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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.

Models Illustrate Newton’s Law of Motion You may not remember Newton’s second law of motion, dealing with the transfer of momentum, but once you spend a few minutes playing with the working model it will always stick in your mind. For that model is a simple framework holding ten one-inch steel balls, suspended by “V’s” of thread from an overhead frame, so that the balls are in line, and touching each other. Draw one ball back, release it, and what happens? Many of the freshman students in the new physics course expect the other nine to be displaced, but nothing like that occurs. Instead, the tenth ball, down at the other end of the line, bounces out, falls back, and the transmitted shock of its re* turn reacts on the first ball.

Draw two back and release them, and the pair at the other end are displaced, three and the end three move and so on.

Across the way is an eight-foot, horizontal wheel, with a toy railroad track on its outer rim, carrying an electric locomotive. Press the starting button and the locomotive starts around the circle in one -direction, but the track and wheel begin to move backward in the other.

Toy Trains Work Out Newton’s Third Law For Newton’s third law says that to every action there is always an equal and contrary reaction. Reverse the current a few times with the switch, and at each reversal the track gets an added backward kick ‘ until soon it is traveling one way almost as fast as the engine moves in the other.

A chart on the wall calls attention to other examples of the same phenomenon.

One is the tug of war, in which action and reaction are equal so long as the two teams remain stationary.

Another is a big railroad gun. Because of its small mass and inertia the shell leaves at high speed, while the great mass of the gun absorbs the reaction with comparatively small hydraulic shock absorbers.

A third is a fisherman stepping out of his boat. As he puts one foot on the pier and lifts the other he gives the boat a backward push—a scientific fact that has spilled many an inexperienced boatman. All of these examples are covered by the dry and dusty statement formulated by Newton long ago, but in the new museum they actually live and mean something.

Student Becomes Human Governor A student steps on a small metal turntable and picks up a pair of three kilogram scale weights. The attendant gives a slight push and the student starts to revolve. Then she extends her arms, with the weights, at full length, and immediately slows down, She drops her arms, and speeds up. Just a human governor, the prototype of ine ball governor used on engines for gen- erations. But after that museum experience there can never be any question in her mind why the principle of angular momentum works.

A crowd of boys flocks around the brake test machine. There’s a heavy flywheel with a brake band attached to recording scales, a crank to turn it, an electric clock with large second hand to count off the minute, and a chart showing the number of revolutions and scale reading for an average man, a strong man and one horsepower.

A complicated arrangement of glass tubes and liquids illustrates Bernoulli’s principle, that, in a moving liquid pressure corresponds to energy and velocity to kinetic energy. Since the total energy, potential plus kinetic, is constant, the velocity is greatest when the pressure is smallest.

Can you remember that? But when you step to the next exhibit and see a small ping pong ball floating in the air on an air stream projected from a glass nozzle at an angle of 45 degrees it all becomes clear, and unforgetable.

Cut-away Engine Shows Working Parts A Corliss engine, a steam turbine with herringbone reduction gearing, and a Liberty aircraft engine, all cut away to show the working parts, the turbine driven by compressed air and the other two by elec- trie motors, form a working exhibit of power generation.

In one of the rooms a small model of Old Faithful and the other Yellowstone park geysers erupts every six minutes. It is made of galvanized iron, a tall, slim cone, well insulated, sitting on a tiny electric stove, with a broad, flat pan at the top to catch the falling water.

Model Shows Why Old Faithful Spouts Because of the comparatively great depth of the water it becomes super-heated at the bottom, and then, when the top layers begin to steam and bubble up, the rapidly expanding steam from the over-heated bottom portion ejects the geyser.

A small brass weight and a large hollow brass ball, both weighing the same, and suspended from the ends of a scale beam under a bell jar from which the air can be exhausted at the turn of a valve, stumps many students.

When the air is pumped out the ball end of the scale arm sinks, despite the fact that both ball and weight weigh the same. The answer is closely associated with the problems of ballooning and lighter-than-air craft, for while the ball and weight appear to weigh the same, in air, that is not actually true, and the apparent weight of the ball is its true weight, less the support given by the air to its larger surface. When that support is removed in a partial vacuum the ball proves to be the heavier.

Vacuum phenomena are a continual surprise to the students. They see readily why a toy balloon under a bell jar grows larger when they open the valve and let the pump exhaust the air around it, but the electric bell in a jar is a continual source of amazement.

You Can’t Hear Through a Vacuum This bell can be started ringing, and then, as the air around it grows less and less the sound gradually fades, and finally ceases altogether, when there is no longer sufficient air in which to set up sound waves.

Complicated experiments of the late Dr. Michelson in the measurement of the velocity of light, X-ray apparatus, crystal structures, and a host of other scientific phe- nomena are demonstrated by simple working apparatus.

Attendants are available to answer questions, but, under the new system whereby every student, regardless of plans for the future, is required to take groundwork courses in four sciences, no information is volunteered.

Museum Occupies 5 V2 Acres of Space When the new Rosenwald museum opens in the spring of 1933 its 580,000 square feet of a floor space in a great five and a half acre building—often described as the most beautiful structure in America—will become the laboratory for the university students, as well as a museum for the public.

The rebuilding in enduring stone of the old Fine Art Palace of the world’s fair of i933 has been completed, and contracts have been let for the interior. When the doors are opened to the public the reconstruction will represent an investment of $6,000,000 and there will be $3,000,000 worth of working models on hand.

Models Work of Large Crew of Experts A large crew of model experts has been at work for three years in the model shops of the museum building the equipment, and already several storage houses have been tilled with completed models.

So far as humanly possible every model Will do something. Huge ship models, perfect in every detail, will not be just housed in glass cases, but will be mounted in dry docks, which can be operated by visitors through a system of switches, or on marine railways.

Rooms and sections will trace the development of each field of science and mechanics from the dawn of history down to the present. In one alcove, for example, a reproduction of an alchemist’s laboratory of the middle ages will face a modern chemical laboratory.

A section on bridge building will open with the earliest types of wooden, stone and bamboo bridges (the latter scale models of famous Japanese types) and close with the latest thing in suspension and bascule bridges, and the bascule models will be electrically operated.

Panama Canal Model to be Shown Alongside a working model of the Panama canal will be an actual section of the old Las Cruces trail, the cobble stone high- way built across the Isthmus by the Spaniards.

