Lindy’s Invention Perfects the Mechanical Man
Lindbergh’s new “mechanical heart” calls attention to the fact that medical science even now has marvelous machines which will replace parts of the human body or do the work of parts that fail.
by RAYMOND L. BOWER
MEDICAL science has machines that will breathe for you, talk for you, hear for you, eat for you, circulate your blood—and even sweat for you—if you should ever happen to need them. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, a mechanical genius as well as a great aviator, has recently constructed a “mechanical heart” by means of which vital organs can be kept alive outside the body for months and probably years. So far, of course, only animals have been used in the experiments with the mechanical heart conducted at the Rockefeller Institute by the famous medical research man and Nobel prize winner, Alexis Carrel.
To Lindbergh goes the credit for another piece of scientific apparatus, a blood testing device which operates on the same principle that keeps a ball suspended in midair by the force below a spray of water.
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Rare-Stamp Racketeers Thwarted by Black Light
By Edwin Teak
IN THE palm of his hand, not long ago, an eastern dealer held two carmine and blue postage stamps. One was worth 50,000 times its weight in gold. The other was worth no more than a scrap of paper. Yet, even under a high-powered magnifying glass, he could detect no difference. Only rays of black light, coming from a quartz lamp in his laboratory, had disclosed an amazingly delicate operation performed by stamp surgeons of the underworld.
The original was a rare 1918 twenty-four-cent airmail stamp with an inverted center. Less than one hundredth the size of this page, it was worth $3,300. An ordinary stamp of the issue, with center right-side-up, can be purchased for as little as a dollar and a quarter. Rare-stamp racketeers had bought two ordinary stamps and had combined them to produce a fake stamp with an inverted center.
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From Cook Stoves to Tanks . . . They Roll from the Automobile Factories
By SCHUYLER VAN DUYNE
THE Detroit genius for industrial organization is sorting out the sudden chaotic avalanche of defense orders with its customary frantic and incredible orderliness. It is responding to the fabulous impetus of something like a billion and a half in armament orders assigned by the U. S. Government to the automobile industry. The vast industrial center, already a huge magnet, drawing raw materials and manufactured parts selectively from many parts of the country, is being called upon suddenly for all its reserve power. Its standard products, such as automobiles, trucks, and their accessories, were in extraordinary de-mand, but now there are imperative pleas also for airplane, marine, and tank engines; for the airplanes and the tanks themselves and for antiaircraft guns, cook stoves, ammunition components, refrigerators, Diesel engines, and a conglomeration of other articles.
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What movie does this remind you of?
Piano Students Use Giant Keyboard
WHEN Arthur Zahorik, a high-school music teacher in Milwaukee, Wis., tells a student to “run up the scales” he means it literally. For on the classroom floor stands a two-octave model of a giant piano keyboard, with white keys a foot wide, upon which students step to demonstrate their mastery of chords and scales. Each of the keys is actually a treadle which, when depressed, closes an electrical contact, causing a metal rod to strike a tuned metal plate and sound the correct note.
