Wow, that is pretty tiny!
Battery-Operated Hearing Aid Is Easily Concealed
SO SMALL that it can be effectively concealed while in use, as shown in the photo at right, a newly developed battery-operated hearing aid is actually a miniature telephone of the most improved type. The device has an efficient “transmitter” which picks up sound waves regardless of whether the wearer is reclining, sitting or standing.
This article is an exploration of the changes that will be brought on by the rise of solid-state electronics. The author does a very good job extrapolating what will be possible, with very few of the flights of fancy such as flying cars and domed cities that are common to articles of this genre. Almost every product he discusses is available now.
People do have video crib monitors, solar panels are available, but are not quite efficient enough to power a house, as he predicted. Video phones are only now really practical because of the bandwidth limitations spelled out in the article. We don’t have ultrasonic washing machines in our houses, but ultrasonics are used in a number of areas for cleaning. We do (did) rent movies for our color VCRs, and there are megahertz range computers managing very complicated factory production with very little human intervention. Not to mention touch tone phones and microwave ovens. Plus, if you showed that picture of a flat screen tv on the first page to someone without any context they’d probably guess that someone had hacked an LCD monitor to look all “retro”. By the way, if you’re interested in flat screen TVs, you should check out this one from 1958.
I’ve actually been wanting to post this article for a few years. When I was posting this piece about a pocket transistor radio, I noticed that the author used the word “stereatronics”, which I’d never heard. I googled it and found the complete text of this article, with no pictures, here. After reading it I learned that stereatronics was a word created for this article, which they hoped would catch on. It didn’t. I thought it would be perfect to post to the site, so I tracked down a copy. Then when I got it I realized that Colliers magazine was 11×14″ and I couldn’t fit it on my scanner. However, I recently bought an 11×17″ scanner for the site, and so here it is.
Stereatronics - A New Science that Will Change Your Way of Life
Tiny solids are turning the electronics industry upside down. Some vibrate, others change light to energy or energy to light, or direct current to alternating. Together, they spell revolution
A NEW science, stereatronics, has been creeping up on us in the last few years and has started to make major changes in the way we live. Few of us have noticed any difference; the changes have come so quietly that even many of the people who are closest to the new science are surprised at what it has been doing. Yet the evidences have been all about us.
—Television sets are a great deal less expensive now than they were a relatively few months ago.
—More and more tape recorders are being sold. Five years back, they were too costly for most people. Ten years ago, they weren’t to be had at any price.
This family gives new meaning to the term “early adopter”. Though at $7.50 an hour ($40 in 2007 dollars) it would almost be cheaper to send the kid to a casino to play blackjack.
The Handy Uses of a Home Computer
* Planning a dinner menu
* Balancing bank accounts
* Doing school homework
* Figuring out income tax
* Printing invitations
* Keeping the budgetComputers for the home have been envisioned by science fiction writers and engineers ever since a huge, unwieldy prototype was developed 25 years ago. The whole futuristic age they prophesied, with an omnipotent electronic monster named Horace in every living room, is still a long way from realization, but compact consumer computers have quietly entered the household. While the market hardly rivals TV sets or refrigerators, the computer-as-home-appliance is now more than just a toy for the wealthy or a mysterious instrument for technical specialists.
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I found this magazine on eBay. I thought that the author was this Arthur Miller. An article about the personal privacy threats inherent in massive government databases, written by the author of the Crucible sounded amazing. It turns out that the author was actually this Arthur Miller, and I don’t think anyone could have done a better job.
This is the most amazingly prescient article I’ve ever read. When people write about the future they are usually wrong. When people write about the future of computers, they are usually even more wrong. This article got everything right. If you changed the tense and a few bits of jargon, then handed to me and told me it was written by the EFF, I’d believe it.
Just to give you an idea of how right he was on even the basic computer stuff, here’s the second paragraph of the article. Keep in mind that this is what desktop computers looked like in 1967.
“The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.”
Forty-one years ago Arthur R. Miller laid out all of the privacy threats that we face now. The power that credit reporting databases have over us. The illegal government use of our financial and phone records. The attempt to build a master database tying all of these together. The fact that the government might consider you a threat if you so much as sent a Christmas card to someone the government has on a watch list. It’s all here. He basically predicted and laid out all of the arguments against the Total Information Awareness program and the current NSA programs that have been so much in the news.
It’s nice to know there were people who were so ahead of the curve in trying to protect our rights, and it’s a tragedy that more people didn’t listen. I think it speaks strongly to the need to pay attention to this stuff now, because this problem will only get worse.
THE NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND PERSONAL PRIVACY
by ARTHUR R. MILLER
The computer age is not to be stayed, as anyone knows who has been billed for another citizen’s charge account or has wondered what has happened to his paid-up magazine subscription. The computer science is already so advanced that experts envisage a huge National Data Center to speed and simplify the collection of pertinent information about Americans. Properly run, it could be a boon. But any person who has seen an FBI file or been party to a U.S. government “security check” has reason to know how the abuse or misuse of dossiers of unevaluated information can threaten an individual’s rights. A professor of law at the University of Michigan here discusses the precautions necessary to protect citizens from “governmental snooping and bureaucratic spinelessness or perfidy.”
For some reason, this strikes me as looking amazingly modern.