Because heat, as the basis of all power, plays such an important part in industry, the museum’s boilers and power plant will be one of the working models. The floor will be cut away in the huge rotunda under the central dome to expose four boilers and the power plant, all spic and span, with stairways so that visitors can inspect their workings.

A complete section of a full size coal mine is being built in the basement, so that visitors can wander through the galleries and see mining machinery in its native habitat. The tall steel shaft of a coal tipple rises in one of the main wings, and visitors to the mine will descend to the workings in a real coal mine hoist.

Every type of vehicle from the earliest invention of the wheel down to the present is to be shown. An old Concord stage coach, an early Orient motor buckboard, a Gardiner-Serpollet steam automobile from Germany, and an ancient cable car are just some of the many full sized exhibits already stored in the warehouses.

Models Actual Copies of Originals The models for the museum are not just reproductions, but actual copies in the materials and using the construction methods of the original, so far as possible. A six-foot model of the four-masted bark “Pamir” recently completed used thousands of tiny rivets in the steel hull and more than 2,000 tiny blocks in the rigging.

An exception to the rule of using original materials is a model of an ancient Japanese bamboo bridge. It was possible to get small bamboo of the proper diameter, but the rings in small bamboo are just M tar apart as in large, so the model would not nave been correct. The difficulty was solved by turning dowel rods down and leaving rings spaced at the proper distance for the scale of the model. With the opening of the museum, just a month before the coming Chicago world’s fair, the city on Lake Michigan will have four of the greatest public attractions in the country—the Field Museum, with its $50,-000,000 display in natural history, the new Shedd Aquarium, recently described in Modern Mechanics and Inventions, and the Adler Planetarium, only one of its kind outside of Europe, being the other three. Models Give Students Enthusiasm for Science High school students will find their classroom studies far more interesting when they have gone through this remarkable museum. With the various models demonstrating the scientific principles in a graphic and unforgettable manner, physics and chemistry will take on a new life, so that students will bring new enthusiasm to the classroom.

The history of mechanical inventions also takes on an added interest when models of devices are seen in operation.

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.

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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.

Because their success has spawned so many imitators, the Bond producers now have to reach for some pretty spectacular devices to keep Bondophiles on the edge of their seats. So they’ve invested about $500,- 000 for the zany gadgets in the newest 007 thriller, Thunderball, starring Sean Connery.

Most of the infernal devices never existed in the original Ian Fleming stories. “Our only excuse for using them” says screenwriter Richard Maibaum, “is that such devices are available and cry out to be buckled onto James Bond’s back.”

Some of the gadgets actually are buckled onto Connery’s famous back. One is the Bell jet-pack flying belt Bond uses in the beginning of the film to escape from a French chateau. Connery has to wear a special Dacron suit whose color won’t bleach out when touched by the belt’s highly concentrated peroxide fuel. The belt provides about 20 seconds of flight, but only 10 seconds is used for the upward flight. It would be disastrous to run out of power a couple of hundred feet up in the air.

Thunderbolts prize piece of gatgetry is a $300,000. 64-foot hydrofoil yacht. It belongs to 007’s enemies—SPECTRE—a sinister gang of international criminals that has hijacked two H-bombs from NATO. They’re holding the bombs for $300 million in ransom. If the Allies don’t pay off, SPECTRE threatens to wipe out two Western cities.

SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) is led by Emilio Largo from the hydrofoil floating fortress called the Disco Volante.

The come-apart boat. Thunderbolts production designer, Ken Adams, couldn’t find a hydrofoil imposing enough for the wide-screen Panavision film, so he decided to build a cocoon aft on a 60-footer, nearly doubling the vessel’s length to an overall 110 feet. This permits the film makers to add an exciting fillip. The cocoon can be jettisoned at the touch of a button, allowing the hydrofoil to zoom off at full speed.

The hydrofoil has a 1,320-hp. Mercedes-Benz diesel and can hit a top speed of about 40 knots. But Adams can improve on that—by filming it at one-third normal camera speed. Normal projection speed makes the Disco Volante appear to do over 100 knots. The hydrofoil is also the mother ship for a two-man sub and eight sea tows—one-man, powered underwater sleds.

Jordan Klein, a top expert in the art of undersea movie making, designed the sub. It’s supposed to transport the hijacked H-bombs to targets selected by SPECTRE if NATO doesn’t cough up the ransom.

The 18-foot sub weighs 3,880 pounds and has negative buoyancy. It is powered by three 3/2-hp. electric motors, each reversible so the sub can turn in its own length.

The motors are located forward, one on each side. A third motor is behind the cockpit in the stern. They are operated through control-panel switches and any one can be used separately. The battery-powered minisub motors run at 750 r.p.m. The sub has a top speed of 4-1/2 knots submerged and runs up to four hours continuously before its batteries have to be recharged. Six guns mounted in front of the sub fire four-foot-long spears on compressed air. The sub operates down to depths of 200 feet.

Klein also designed the sea tows. These are just under 10 feet long and are powered by battery-run, 3/2-hp. electric motors. They support the upper portion of a skin diver who steers the contraption with flippers.

When Bond discovers this formidable array of hardware, he calls for the head of his Q Branch to rush a shipment of counter-weapons. Most of these are off-the-shelf gadgets like the Heath marine radios and Voit skin-diving gear.

But where the real thing doesn’t exist, props have to be created. The man who put together the nonmarine gadgetry in Thunderbolt is John Stears, the special-effects genius of all the Bond movies.

Grenades are old-fashioned. Stears came up with all the unique devices for 007*8 Aston Martin in Goldfinger, and has even added a few to the car, which is also used in the new movie. Stears says the gadgetry the late Ian Fleming used is old-fashioned. Thus, where Fleming used a hand grenade tossed into an open Volkswagen to kill SPECTRE agent Count Lippe, Stears adapted a rocket-firing, 120-m.p.h. motorcycle to do the job in more spectacular fashion.

Stears added four rockets, which cost about $10 each to make. He used a regular artillery unit, ignited by a .38-caliber cartridge. The rockets actually detonate on contact. Two of the rockets contain napalm, and two ordinary black powder.

Bond doesn’t get any underwater vehicles to battle SPECTRE, but Q delivers some other fascinating items: • A wristwatch Geiger counter to help Bond search for the missing H-bombs.

• A pill-like transmitter that Bond swallows when he is trapped by SPECTRE in a sealed-off crater. The beam attracts a con- federate in a helicopter and guides him in.

