New Typewriter Conquers Chinese Symbols
FOR the first time since the development of modern Chinese script more than 16 centuries ago, a way has been found to copy quickly all of the language’s thousands of complex characters. It is the unique “Mingkwai” (clear and quick) typewriter, invented by Lin Yutang, Chinese author.
Reducing a day’s hand copying to an hour’s typing, the electrically driven machine can print 90,000 characters and reproduce every known Chinese word. Chinese writing does not use the letters of an alphabet; instead, each word is an individual symbol. Other Chinese typewriters require memorizing the position of 5,000 characters and filling in missing words by hand.
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4,000,000 Listen to Auto-Radios
The amazing fact and figure story of the radio in your automobile.
BACK in 1922, William Lear, a Quincy, Illinois, radio experimenter, hooked up sixty odd pounds of complicated electrical equipment and sold it to Dr. Edward Martin, of Kahoka, Missouri.
The doctor fitted it into the back of his car and drove off to California. But he didn’t have much fun, he was too busy trying to tune in something—anything! Not until he was home again did he think to reverse the power plug, whereupon the contraption worked perfectly.
That was the first auto-radio.
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New Refrigerator Has Built-in Radio Receiver
A REFRIGERATOR equipped with a built-in radio has been placed on the market. So popular was the first model that the manufacturer has made available a choice of several models in different sizes equipped with radio. This has been accomplished by having the radio mounted in the top of the refrigerator, and having the refrigerator constructed so that a top equipped with radio may be substituted for one without.
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Planning high-speed business
An Advertisement of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
More than 95% of the telephone calls from one town to another in the Bell System are now on a high-speed basis. This holds whether the call is from New Orleans to Boston or from New York to Oyster Bay.
Even if it is a long call, the operator in many cases now asks you to hold the telephone while the call is put through.
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Radio and Electronics Today
A—Designed to send and receive radio messages in trucks, taxis, fire trucks, police cars and civil-defense passenger cars, this lightweight unit can be installed quickly by plugging it into a cigarette-lighter outlet to obtain the necessary six volts for operation. It is available in either a variable or fixed-frequency model and may be operated on various wavelengths. It has a power output of about four watts and -a range of approximately 20 miles. It also may be used on a standard 115-volt 60-cycle a.c. line
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Blind Spots in Radio Mystify Science
WHAT is the mysterious force that makes certain spots on the earth’s surface apparently impervious to radio messages? Although about fifty of these “dead” gaps have been charted in North America, and its coastwise waters, no one has found the cause for the “blind” pockets. One of the largest dead gaps is just south of Hudson bay in Canada; another is over the ocean off Atlantic City, while a third is supposed to be in the vicinity of Camden, N. J. Neither does Mexico offer an entirely uninterrupted path to the wireless waves, for somewhere south of that country’s capital a blind spot has been found in the air, and further north, on the border of Texas, there is a gap that defies passage of the wireless.
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