Tamed Humming-birds Sip Honey

TRAINING humming-birds to sip honey from his lips is the unusual accomplishment of Ralph Ayer, a farmer living near Eastonville, Colorado. These tiny birds have heretofore been considered untamable.

Perfume bottles filled with honey and flowers first attracted the birds. They now return each year.

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DON’T GET STUCK By STOCK GYPS

Want to make a buck in the market? You can be bilked of your dough.

By SIMON LEE GARTH

IN AN upstairs bedroom a woman lay dying of cancer. Downstairs in the living room her husband was talking business in low tones with a distinguished-looking stranger.

The stranger was Joseph H. Schoenberger, 70, and every inch of his well-groomed appearance suggested the prosperous, sincere businessman, the pillar of the community.

Their business completed, Schoenberger suggested, “Let us now bow our heads for a few moments in silent prayer for your afflicted wife.”
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One Woman’s Confession: I HATE SUBURBIA

Yes. I’ve been a long-term resident of the suburbs,” the attractive woman next to me replied in answer to my question. Her brown eyes seethed with excitement. “And I think the word ‘term’ is very appropriate. It’s been almost a jail sentence!”

We looked around us as we drove through the streets of one of the towns in a suburban area called The Five Towns, on Long Island. Neat little houses bordered the roads, each painted white and framed by shrubbery or forsythia, with the number of the house painted in script above the garage. Often, a car was parked in the driveway. It seemed to be Hollywood’s version of suburbia—a way of life to which every young woman facing marriage must aspire. Read the rest of this entry »

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Gold from the Sea?

TEN years ago commercial extraction of any of the score of valuable elements present in the ocean was as impossible as alchemy. Today it is an accomplished fact in the production of bromine, a vital ingredient in the manufacture of anti-knock gasoline.

“And I feel safe in predicting that within the next decade—and possibly even within the next year—we will be able to recover gold, silver, radium and all the other untold wealth from the sea,” says Thomas Midgley, vice president of the Ethyl-Dow Chemical company, whose research promises this modern miracle.
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Radio Power will Revolutionize the World

by NIKOLA TESLA As told to ALFRED ALBELLI

Tesla’s World of Tomorrow

“We are on the threshold of a gigantic revolution, based on the commercialization of the wireless transmission of power.

“Motion pictures will be flashed across limitless spaces . . .

“The same energy (wireless transmission of power) will drive airplanes and dirigibles from one central base.

“… In rocket-propelled machines . . . it will be practicable to attain speeds of nearly a mile a second (3600 m.p.h.) through the rarefied medium above the stratosphere.

“. . . We will be enabled to illuminate the whole sky at night . . . Eventually we will flash power in virtually unlimited amounts to planets.”

—Nikola Tesla.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.

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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 budget

Computers 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.
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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.

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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.” Read the rest of this entry »

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.
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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.