Animated Statue Smiles and Displays Her Dimples
ALMOST human is “SHE,” work of Courtenay Pollock, well known sculptor of London. With the aid of a small electric motor, “SHE” is smiling, coy, demure, or scornful as her master wills. Rolling her eyes about in an enchanting manner, she even displays a lovely set of dimples.
This “living” model is on display in one of the leading department stores of London. A cordon of police are required to keep the crowd moving and traffic clear in the streets.
They certainly got this one right.
CORN SUGAR IS MADE CHEAPLY TO COMPETE WITH CANE
Corn sugar, that costs no more than cane, has been turned out by a process developed by H. C. Gore, a department of agriculture chemist. It is said that the product can be melted and cast into molds, like the fondant made from cane or beet sugar, and used in the candy industry. The operation involves no unusual equipment, and consists essentially of mashing cornstarch, or hominy, with malt, which liquefies the product.
Robot Engine Built in Japan Is Driven by Remote Control
Automatic train control is understood to be a feature of a mysterious robot locomotive model built in Japan. Streamlined, but of a design unlike any conventional locomotive, the details of its mechanism have not been revealed. It is believed, however, that it will be operated electrically by remote control and will be equipped with a braking mechanism which will stop it automatically if the rails ahead become dangerous.
Compton gives a nice history of the rise of American science and engineering prowess as well as making some pretty good predictions here.
Some answers to this question seem clear, and others seem very uncertain. It is safe to predict that the 2002 person will be clothed with synthetic textiles which will not fade, shrink or wrinkle and in which the desired creases will stay put. Atomic energy will be in use for special, but not for general, power purposes. Gasoline will be coming more from oil shale than from oil wells, and may be already produced commercially from coal. Cancer may then be as well under control as tuberculosis is now. Television may have proved to be an instrument to perpetuate dictatorship, or to make the democratic process more effective, depending on the trends of control and public concern.
Cancer is certainly not under control, though we do have much better treatments and shale oil is only now starting to take off but he nailed clothes, atomic power and TV.
As an aside; the design of this article is really nice, however, for people who are supposed to predict the future I wish the PM’s designers would have shown a little consideration for schmucks like me who have to scan their articles. Why didn’t they realize that putting an illustration of balloons behind the text of the article would play havoc with my already finicky OCR software? (Lest you think I’m picking on PM, Modern Mechanix also had a nasty habit of doing this.
SCIENCE ON THE MARCH
By Dr. Karl T. ComptonChairman of the Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology THE AMERICAN TRADITION of mechanical skill and inventiveness, often called “Yankee Ingenuity,” goes far back of the turn of this century. It grew out of the challenge of pioneer life to a people of high native intelligence engaged in forging a new way of life in an environment of rich but undeveloped resources. But our development of scientific knowledge and its useful applications is, despite a few notable predecessors like Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Henry and Thomas Edison, essentially an achievement of the last 50 years.
What they don’t mention is that the fellow in the picture is named Marcus Googlethorpe.
“QUESTION SHOP” GIVES ANSWER TO ANY TELEPHONED QUERY
Offering to answer any reasonable question telephoned to its office, a firm dealing in general information is said to have set up business in New York City. Subscribers to the service are permitted to put as many queries to the “question shop” as they desire. Each patron is given a code name and. it is reported, can receive aid from the station at any hour of the day or night. It is also claimed that eighty per cent of the queries do not require more than two minutes for an answer.
DOES GRASS HOLD SECRET of HIDDEN POWER?
“BOSS KET”
Charles F. Kettering, known as “Boss Ket” to his fellow workers, is chiefly interested in finding the answers to unanswered questions. Two of the foremost that have puzzled him are: “Why is grass green?” and “Why can we see through a pane of glass?”
Head of the General Motors Research Corporation, “Boss Ket” devotes practically all his time to research, to discovering how it can be done when experts and formulas say “It can’t be done.”
Using offshore systems to subvert a communication network to deliver ads for gambling, controlled substances and quack cures. Sure sounds like spam to me.
OUTLAWS MAY USE SUPER-STATIONS at Sea
Broadcasting stations without a country seek new ways to flood the United States with radio advertising barred by federal commission. Two hundred outlaws face war by the government.
by MURPHY McHENRY
RADIO circles on the Pacific Coast were turned topsy turvy not long ago by the; continued presence of a radio pirate ship which had taken unto itself a very popular spot on the dial and started broadcasting without regard for the land stations with which it interfered.
The primary purpose of the unlicensed broadcast station was to advertise the gambling, liquor, and other dubious pleasure activities of the ship upon which it was built—all these activities beyond the 12-mile limit, of course. Thousands responded to the advertising and the owners waxed rich. They found other sundry rackets, such as a fortune telling program, which brought in additional money and finally assumed such an extensive program that one Los Angeles station was threatened with; a complete loss of audience and business because the ship’s radio signal was the more powerful of the two.
Ancient Seer of Modern Marvels
Nylon and air-conditioning wouldn’t have surprised Sir Francis Bacon. He predicted them, along with most of our other present scientific wonders, over 300 years ago!
by Tyche Ayres
WILL we soon be broadcasting smells? Three centuries ago, when the Earl of Essex was flirting with Good Queen Bess of England, a genius sat down and wrote an amazing prediction of the wonders of science which were to be realized in our day.
Writing in an era of intellectual darkness, when alchemists and wizards practiced their black arts, this astounding man foresaw the airplane, television, movies, submarines, automobiles—almost the whole range of modern discoveries.
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