I wonder how they did this. It seems like it would require some sort of hardware database.

Dialing Device Shows Stock Quotations on Indicator

SITTING in their offices business men may now learn at any time the status of any stock in which they are interested simply by dialing a number corresponding to the number of the stock listed on the New York Exchange.

Numbers showing the high and low of the stock and the figures at which it opened and closed are revealed on an indicator board as illustrated in the photo at the right.

The dial is similar to the dial used on telephones and rests in a convenient spot on the desk. The numbers are dialed much in the manner that phone numbers are called, so that the utmost convenience is afforded.

Each “teleregister,” as the device is called, is hooked up with the central exchange, so that the dealer has instantaneous connection with the stock market.

This would be great. I live in Portland, Oregon, a city in the grip of food cart mania and home to Powell’s City of Books. It seems like someone here would’ve tried this.

“Vagabond” Shop Supplies Isolated Summer Resorts With New Books

LITERARY needs in fashionable but far distant resorts are provided for by this traveling book shop, shown in the photo below. This movable shop parks in some shady corner of a summer resort where books usually consist of the Bible and a school history of the United States. Its stock comprises popular fiction, classics and rare volumes of all natures. Read the rest of this entry »

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World’s Strangest Museum Makes Science Fascinating

by JAY EARLE MILLER

CAN you, off-hand, describe Newton’s second or third laws of motion, explain the Bernoulli principle or say whether a noise could exist in a vacuum?

Those little problems, and scores more like them, are being answered in a practical way with working models in an unusual new museum at the University of Chicago.

In the spring of 1933 the museum equipment will be moved into the great new Rosenwald Industrial Museum—and, along with thousands of other working models, will be thrown open to the public.
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Wow, this is actually the second guy I’ve seen with homemade stainless steel dentures. Here is another from 1937. I wonder how common this was.

STAINLESS CHOPPERS
STEELY SMILE of John Gilpin, village blacksmith of Livingston, Mont., is really friendly although strangers are sometimes awed by it. Gilpin broke a set of store teeth 16 years ago, replaced them with rugged stainless steel.

This would be the coolest thing ever.

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CALIFORNIA’S BIG SQUIRT

THE parched deserts of Southern California need water to transform their barren soil into fertile farmlands and tourist Meccas such as those existing elsewhere in the state. So far the problem has remained unsolved. But Sidney Cornell, a Los Angeles construction engineer, thinks he has a solution. He wants to construct a series of geyser-like power plants one mile apart to shoot water from the mouth of one into the funnel of the next, as depicted here by MI artist Frank Tinsley. The water would arc over hilly sections, have a flat trajectory over plains. Its velocity would approach 400 mph. These stations— 400 in all—would cost about $300,000 each.

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James Bond’s Weird World of Inventions

007 tangles with the trickiest assortment of supergadgets ever assembled for the screen in new James Bond movie, “Thunderball”

By HERBERT SHULDINER

Gadgetry is a smash hit in Hollywood. Dozens of new films and TV episodes are filled with zany gimmicks and pushbutton devices to entertain audiences.

The thing that started this remarkable trend is the unprecedented success of the gimmick-packed James Bond movies. The first three 007 films raked in over $75 million. Gold finger alone has earned about $43 million—more than any film has ever returned over a comparable time span.
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MOTOR BIKES SPEED HOME REPAIRS

When anything goes wrong in the house, from the furnace to the radio, a Los Angeles, Calif., resident has but to step to the telephone and at his call instantly one of a fleet of repair motorcycles will come whizzing to the rescue.

The organizer of this novel service first got together a large staff of experts in many household crafts and trades. Then he equipped them with speedy motorcycles.
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If you like this article, you should also check these out:

• Must Tomorrow’s Man Look Like This?
• How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race
• How Will You Talk to the Martians? (Dec, 1947)

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How Scientists Visualize the REAL Flying Saucer Men

When scholars of the universe recreate spacemen along logical scientific lines, even those supposed weird little saucerites seem ordinary by comparison.

By I. B. Neer

PRYING eyes of science are probing into space again in the hope of detecting life on other planets. Armed with new facts, previously accepted theories about what lies beyond the Earth are being discarded by scientists every day and the possibility grows more and more distinct that creatures, more fantastic than our most vivid imaginations could conjure up, may inhabit the planets around us. They make those startling stories of weird little men in flying saucers seem tame by comparison.
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Tires Piled Up 150 Feet High Sell Them Quickly

TO ATTRACT attention, a Hollywood garage owner who had a large stock of used tires he wanted to dispose of stacked up a couple of hundred of them and put a life-like dummy on the top.

The stunt got results. While waiting to see if the stack would fall, an astonishingly large number of people bought tires, bringing the depression to an end as far as the tire dealer was concerned.

The secret of the stacking lies in the telegraph pole running up through the center, thus holding the column vertical. In the accompanying photograph the dummy is seen atop the tires which were piled over 150 feet in height. Most spectators actually believed the dummy was real; and wondered how he got there. There’s a hint in this spectacle for other tire dealers in like predicament.

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.

Certainly looks like a space ship to me.

FLYING SUPERWEAPON?

Would you say that this queer-looking contraption was a jet-propelled life raft, a plane fuselage flying without wings, or some other super-secret, odd invention just released for public view? Perhaps, if you turn the picture upside down and think of reflections on water as you reexamine it, you will be able to tell. It’s the conning tower of a German submarine sunk alongside its dock at Hamburg. Note the radar antenna. Lt. Arthur L. Schoeni, of the Navy Department, sent the photo in.

That flower pot tearoom is pretty awesome.

Bizarre Eat Shops Built to Lure Trade

CONES!
An ice cream maker’s specialty is cones. His shops throughout the city are shaped like inverted cones, thus advertising his wares and drawing attention.

HOT DOGS are purveyed by this eat shop, so the showman instincts of the proprietor have caused him to model the exterior of his stand after a puppy. Read the rest of this entry »