• A skyhook device, which is dropped by the confederate to Bond. It’s a helium -filled balloon that pulls up a cable and holds it aloft for the co-agent to catch in the chopper’s winch and thus hoist 007 to safety.

• A rebreather. This cigar-shaped device provides Bond with two minutes of emergency oxygen—enough to get him out of another tight spot.

Only one of these devices—the skyhook-exists, but what Bond needs, Bond gets.

Agent 007 also gets a unique self-propelled underwater backpack on which two deadly impact-exploding spears are mounted. The pack consists of an aqualung with two tanks, plus a jet-propulsion unit. One tank provides air for breathing and firing the compressed-air spear guns. The second tank releases a pressurized liquid dye to make a screen for Bond. The spears have 12-gauge shotgun-shell heads that explode on contact.

Taking the action underwater. About 25 percent of Thunderbolt takes place underwater. It took about 845,000 worth of skin-diving gear to outfit the 45 skin divers for undersea fight scenes. Although much of the action is submerged, it’s easy to tell who’s who. The baddies wear black. Bond and his helpers wear bright orange outfits.

A flotilla of 29 ships, ranging in size from small outboards to a British Navy cruiser, are used in Thunderbolt. The cruiser just happened to be in the Bahamas where the film was shot, so director Terrence Young decided to work it into a chase scene.

At the climax of the film, SPECTRE ferries the H-bombs to the waters off Miami, where they are to be planted and set to detonate when the ransom deadline arrives.

Bond leads his troops to intercept Largo’s gang. Ian Fleming had the good guys pop out of a nuclear sub. The movie producers use a more spectacular team of interceptors. They arranged to film the jumping exercise of 15 U.S. Air Force aquaparamedics—the same ones who assist in astronaut landings— from a height of 1.200 feet. When they hit the water, the scene cuts to the extras engaged in a tremendous underwater battle with the SPECTRE gang.

We won’t tell you the outcome. But you can be sure that 007’s zany world of gadgets, girls, and vodka martinis—shaken, not stirred—will survive.

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.

The odd shape of the vehicles, patterned after bungalows, attracts attention as they speed through the streets and results in making his service more widely known. Each of the men employed is bonded and is thoroughly trained in his line as an electrician, radio repair man, plumber, carpenter, or expert in gas fixtures.

• 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.

Dr. Henry Norris Russell of Princeton recently threw a bombshell into scientific circles when he said: “It appears now to be probable that the number of inhabited worlds within the galaxy is considerable. To think of thousands, or even more, now appears far more reasonable than to suppose that our planet alone is the abode of life and reason.”

And H. Spencer Jones, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and one of the world’s most noted inter-planetary authorities, declares: “It is reasonable to suppose that life on any other world will have developed along forms that are entirely different from any with which we are familiar and that are possibly beyond our conception.”

Just how would those inhabitants look? Could they be men, beasts, plants or a combination of all three? To get the answer, experts in the field were polled. This question was put to them: “Knowing what we do about conditions on other planets—differences in the constitution of the atmosphere, in the proportion of land and water, the temperatures and other phenomena—what kind of people could conceivably inhabit them?”

Some startling answers resulted. However, all the experts pointed out one vital fact: on most planets, life as we know it cannot exist. An earthman would die at once on Mercury, his organs ruptured by the boiling of his blood in the tremendous heat of the sun—if he weren’t asphyxiated for lack of oxygen and dried up by lack of water. But the experts all agreed it is entirely possible that other planets may have developed their own life forms, entirely different from ours, suited to the very, very special conditions existing on their worlds!

Let’s go planet-hopping and take a look at a portrait gallery painted by the imaginations of inter-planetary experts.

First to Venus because it is most like the earth in weight and size and, except for the moon, comes closer to us than any other globe. Scientists are convinced that the planet Venus has an atmosphere, but it is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, with no detectable free oxygen. No evidence of water vapor has been observed, hence the surface of the planet must be largely desert, with no rivers, lakes or oceans.

What kind of people can live there? John W. Campbell, Jr., a profound student of extra-terrestial life who is editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, a magazine which has successfully prophesied many of the most astounding recent scientific discoveries, says: “Life can exist on Venus without oxygen. Here on earth we have micro-organisms which can stay alive in sulphuric acid and kerosene. Undoubtedly there are life forms which can take the oxygen from carbon dioxide, and why can’t these be creatures of flesh?”

Would a Venus man look vaguely like a human? “Why not?” counters Mr. Campbell. “After all, the human form on Earth represents two billion years of experimental engineering on the part of nature. It is the best possible form to do the things it has to. There is every reason to suppose that life on Venus, or on any other planet, if it has developed to a high level, has taken human form. But this form would have to conform to the specific conditions of the planet.”

Thus, Mr. Campbell points out, the lungs of a Venus inhabitant would have to be designed to perform a special function of extracting oxygen from carbon dioxide and his body cells would have a different chemical nature than ours. Now, since carbon dioxide is an extremely poor source of oxygen, a Venus man would have to breathe in considerable amounts to extract oxygen, hence his lungs would be developed to enormous size, giving him a tremendous barrel chest.

His food, Mr. Campbell says, would consist of fats and hydrocarbons. Trying to get life energy from these sources is like trying to burn gasoline under water—it can be done, but you need an awful lot of gas. Therefore, a Venus man would have a grossly protuberant belly and heavy, columnar legs to support his bulk. Because his energy source is poor, his movements would be lumbering and sluggish. And since he must eat such huge quantities, he would literally eat himself out of house and home, living a nomadic life, constantly on the prowl for food.

For this reason, Mr. Campbell thinks that the existence of a high culture on Venus is extremely doubtful since culture develops when people don’t have to spend all their time just keeping alive. The Venus man would have no time to think, hence the race would be virtually beastlike.

Now let’s leap to Mars and observe a Martian as described by Major James R. Randolph, engineer, mathematician and physicist, who taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N. Y., and Rhode Island State College and lectures extensively on interplanetary subjects. This is his conception of a Mars inhabitant: He has slender arms and legs, a large chest, wide, flaring nostrils and a broad mouth. His head would be about a quarter the size of his body; his eyes would be dark-adapted, with wide pupils. His size is problematical— Major Randolph’s guess is that he would be about four feet tall but he frankly admits there is no real basis for the assumption.

