It’s really amazing how much these pictures look like the modern music visualizers in WinAmp or iTunes.

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Music Is Turned Into Glowing Color

Soundless Symphonies from Keys of “Organ” Projected on Screen Are Hailed as Birth of a New Art

THE audience sat in hushed and wondering expectancy within the darkened theater. Without accompaniment of sound, soft color suddenly glowed upon the screen. Slowly it moved into definite form, its modulation of figures evolving in majestic sweeps. Its hue deepened and then melted radiantly into iridescent crimson, and from the restless, ever-changing shapes a slow rhythm was born. It grew and blossomed, a symphony of light, plastic and mobile. The “clavilux,” as Thomas Wilfred, the inventor, has named the organ, opens the door to a new art, the expression of moving color and form, which the artist-craftsman believes is destined to take a place as a sister of music and sculpture. It has long been the vision of dreamers; Mr. Wilfred has actualized the dream and provided the instrument that visualizes it.
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‘49 Uranium Rush

PROFESSIONAL and amateur prospectors by the thousands are literally leaving no stone unturned in the great uranium rush of ‘49. The ores which yield atomic energy are being sought in every part of North America.

Excited by reports of government rewards, many of the prospectors are wasting their time in localities where uranium of worthwhile quality can hardly be expected to be found, though there is always a chance that someone may upset the convictions of mining engineers by making a “strike” in a new region.

The Atomic Energy Commission wants to see samples of any ores suspected of containing valuable amounts of radioactive materials, but prospectors are urged to make reasonable tests of their samples before submitting them. Misinformed or overly enthusiastic people have submitted hundreds of samples of worthless rocks, including ordinary concrete, to the commission.
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This was a total revolution. You really don’t want to know where they held their cigarettes before this was invented.

Cigarette Holder for Nudists
Faced with the problem of carrying cigarettes when no pockets were available, a delegate to a recent nudist convention devised the holder shown at right. The leather case is strapped to the leg by means of an elastic band.

Three-Wheeled Auto Makes Speed with Low Fuel Cost
Resembling a tiny inclosed model, a three-wheeled automobile designed in Germany has a closed top and doors like bigger cars. Although the vehicle does not consume much fuel, it is said to attain a speed of ten miles an hour on good roads. Its size enables it to be operated where more cumbersome machines might find difficult traveling. It is claimed that, owing to the small size of the car, the government places no tax on it and permits its use without a driver’s license.

I wonder what kind of “comfort and entertainment” the provided to “seaman strangers”…

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“THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SEA”

By LAWRENCE Wm. PEDROSE

FOR the purpose of making more comfortable and pleasant the hours spent in their home ports by the masters, mates, and pilots of the Pacific, and developing radio broadcasting to their ships while at sea, wives, daughters, and sweethearts of manners living at Seattle have formed an organization called the “Daughters of the Sea.”

The Daughters of the Sea plan to bring the home closer to the ship, and the radio will be their chief means toward that end. The club has undertaken the fitting up of quarters on the top floor of one of the city’s tall buildings, and is furnishing them with a library, comfortable chairs, smoking accessories, and marine glasses, so that seafarers may watch from the windows the ships making and leaving port.
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Surprising Tests WITH Household AMMONIA

Simple Experiments and Home-made Apparatus Extend Your Knowledge and Speed the Work You Can Accomplish in Your Own Laboratory

by Raymond B. Wailes

IT IS surprising what the amateur chemist can do with a fifteen-cent bottle of ordinary household ammonia.

Being a mixture of ammonia dissolved in water, this pungent-smelling liquid offers an ever-ready supply of ammonia gas for the home laboratory. Even at room temperature, the gas is released from the liquid. By heating it, the experimenter can obtain the gas in larger quantities.

Strictly speaking, household ammonia is not ammonia at all, but ammonia water or ammonium hydroxide. Although ammonia can be liquefied, it is a colorless gas at normal temperatures. The fact that it dissolves readily in water makes the manufacture of ammonia water possible.
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Pointer
The Laser Pointer projects a visible bright red spot of light several hundred feet under normal lighting conditions-great for lecturers with slides. The $800 helium-neon laser has an output of 0.5 mW—not enough to harm eyes or body, says RMF Products, Box 413, Batavia, III., 60510.

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Building Dreams of Steel In San Francisco Bay

by C.W. Geiger

They said it couldn’t be done—span the Bay and Golden Gate with bridges, but San Francisco did it And threw in a great Exposition to boot. This story tells how the impossible is accomplished.

THE intricate and wondrously knit glittering spans of the world’s two greatest bridges across the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay, and a magic isle of Atlantis—dripping with all the miracles of an international exposition, is what San Francisco is preparing for your coming in 1938-39.

The site of the Exposition lies in the white-capped San Francisco-Oakland Bay area, midway between the two cities, on shoal land located just north of the adjoining Yerba Buena Island. And this year 385 acres of shoal will be filled in to provide the site for the Exposition. By the end of 1936, when the fill is completed, architectural plans for the buildings will also be finished, so that actual construction will begin with 1937.
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Whew! It’s difficult to imagine how the army could defend us with out using Polo. I assume West Point now has some ten-million dollar, full immersion 3D polo simulator to keep our boys at peak polo readiness.

Wooden Horses Help Army Cadets Learn How to Play Polo

“Saddled” and- “bridled” a wooden horse is used by West Point cadets to practice on when they begin learning how to play polo. Tne “animal” is braced securely to the wooden floor in the center of an inclosure surrounded by wire netting. To keep the balls within striking distance at all times, the sides of the cage slope toward the center.

AUTOGIRO HALTS FLEEING ‘BANDIT’ CAR

To test an autogiro in a motor bandit chase, a driverless car recently was sent speeding across a field near Bryn Athyn, Pa. A windmill plane took off in pursuit, carrying Chief of Police Theodore Hollowell. Using a sub-machine gun, as at left, he peppered the car until a direct hit disabled it. Tracer bullets set the car afire. The end of the chase is shown below, with the autogiro about to land.

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How Modern Surgeons Conquer Fatal Germs

By Frederic Damrau, M.D.

A SMALL item recently appeared in the newspapers. It reported a new ruling of the American College of Surgeons. In the future, all surgical thread must be tested thirteen days instead of six to insure its freedom from germs. That tiny item was buried in the back pages of the papers. Few people read it. Yet, behind it lies one of the most thrilling chapters in the whole dramatic story of death-fighting by surgery.

Less than seventy years ago, such a simple operation as the amputation of a finger was a life and death matter. In one famous European hospital, eleven out of seventeen amputations resulted in death from blood poison. Germs of infection were unsuspected. Sterilization, as we know it today, was unknown. Antiseptics were undreamed of. Doctors knew little about infection and were helpless before it. It was not until after the Civil War, that antiseptics first appeared and revolutionized the science of surgery.
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X-Rays of Criminals’ Skulls May Replace Fingerprints

SCIENTISTS have worked out a sure means of identification of people that may some day replace fingerprinting. Scotland Yard and the U. S. Secret Service have shown interest in the method.

Already a number of instances are known where criminals have mutilated their fingertips.

According to Dr. Thomas A. Poole of Washington, the frontal sinuses of each individual, located just above the nose, are different. X-ray plate shows up these individual peculiarities.