This shows you how fast technology can change. Only 36 years after this article declared that a trip to the moon was “apparently impossible”, Neil Armstrong actually walked on it.
GETTING More LIGHT On the Moon
By Calvin Frazer
IT IS unwise to dogmatize about the future, and hence a cautious man of science “would hardly make the positive assertion that human beings will never visit the moon, though the difficulties involved in such a journey now appear insuperable. On the other hand it is quite safe to assert that, without leaving his own planet, man will learn much more about the earth’s satellite in days to come than he knows today. This expectation is based upon the remarkable progress accomplished in the study of the moon in recent years.
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And for the next 60 years, every desk in America would have a Rolodex.
Filing Cabinet on Wheels
THE last word in filing convenience is offered in a new revolving card file recently placed on the market. Compact, time-saving, the file turns at a touch of the finger and displays 1000 cards attached to ring. Manufacturers claim the system is speedy.
I can’t imagine why these didn’t take off. That monorail train looks utterly stable to me! Not to mention the plane stabilized by a pendulum.
Vehicle Oddities
Boynton Bicycle Locomotive built in 1889 was tested in Gravesend, Brooklyn, on one overhead and one ground rail. Arrangement was supposed to reduce weight, friction and save power on curves.
Bicycle Airship designed to fly in any direction was the fantastic brainchild of Herman Rieckert in 1889. Bicycle apparatus in pilothouse flapped side and center wings, providing motive power.
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This computer contains 13,000 relays, each rated to perform for at least 100 million operations. If the transistors in your CPU were this reliable it would last less than 100 milliseconds.
Inside the Biggest Man-made Brain
Navy’s new calculator has steel bones, silver nerves, paper impulses, and can make mistakes.
By Stephen L. Freeland
THE LARGEST brain in the world today is a mammoth electrical mathematician being built at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory for the U. S. Navy Proving Grounds at Dahlgren, Va. But its reign as king of the robots will be brief.
Work already has begun on faster, better calculators based on the lessons learned in creating this machine, known as the Dahlgren Calculator, or Mark II, just as this one was designed to be the big, tough brother of Mark I, which was built for Harvard during the war by the International Business Machines Corp. (PSM, Oct. ‘44, p. 86). Mark II, however, will not be retired. Even Mark I has many years of useful labor ahead. There is plenty of work waiting for all the big calculators now in existence and on the drawing boards. Mark I is still churning out answers to abstruse mathematical problems 24 hours a day, and Mark II will be taken to Virginia next month to begin an equally strenuous career.
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I don’t really see how these do anything other than make you look like a cool character from a Terry Gilliam film.
TINY GLASSES SHIELD EYES FROM GLARE
To reduce the blinding glare of approaching automobile headlights, a novel eye shield has recently been introduced. Strapped to a band worn about the head, a metal frame extends from the forehead and holds two ovals of amber glass in front of the eyes, where they are normally just out of range of direct vision. A slight turn of the head places the glass ovals between the eyes and the rays of oncoming car lights.