Now, why would a Martian look like this? Gravity on Mars is only 38 per cent of what it is on earth, hence everything would be easier to push, pull, pick up and carry. If everything weighs less, there would be less need for muscle, hence the reed-like limbs.

Why the large chest, the wide mouth and nostrils? There is considerable evidence that Mars has an atmosphere but it is extremely thin and the pressure is very low. Now, says Major Randolph, since air occupies more space if there is less pressure, a Martian would have to take much more air into his lungs than we do and oversize organs would result.

The mouth and nostrils would be wide for the same reason—larger air spaces would be required. The head, encompassing a normal brain, would be the size of an earthman’s thus disproportionate to the rest of his body.

Now come to Jupiter and prepare for a shock. Inhabitants who can conceivably live there are really something to see. The conditions on this planet are such that Jupiter man would have to be short, squat, with tremendous muscular developments and no eyes in his head! Yet despite this, he would be able to see in his own way.

Mr. Campbell explains: “The massive muscles would evolve because gravity on Jupiter is two and a half to three times that of earth, requiring the expenditure of considerable energy. The atmosphere is so dense and deep that it is perpetual, unrelieved night, making eyes useless, hence undeveloped.

“But why couldn’t a Jupiter man see by a built-in sonar system, much like bats?”

Next, we call on Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—the cold, remote wastes of the solar system. The atmospheres of these giant ‘ planets are known to contain hydrogen, marsh gas, helium, ammonia (on Saturn) and no oxygen at all. Such an atmosphere is poisonous to Earth men.

However, Fletcher Pratt, famous military and naval analyst and inter-planetary researchist, says: “Knowing what we know about these three giant planets, any life form there must be completely different from ours. It would have to use a nitrogen instead of an oxygen base, with lungs and other internal apparatus designed in such a way as to extract nitrogen from the atmospheric gases.”

Because of the known difficulty of extracting nitrogen from methane and ammonia, the creatures would have to possess enormous intake surfaces, and since gravity on the three planets is extremely high, they would possess heavy, squat forms. Light would be absent because of the distance of the planets from the sun, hence, like Jupiter men, the inhabitants would not have eyes but “some sort of organ to keep from running into things.”

Mercury, the fastest-moving planet in the solar system, has three lands—one of eternal day, one of eternal night and the third (the so-called intermediate zone) a land of light and darkness. The land of night is intensely cold, the land of day burning hot. But the sun alternately rises and sets in the area in between, producing temperature variations.

Kenneth Heuer, lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and author of the book Men of Other Planets, tells how a Mercurian might look.

He would follow the shifting sun every moment to stay in the most favorable zone, Mr. Heuer says. This means that he would be on the move practically every minute, would have no definite home, hence no culture could arise. A Mercurian would probably be four-footed, to make locomotion simpler. His food would consist of lower forms of vegetation, such as lichens on rocks. And again, because of the extremely tenuous atmosphere, the inhabitant would have a deep chest and large breathing orifices.

Now, between Mars and Jupiter are more than 50,000 tiny worlds—minor planets called asteroids which have not been able to hold any atmosphere. They are airless, waterless, barren wastes. Hence, Mr. Heuer believes no life such as we are familiar with could possibly exist. No life, that is, except . . .

“Why couldn’t mineral life exist there?” he asks. Rock men?

“Exactly. Mineral life could best withstand the conditions which, as far as we know, are totally devoid of any animal life-sustaining factors.” How would they move or talk?

“They wouldn’t move. They would remain eternally where they are. And why couldn’t they communicate with one another by some form of telepathy?”

There you have them—the creatures of other worlds as come to life in the scientific imaginations of the experts. Perhaps in centuries to come, man will span the vast reaches of the universe and at long last come face to face with his neighbors in space.

Until that time, however, we can only sit at our instruments, study the heavens and, based on what we see, let our imagination roam into other worlds. •

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.

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.

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.

FLOWER POT TEAROOM is one of the unique attractions on the Pacific coast. Giant flowers rise realistically from the roof. Right — COFFEE POT specializes in quick lunches for passing tourists. Steam rises from the spout.

ZEPPELIN LUNCH!
This unusual restaurant is housed within a model of a zeppelin. Note the mooring mast at left

THE HAT, copy of a brown derby, is popular among bizarre eating places. The restaurant is located within the crown of the hat, while the curved brim makes a very unusual veranda. The sign invites passersby to stop and “eat in the hat.”

Trailer Combines Home and Office

Home and office are combined in a custom-built trailer just completed for an executive whose business keeps him touring the country. Equipped with desks, typewriter, and electric dictating machine, it also provides the owner and his wife with satinwood-furnished living quarters, an upper-deck observation lounge, a tiled bathroom with hot and cold shower, and a stainless-steel kitchen with a range burning bottled gas. Telephones connect office, power car, and galley; and an air-conditioning plant maintains year-round comfort.

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KITE + BALLOON=KYTOON

ON CALM DAYS, kite enthusiast Domina Jalbert felt frustrated. Although he had kites of all types, he simply couldn’t make one fly when there wasn’t any breeze.

This frustration led to the Kytoon, a hybrid sky rider that combines the best features of the kite with the best of the balloon. Even the name, Kytoon, is a combination of kite and balloon. By adding the kite’s ability to “climb” the wind to a lighter-than-air, helium-filled balloon, Jalbert produced a “sky hook” that flies virtually motionless above its mooring. Unlike a kite, it won’t nose dive, being lighter than air. Yet it won’t drift downwind like a captive balloon because its fins make it rise into the wind.

Its extreme stability makes it an ideal way to elevate radio or TV antennas. It supports advertising signs over business districts and carnivals. So stable is it that it can be used as a sighting target on large-scale surveys or to carry cameras aloft for low-level aerial photographs.

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Man of the Monsters

Here’s a genius who makes prehistoric monsters that “live.”

BY LUIS HOCHMAN

SOME learned scientists and explorers are content to probe Mother Earth for moldy remnants of prehistoric monsters, but not George Harold Messmore. This energetic little man with big ideas and accomplishments to match simply built himself a dinosaur factory in the heart of New York and proceeded to turn out his own staggering array of life-size, breathing, eating, fighting, snarling, replicas of the huge creatures that roamed the earth long before man had a tail to hang by. Powered by from one to 17 silent motors, operating a complicated mass of cogs, wheels, cams, chains, and bellows beneath canvas and papier-mache hides, huge dinosaurs, stegosaurs, allosaurs, saber-tooth tigers, mastodons and other monsters lash their tails, blink their eyes, gnash their teeth, swing their heads and limbs and emit frightful howls and screams. (Their vocal renditions issue from small phonograph recordings in their throats, but the secret of how these voice-noises were figured out still lies locked in Messmore’s brain.)

