Electricity Frisks Mattress
IF PRISONERS in the Joliet and Stateville, Ill., penitentiaries should hide pistols, knives or saws in their mattresses, this machine will detect them. It is wheeled around the prison, and every mattress is subjected to its scrutiny once a day.

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When Dust Explodes

As destructive as a racketeer’s bomb, combustible dust exacts its toll of business.

by Volta Torrey

HAUNTING America’s castles—those gigantic, concrete structures dotting the shipping terminals—is a public enemy more deadly than all the ghosts of all the medieval citadels known to man.

“Combustible dust” is the name of this insidious foe. It lurks in 28,000 elevators, mills, factories and warehouses, a constant menace to the lives of 1,325,000 Americans and $10,000,000,000 worth of property. It explodes with more destructive violence than a gangster’s bomb, haunts industry more persistently than its many victims’ ghosts, and mocks inventors’ efforts to circumvent, ensnare or confine it.
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LATEST HELICOPTER MAKES FLIGHT

THE latest in the helicopter type of flying machine made its initial flight a short time ago when it remained in the air for 1 minute 40 seconds and reached a height of 8 feet. In several later ascensions the machine, carrying two passengers, rose 3 feet above the ground. Helicopters continue to attract considerable attention on account of their ability to rise vertically from the ground and to land in a small area. While the height attained by this helicopter may not seem very impressive, it can be argued that the first trial trip of the Wrights lasted only 59 seconds. The machine was built at McCook field under the supervision of the inventor, Dr. Geo. de Bothezat, a Russian scientist. It is equipped with four lifting propellers, each having six blades and a diameter of 10 feet, and it has provision for flying horizontally. The machine measures 60 feet from tip to tip and has a total lifting capacity of nearly 4,000 pounds.

This later became LaGuardia Airport

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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.

GALOSHES FASTENED WITH KEY THAT LOCKS ROWS OF TEETH
Galoshes are being made to fasten with two rows of metal teeth that lock together as a “key” is pulled across them. It is claimed that this method permits the overshoe to be adjusted in a few seconds and leaves a smooth surface with no buttons or buckles. When the footgear is to be removed, a downward stroke of the fastener separates the two edges. Closing tighter than the ordinary galoshes, cold and moisture are said to have little chance to penetrate to the inside. The key is concealed under the folding top of the boot.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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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Huge Pencil That Cannot Get Lost Also Has an Easy Grip

For the use of editors, writers, business men and others whose desks are covered with letters and manuscripts, a pencil so
large that it can always be readily found when hidden under a mass of papers, has been introduced by a European manufacturer. Because of its size, one end generally projects when lying under a heap of correspondence. Should it, however, become entirely buried, i t s location can be quickly detected by passing the hand over the desk, when the thick shaft will be distinctly felt. About twice the length of an ordinary pencil, it has a correspondingly greater diameter, affording a good grip. The lead is of such ample size that it does not have to be sharpened frequently.

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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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Photo Lens Registers Rays Predating Dinosaurs

BELIEVED by its makers to be the fastest in the world, a new astronomical photographic lens has been used at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, Calif., for taking pictures of light rays which, scientists claim, left distant stars before dinosaurs trod the earth. In conjunction with the 100-inch reflector at Mt. Wilson, the new lens has photographed spectra of nebulae 30,000 times fainter than the faintest star visible to the unaided eye.

Dr. M. L. Humason, who conducted the Mt. Wilson Observatory tests, reported that the speed of the observatory’s spectrograph was doubled through use of the new lens, which has a speed of F. 0.59. Astronomical data placed the nebulae observed by Dr. Humason as being an estimated distance of 80 million light years from the earth. Through use of the new lens, scientists can now observe faint objects which have previously been deemed hopeless from an astronomical viewpoint, according to Dr. Humason.