’s home, a thermos-type container produced by a California manufacturer is said to keep the milk at its delivery time temperature indefinitely. A simple release lever on the top of the container locks or unlocks the bottle.
No Scents in this Business
By Thomas K. Worcester
Colorado couple earns up to $3,000 a year in novel sideline of raising skunks to sell as pets.
SKUNK pelts bring good money but a Lyons, Col. couple finds that the fur sells better when attached to live animals.
Through a venture which started as a small sideline business, Ken and Ardetta Barris now raise more than 100 skunklets a year for sale as pets to motorists who stop at their farm on the road to Colorado’s famous Rocky Mountain National Park. Ken and Ardetta became interested in skunk-raising several years ago after reading an article on profitable “polecat” culture.
In 1951 the Barrises ordered two pre-bred female skunks from a commercial breeding farm. That year, and every year since, they have been able to sell all the skunks they could raise.
Batteries of Robots Scoop Power From Sea With Shovels
A ROBOT wave motor designed to use the tremendous unharnessed power of waves at sea for generating eleetric power at low cost has been invented by Chester E. Shuler of Los Angeles.
Robot-like machines built in the sea on concrete foundations have huge metal shovel arms which are lifted upward by onrushing waves. The counter-balanced arms drive electric dynamos through speed-multiplying gears, so that a small movement of the arms spins the generators at high speed. Ratchets permit the shovels to drop down freely as the waves pass on, to be in readiness for following waves.
When a battery of these machines are installed to be operated together, the shovel arms are all inter-connected and belted to huge flywheels either on shore or in a powerhouse built in the ocean. Each on-rushing wave lifting the shovels would give a new impulse to the flywheels. The dynamos could thus run at almost constant speed.
MAIL PLANE TO BE LAUNCHED IN MID AIR
THE modern demand for long range flying at high cruising speeds has presented a take-off problem for highly loaded airplanes. As one solution to the problem, Major Robert Mayo, of England, has designed a composite aircraft, which consists of a small, fast, heavily-loaded seaplane mounted atop a huge, lightly loaded seaplane, the larger plane serving to carry the smaller one aloft to an altitude of about 10,000 feet before launching it.
The powerful four-engined lower component of the Mayo Composite Aircraft, as the novel craft is officially named, is equipped with a special strut-type structure to which the smaller, but heavily loaded, seaplane is firmly attached. Until the actual planned separation of the two aircraft has been made in mid-air, the controls of the smaller plane are locked to prevent a premature launching.
The combined wing area of the small and large seaplanes enables a take-off to be made from the water with a minimum run. Use of the larger seaplane as the launching medium enables the smaller plane to be loaded to its maximum of 20,500 pounds (mail, cargo and fuel), providing a cruising range of about 3,800 miles at 180 m.p.h., which will enable the mail carrying plane to fly non-stop from Southampton, England, to New York, N. Y. Trial flights of the composite aircraft are now being conducted and on the cover of this issue a Modern Mechanix artist has depicted the aerial launching as it will appear to observers.
Amazing Miniature Machine Successfully Makes Paper
FROM crude pulp to the unwinding of the finished rolls, this miniature paper-making machine is complete in every amazing detail.
A beater first cuts the pulp to shreds. The mass is then impregnated with 99 percent water and is passed over various screens and between rollers to shape the paper and eliminate moisture.
Sixteen feet long and two feet high, the machine turns out a four-inch roll of paper three feet long every minute. In comparison Modern Mechanix and Inventions uses enough paper in a year to cover a sidewalk 5000 miles in length.
RUBBER SLAPPER OUSTS THE POLICEMAN’S CLUB
Rubber slappers have taken the place of wooden clubs familiarly known as billies, in the hands of Indianapolis police. Invented by Chief of Police Michael Mor-risey, of that city, the new weapon is a flat, heavy block of rubber with a slot for the fingers It is declared more humane and fully as effective as a club, for it can deliver a stunning blow without drawing blood or cracking a rioter’s skull. In the photograph above, an officer compares the slapper with the stick formerly carried.
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