Though he started his peculiar business in 1918 with a partner, Joe Damon, since retired, the firm of Messmore and Damon didn’t attain its world-wide fame until 1933, when they put on their spectacular exhibit, “The World a Million Years Ago” at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. That exhibit, which drew thousands of spectators from the far corners of the earth, was one of the great box-office bonanzas of the Fair. Visitors who entered the huge metal globe of the world, which housed the exhibit, were treated to a tour through steaming prehistoric jungles alive with such kicking, squirming, roaring and tail-lashing monsters as brontosauri, allosauri, ichthyosauri, stegosauri and dimetrodons. The brontosaurus, a 60-foot mechanized reproduction of its extinct counterpart, could move its long neck in any direction and even pick hats off unsuspecting spectators’ heads.” Its movements were activated by 17 motors, guided by a man who manipulated a push-button control panel from a secret recess inside.

“That exhibit sure put us on the map,” reminisces Messmore. “We were always cooking up new gags to publicize it.” One of those gags resulted in so much world-wide publicity that Messmore had to stop his clipping agency from sending him any more newspaper clippings about it.

“It was breaking me to pay for all those clippings,” explains Messmore. “You see, during the Fair, the exhibit was forced to move to a less desirable location and it needed a shot in the arm; so we changed its name to ‘Down the Lost River’ and hired a couple of nudists to go through a wedding ceremony in it. The bride was a Milwaukee gal and the groom came from Texas and all the members of the wedding party were as naked as jaybirds, except the minister, who wore a dignified goatskin. Reporters, feature writers and press and newsreel photographers really did a job on that ceremony, but so did a mechanic who accidentally threw the wrong switch and started up a tyrannosaurus and glyptodon. In the excitement a nudist and one of the bridesmaids fell backwards into the flotsam of the Lost River.”

Turning from the primeval to the medieval, Messmore took over the Show Boat and set up another mechanized exhibit called “The Torture Chamber” where he entertained his customers with such delicate scenes as screaming and groaning men and women being broken on the rack, getting boiled in oil, having their feet seared with red-hot irons or cooked in iron boots filled with molten lead. These exhibits consisted of life-sized, mechanized men with settings, costumes and torture methods accurately reproducing those of the middle ages. Through cleverly recorded and synchronized sound effects, visitors heard the questioning of the inquisitor as well as the screams and groans of the unfortunate victims.

High spot of this exhibit, however, was Ann Kay, “The Crusader’s Bride,” who stepped forth wearing a medieval chastity belt, one of those iron panties which crusading husbands locked their wives into before going off to war. Ann Kay wore nothing else. This soon brought down on Messmore the wrath of official World’s Fair Censor Joe Moriarity.

“See here, Messmore,” he cried, “you cover up that girl’s bosom or I’ll close your show!”

“O. K.,” said Messmore. “Will any opaque covering do?”

“Yes,” replied Moriarity, “but it’s got to be opaque.”

That night Messmore put his ingenuity to work. He made a plaster cast of Miss Kay’s bust, poured some flesh-colored latex into the mold and made a paper-thin, thoroughly form-fitting bra which, when donned, powdered and retouched with rouge, couldn’t be spotted from two inches away.

“Moriarity sure was mad,” laughs Messmore, “but he couldn’t do a thing. The bra was opaque. People offered me thousands for that formula but we never gave out the secret.”

Though Ann Kay and her cast iron device drew large crowds to the exhibit, Messmore’s press agent for some reason couldn’t get the papers to mention the chastity belt.

“It’s no use,” he told Messmore one night, “the papers won’t touch it. I’ve tried everything.”

“That’s what you say,” replied Messmore. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks I can get it mentioned.”

“It’s a bet!” answered the P. A.

Messmore reached for the phone and called one of the local papers.

“I want to place an ad in the Lost and Found section,” he said into the mouthpiece. “This is it: ‘Lost: The key to the chastity belt. Liberal reward. Return to M. T. Show on Show Boat.’ ” Messmore won the bet.

In 1934, when International Harvester decided to demonstrate their McCormick-Deering milker at an exhibit, they turned to Messmore and Damon to produce a mechanical cow to which the milker could be attached. Nothing but a pure-bred blemish-free Holstein cow which could moo, switch its tail, turn its head, wink its eyes, chew its cud, breathe and give milk would do.

After examining over 150 cows, Mrs. Alken Ina Ormsby, No. 864,903, a bovine beauty of the finest qualifications, was selected. For weeks, she lived in regal splendor at the Messmore and Damon factory, eating the best of foods and living the life of Riley as she posed for her exact mechanical likeness. But when that likeness was finished, Mrs. Aiken’s days of luxury came to an end and her skin was used to cover the mechanical creation she had been model for. At the exhibit, Messmore hooked the mechanical milker to the cow, running a pipeline up through one leg so that the imitation milk could be pumped back from the pail into the udder and then milked out again into the pail. “That cow sure fooled a lot of people,” chuckles Messmore. “Once a hard-bitten old farmer watched her for some time, then came over and remarked, ‘You know, I’ve been watching thet cow fer over an hour now, and by gosh she’s still givin’ milk!’ ”

Today Messmore’s extraordinary inventory calls for a large staff of skilled wood carvers, seamstresses, machinists, scenic artists, sculptors and workers in every medium from welding to stage carpentry. Messmore himself does most of the sculpture work and can figure out in a jiffy what complicated eccentrics, gears, rods and cams are needed to bring anything from a six-inch dwarf to a 60-foot brontosaurus to life. He once made a herd of elephants which walked across the Zeigfeld stage carrying chorus girls in their trunks.

When a department store books one of his exhibits it pays a flat sum, sometimes as much as $15,000 plus half the gate up to $35,000. Frequently Messmore will revive an old show, such as “The World a Million Years Ago” or “The Torture Chamber,” and send it on tour.

“Those shows will never become outdated,” he claims. “Heck, one’s a million years old already and it still packs ‘em in!”

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Periscope House

YOU walk across the green-lawned, palm-hemmed park overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California, and climb the stairs to the little house in the picture above. Your party gathers around a circular rail in the center, the door is closed and at first all is darkness.

