This later became LaGuardia Airport
New York Builds Big Airport for Land and Sea Plane Service
REACHED from the heart of the metropolis by a 28-minute drive over a route which crosses the famous Triborough Bridge and leads to the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, North Beach Airport in the Queens section of New York, N. Y., is being enlarged in area from 105 acres to 429 acres and will be provided with every facility for the handling of giant transcontinental and transoceanic air liners. Exclusive of land, the construction cost of the enlarged airport will represent a cost of about 12 million dollars.
The completed airport, as shown in the artist’s sketch at left, will feature four main runways, one of which will be 4,160 feet long, to accommodate land planes while a vast seaplane basin will provide landing and takeoff facilities for flying “clippers.” Plans for the reconstruction of the airport were prepared by engineers of the Works Progress Administration in co-operation with the city’s Department of Docks. The airport’s hangars and administration buildings will represent the latest ideas in airport architecture.
If the A-Bombs Burst
Here is what to expect, what you can do today to prepare yourself, what you can do then to survive
By Clifford B. Hicks
8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. A single plane flies over the city. The only warning is a blinding flash of light. A ball of fire explodes in the sky, hanging there for a moment as it grows in size and fury. Then in a crackling instant the world’s second atomic explosion races down to strike the earth at a spot called Hiroshima.
Sixty seconds later 70,000 Japanese are dead, caught above ground. The heart of the city has been blasted into rubble which still plummets down on the dead and dying.
10:15 a.m., January 2, 1950. A stenographer in Manhattan shrugs her shoulders over her mid-morning cup of coffee and says to her girl friend, “I’m tellin’ you, there’s nothing you can do to save yourself —just one bomb will wipe out New York. Me, I’m headin’ for the country if things get worse.”
At the same moment the sky above Chicago’s Loop is split by a bright flash of lightning from a sudden winter storm. A nervous executive freezes in terror for an instant, then smiles sheepishly as he returns to the morning mail. But he can’t help wondering whether the bomb would demolish his home and kill his family in a suburb 14 miles away.
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Homemade Tractor Has One Wheel
WITH a power plant that is suspended securely inside of a big ring-shaped wheel, a garden tractor has been built largely from odds and ends by R. D. Read of Akron, Ohio. It operates like the unicycle automobile developed in England. (P.S.M. May, ‘32, p. 63.) A single-cylinder motorcycle engine was used without modification except for the installation of an additional gear for cranking, and a planetary type clutch operated from the plow handle.
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AUTO ON SKIS RACES OVER SNOW AT 100 MILES AN HOUR
When snow-blocked roads hindered Father Frank Nestor, of Cando, N. D., from visiting his outlying parishes during the winter months, he determined to build a machine that would be proof against unfavorable weather. An opportunity came to purchase a good 100-horsepower airplane engine secondhand, and around this Father Nestor constructed the remarkable air-propelled vehicle that he calls his “snow-boat.” On packed snow or ice the slender streamlined vehicle can travel at a speed of 100 miles an hour.
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Auto Stealing Now $50,000,000-a-Year RACKET
By Edwin Teale
A BLUE roadster, traveling at high speed, rounded a curve outside a New Jersey town and apparently vanished into thin air.
Five minutes later, two motorcycle cops, flattened against whizzing machines, raced around the corner, flashed past a lumbering furniture van and headed after the stolen car. Without knowing it, they had already passed it. Snugly housed within the big van, the roadster was already the center of attention of a corps of experts. License plates were being shifted; wire wheels were being substituted for wooden ones; gray, quick-drying paint was being applied to hood and body.
A hundred miles away, across the state line, the van stopped, A light steel runway slid to the ground from the rear of the truck and a gray roadster, with wire wheels and Pennsylvania license plates, rolled to the pavement ready for sale to an unsuspecting buyer. The latest trick of a motor-stealing mob had worked and the police were baffld.
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