Then, slowly and as if by magic, the scene you left outdoors a few minutes before appears on the revolvable table in front of you. Colors are perfectly natural. Strollers in the park move about, quite oblivious to their observers.

The venerable operator, E. V. Williams, turns a wheel and the outdoor vista is duplicated in first one direction, then another. East, you see Santa Monica’s Broadway, with snow-capped mountains in the far background; to the south and west is Ocean Park amusement center, Catalina Island and the Pacific Ocean; and to the north is Palisades Park and Ocean Avenue.

These scenes enter through the small -hole you see in the cupola atop the “periscope house.” The image is reflected by a mirror down through a lens and onto the tilting circular table. This apparatus, called the Camera Obscura, is actually an adaptation of the periscope.

The novel showplace is maintained by the Santa Monica Recreation Department and has been entertaining visitors for more than 40 years. Downstairs, members of the Chess and Checker Club— “old duffers,” Williams calls them—meet to test their skill and to argue topics of the day.

A few years ago, Williams recalls, the Camera Obscura was a thief’s undoing. Just as the lens turned to pick up a view to the north, it focused on a muscular youth stealthily approaching a woman asleep on the grass in the park. The audience, gasping at the image before them, saw the young athlete steal the sleeper’s purse and sneak away to rifle its contents.

Williams hastily summoned an officer who apprehended the thief with the money, watch and other valuables from the purse still in his possession. The purse had disappeared down a storm sewer. The victim went into hysterics— and back to her home in Philadelphia with a hearty regard for the Camera Obscura.

The Camera was built by John P. Jones, who received an inspiration for its construction while abroad. And only recently a world traveler took down construction details of the Santa Monica attraction with the idea of building a similar structure in Europe.

Williams, a bachelor who guards his age with a spinster’s vigilance, is “only temporary” on the job, he says. He’s been at it 13 years. His real interest is the Chess and Checker Club downstairs, but he never minds leaving a close game in order to demonstrate the Camera.

Builds Playhouse From Oil Cans

BY SOLDERING together 1500 quart oil cans, Edgar Speer, Ohio mechanic, has constructed a novel playhouse for his small daughter.

By laying the soldered cans on their long axis and offsetting each course at the end, Speer has achieved a log cabin effect. Large enough to accommodate three or four full grown men, the cabin is 6-1/2 feet long, 4-1/2 feet wide and 6-1/2 feet high. The project took about 2-1/2 months of Speer’s spare time. The work was done with a common blow torch and soldering iron.

English Ladies Smoke Tiny Pipes

FEMININE smokers of London, England, are adopting a dainty little pipe now on the market. Cigarette tobacco is crumpled in the tiny bowl and lit in the approved masculine fashion. A long slender stem gives a cool smoke without staining the fingers.
The pipes are scarcely heavier than the average cigarette holder.

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Science Never Stops

The world has made vast strides in the last 75 years; even greater triumphs lie ahead if mankind has the courage to go on with the job.

By Harland Manchester

Illustrations by John Gaydos

MAN, standing upon the eminence of 1947 and gazing into the future, may well be dazzled and also perplexed by the promise of science to redeem his world. New discoveries and improved techniques on a hundred fronts present golden chances for a richer and fairer existence—if man has the sense, the honesty and the guts to seize and exploit them for the good of all.

Science is a blank check, and this is no time to be niggardly in filling it out. There are, of course, the doubters, like the 19th-century patent commissioner who wanted to close his office because nothing remained to be invented. If these timid souls look about them, they will see men and women who were living when there were no telephones, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, radios, motion pictures, antitoxin serums or antiseptic surgery, to mention a few advances of the last 75 years.

Modern techniques have shortened the time lag between the original idea and its practical application. Today’s machines and methods, which amaze oldsters, may be nothing compared with the parade of triumphs soon to come.

There will be many discoveries and feats of engineering that we cannot foresee, but if we consider the significant projects now under way and the world’s most obvious needs, we can reasonably make an informed guess as to the shape of things to come.

AT THE top of anyone’s “future list” stands the great question of atomic energy. Will the splitting atom bring a millenium of cheap power, supplanting oil and coal? At present there are two answers: a short-range program based on actual knowledge, and distant possibilities based on audacious hopes.

Many corporations, aided by the country’s leading scientists and engineers, are now working on projects to apply the energy of the splitting atom to stationary power plants, ships, guided missiles and planes. Atomic power plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge will be in operation within a year or so. That project is simple. Heat and power are interchangeable, and every hour the Hanford pile turns out heat equal to that obtained from burning 7,100 gallons of fuel oil or 38.5 tons of coal. This heat can be used to make steam to drive turbines, or, more efficiently, to heat mercury vapor that will drive a turbine and then make steam to drive a second turbine. This mercury-steam combination (now used in coal-fired plants in Kearney, N. J., Hartford, Conn., and Schenectady, N. Y.) is the only prime mover known that gets as much power from its fuel as the Diesel, long the yardstick of superior efficiency. It may be still better to use the heated air from the pile to drive a gas turbine of the closed-cycle type, in which the hot air constantly recirculates, and heat wasted through the exhaust in the open-type gas turbine is used to make more power. Since radioactive air may eat away the turbine blades, helium, which cannot be “poisoned,” may be used in this efficient engine.

That brings us to one of the greatest problems of atomic power—radiations that cause falling hair, sterility, wrecked red corpuscles and often lingering death. A wad of paper will stop all the charged particles caused by nuclear fission, but two uncharged criminals —gamma rays (akin to X-rays) and neutrons —must be caged by heavy shields of lead, concrete or other dense material. Nuclear physicists all over the world are seeking a lighter, more compact shield. We can reflect heat radiations with a thin sheet of aluminum instead of absorbing them with bulky insulation, and we can bend light rays in a lucite pipe and send them back where they came from. If these facts offer any clues, we can be sure that they are not being neglected.

Until lighter shields are discovered, atomic power as we now know it can be used only in stationary power plants, ships, locomotives, rockets and pilotless planes. There is no evidence yet that it will be much more economical than power methods now used, but it might bring all the blessings of a TVA to a region without coal or water power, and it might enable an aircraft carrier to circle the world a few times without refueling.

But if we persist in harnessing the atom to our present engines, we will copy the early motorcar makers who mounted gasoline engines in buggies. A great goal seen by scientists is the direct conversion of atomic energy into electric power without routing it through the cumbersome heat cycle. How about some method of inserting metal terminals in a uranium pile and drawing electric power as you would from a battery? (Forecast by Dr. J. A. Hutcheson, Westinghouse Research Laboratories.) Can we use high-vacuum insulation to build small electrostatic generators like the giant Van De Graaff atom-smasher, enabling us to use directly and conveniently the energy of nuclear fission? (Suggested by Prof. John G. Trump, of MIT.)

So far, our atomic power has come from smashing the heavy atoms U-235 and plutonium, but the sun gets its power by combining little atoms of hydrogen into bigger ones of helium. Man may learn to do this, with an increase in power of about 1,000 percent. Or scientists now investigating the cosmic ray in this country and in Russia may learn its trick of disintegrating hydrogen atoms. No one can scoff at the notion that some day the world’s work may be done by atomic-power engines of sizes suitable for every job, fueled by elements that are abundant and cheap. In any event, science will press toward that goal. We have entered the lair of the atom, God help us, and the door is locked behind us. There is only one way to go.

WHILE we are waiting for atomic power, scientists and engineers will have their hands full perfecting new fuels for our present motors as the oil wells run dry. The world’s petroleum supply is definitely dwindling, and new deposits will be increasingly expensive to work. But we have enough coal for an estimated 2,500 years, and from coal and natural gas, as the Germans have shown, we can obtain gasoline and Diesel oil, as well as by-products of fuel gas and alcohols. Coal, the orphan of research, will soon come into its own at the hands of the “long-haired professors” whom the shortsighted mine operators long disdained.

For several years a toy refinery has been operating in the laboratories of the Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh. Coal goes in at the top and gasoline trickles out at the bottom. Now two full-scale plants are being built in Texas for making motor fuels from natural gas by the more efficient Fischer-Tropsch process. The next step is to use coal to make the gas to make the gasoline, and several big oil companies are spending large sums in research to have this method ready when it is needed. The cost of gasoline from coal abroad has always been high compared with U. S. filling station prices, but improved methods of making cheap oxygen (developed by Dr. Kapitza, of Russia; MIT, and M. W. Kellogg and Co.) will help in making synthetic fuels at prices we can pay.

You don’t have to turn coal into oil to provide a convenient fluidlike fuel. You can pulverize it as fine as face powder and blow it into the combustion chamber of a gas turbine. Perhaps tomorrow’s Iron Horse will grind up any cheap coal, burn it, remove the fly ash, and spin a turbine with the hot gas, getting three or four times as much power out of the coal as does today’s steam locomotive. (Built experimentally by John I. Yellott of the Locomotive Development Committee, Baltimore.) There is no reason why this engine can’t be used to drive ship propellers and factory wheels.

But why mine coal, haul it to factories, pollute the air and run up laundry bills? Why not burn it where it lies, pumping air down a pipe to keep the fire going, and collecting the fuel gas as it comes up another pipe? (Now done experimentally by the Alabama Power Co.) If oxygen becomes cheap enough, it could feed the fire to make richer gas, which might be distributed through pipe lines like oil, or burned at the surface and converted into electric power.

That brings us to another great need—an efficient method of transmitting electric power over a thousand miles. However it may be arrived at, power decentralization is one of America’s most important goals. Aside from a military value that we hope will not be tested, it should contribute immeasurably toward promoting freer competition and providing more living space and recreational opportunities for everyone.

THE man of 40 will live to be flabbergasted by new strides in transportation. Before long, robot planes with recording instruments will probably penetrate the transonic speed barrier, that mysterious region lying between 650 and 950 m. p. h. Will these pioneers pave the way for human flight at 1,000 m.p.h. or better, and if so, what motors and airfoils will be used and how will they behave at a slowpoke 400 m.p.h.? Planes have already reached speeds that rival the pace of their own bullets, and pilots who bail out have to be blown from their seats by explosives. There will come a time, determined by the length of the average journey between points on earth, when further speed will not pay. If you’re going on a quarter-mile errand, you don’t step up your car to 80, and we can apply such a formula to air distances and speeds.

The future of really fast travel lies in the waste spaces of the heavens. A V-2 rocket has already been sent up 114 miles (White Sands Proving Ground, Dec. 18, ‘46), and as Dr. Fritz Zwicky puts it: “We first throw a little something into the skies, then a little more, then a shipload of instruments—then ourselves.” Restless man will probably throw himself at the moon, at Mars, and at other chunks of matter and return to write books about it. Experts report that it’s only a matter of mathematics, but first a few problems must be solved. While man’s body can safely travel at any known speed, with too sudden a change in speed or direction his more easily detachable components, like blood and entrails, proceed in an opposite, or tangential, line of march. The more efficient a rocket is, the more likely it is to annoy its crew in this manner, since it must lighten its fuel load by quickly turning it into driving energy. This may cause acceleration too rapid for health. A compromise is indicated, and research toward creating new fuels that will give more power per pound. If lightweight shields against radiation are discovered, atomic power may bring about interplanetary travel.

To serve man best, earth-bound aviation will concentrate on economy, convenience and safety, with safety first. We have an array of tools—Ground Control Approach, Instrument Landing System, Loran, fog-dispersal methods, to name a few—that in some combination should make blind flying about as safe as taking a bath. For convenience, we need among other things a reliable low-priced helicopter. Maybe it will be driven by jets mounted on the tips of the rotors. Such a machine may sometime supplant taxi-cabs, ambulances, fire engines, cow ponies and crop sprayers.

NEWLY developed tools for communication, when fully applied, will match comic-book dreams, just now we are beginning to move radio broadcasting from the noisy, crowded, low-fidelity AM band upstairs to FM, where music sounds the way it’s made and there is room enough on the air for thousands of stations instead of hundreds. The transition should be virtually complete in a few years. Beyond that lies a time when telephone and telegraph poles will be sold for firewood, and microwave relay networks (used experimentally by A. T. & T., I. T. & T., Western Union, General Electric and Raytheon) will cover the country, using wave lengths a few inches long to carry all oral and visual intelligence, including FM broadcasting, phone calls, telegrams, television and facsimile.

By means of such a co-ordinated system, a general in the Pentagon could throw on his office screen radar scopes in any part of the country and see what planes are in the air, and the telephone band could be so wide that every house in a city of 10,000 could have its own radiophone wave length. (Predicted by Dr. M. H. White, of Princeton, formerly of the Radiation Lab.) The networks may be extended throughout the world by putting relay stations in planes that spell one another in the stratosphere, (proposed by Westinghouse) or by bouncing the microwaves off the moon. (Planned by Federal Telephone and Radio Corp.)

Tiny radio receivers and transmitters, with circuits printed instead of wired (see p. 101), will be as common in pockets as fountain pens, with great savings in time, gasoline and shoe leather. In short, everyone may soon become accessible to everyone else, and that, too, is something for the thoughtful scientist to brood about.

PERHAPS the most ambitious goal of science is the duplication of the process of photosynthesis, by which plants, with the catalytic aid of their green chlorophyll, utilize the sun’s energy in the production of sugar, starch, proteins, fats and cellulose—without which life on earth would end. If the efforts of many brilliant research men (like Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch, of MIT) should bear fruit, there might ensue a golden age of plenty for all mankind. Many developments may be expected in the field of nutrition. Will a protein-deficient world eat cheap “beefsteaks” made from yeast? (Developed by Anheuser-Busch.) Will we feed our animals proteins made from wood scraps (pilot plant at University of New Hampshire), or on cheap synthetic urea made from coal? (Feeding tests at Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station.)

Will our descendants have everlasting teeth from drinking water containing fluorine?

Man may hope for the conquest of his crudest diseases—cancer, rheumatic fever, arthritis and polio—if he really wants it. But not while he spends two billions for a weapon and passes the hat for health. Fund-raising drives may warm the heart, but they are no match for carcinoma, -which is not sentimental.

THE huge industrial metropolis, a fairly new development in man’s history, is one of his worst mistakes. The pattern of degradation is familiar: Real estate owners chop up dwelling units and create congestion, then those who can afford it move to the suburbs, leaving behind them run-down areas that yield low taxes. Then the city tries to stave off bankruptcy by floating bond issues, underpaying teachers and levying sales taxes. All the while, radial superhighway approaches are being built to jam the streets from curl) to curb with transient vehicles. As a result, the place isn’t fit to live in, and even its millionaires cannot buy the sunlight, clean air and recreation space that the village handyman gets for nothing. But cities can be excellent places for living, if we will heed scientific “visionaries” who are concerned with the needs of human beings.

If we select a number of ideas that have been proposed by advanced architects and planners, the city of the future may look like this: It will be surrounded by a multilevel belt highway near which industry will be relocated to isolate much heavy traffic. Within this great circle, the city is divided into self-contained sections, each circled by a one-way “ring street” to prevent through traffic and to restore to residential streets the character of additional “living space” that they had in the horse-and-buggy days. (Proposed for New York by architect Hermann Herrey.) Since it has been shown that the building of more and wider streets and more parking places simply lures more cars into town to fill the vacuum, all incoming private cars, with few exceptions, would park in lots provided at the city limits, where the occupants would receive free bus tickets to the center of the city. (Plan now being tested in Baltimore.)

METEOROLOGISTS would aid in city planning, breaking up streets to check cold winds. Walls of city gardens and courtyards and walls lining streets would have large louvres, like outdoor Venetian blinds, set to catch the sun’s heat rays in summer and bounce them back into the sky. (Proposed by Dr. Albert E. Parr, Director, American Museum of Natural History.)

All heavily traveled sidewalks would have awnings or roofs to protect pedestrians from the elements (proposed by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward), and snow would be melted on midtown streets by radiant heat from pipes imbedded in the pavement. (Now used on a road in Belmont, Mass.) Better still, snowstorms over cities may be prevented by sending planes to “seed” the clouds with dry-ice pellets, making them dump their cargo in the country. (Done experimentally by Vincent J. Schaefer, General Electric Co.)

These may not be the answers, but cities will adopt plans equally revolutionary, or slide further into their morass of fiscal and architectural bankruptcy.

WE MUST lessen the gap between the scientist and the rest of the world. The scientist is not a mysterious genius. He is an ordinary man with a highly developed respect for provable facts, who has learned accurate methods for sifting those facts from the chaff of conjecture, legend and wishful half-beliefs. The man who masters a balky furnace and the woman who bakes a better muffin are often unconscious scientists.

People must come to a better understanding of laboratory men and their methods, for science plans our future and sends us the bills. When we don’t know how to read them, we sometimes get stuck. And that’s not all. History shows that it’s dangerous for members of a small, powerful minority to consider themselves universally misunderstood. If we don’t knock on their lucite towers and ask them to the clambake, a few ingrown fanatics may try to run the world on their own, and there will be a loud and final bang.

The responsible scientist of the future will be increasingly concerned with social problems. When people say that a certain human dilemma lies beyond the scope of science, it is often more accurate to say that scientific analysis has not yet been successfully applied to it. Race prejudice is one of the most challenging fields for tomorrow’s scientists, and no one knows what physician, psychiatrist, anthropologist, eoologist or economist may discover facts that will help to end lynchings and ghettos. To what extent is race hatred a function of the income, occupation, nutritional status, dental condition and folk habits of the hater and the hated? Nobody knows. Science should explore the dark problem.

Juvenile delinquency, venereal disease and assorted neuroses present more jobs for enlightened scientists. It is not enough to treat these maladies after they occur. What would be the preventive effect of subsidized early marriages? Animals mate blamelessly when they reach biological maturity. Homo sapiens is expected to wait until he gets a raise or a house to live in. What ills derive from his abstention, or from his guilt at violation of the social code? If a billion-dollar research project established facts leading to a 10% improvement, it would be the greatest bargain of the ages. Also, manufacturers might sell more refrigerators.

The organization of our industry and agriculture has made us into a nation of movers. Trends in population movements should be anticipated, and practical methods should be adopted to ease the shocks of a family’s readjustment to the new locale.

Today no enlightened corporation builds a big plant without considering the housing and transportation facilities available to its employees. What happens to the employee and his family when the plant shuts down or moves somewhere else is of equal importance to society.

Today, scores of eminent scientists, horrified at the killing power of the splitting atom, are earnestly working to unite all peoples in a master plan to harness it in the service of life. We’d better help them, and do it fast. Once we have jailed this bloodthirsty outlaw, the same plan can be used to control other scourges, both man-made and natural. Man will then have a chance to ful-fill his destiny through science. Until then, we live by the skin of our teeth, awaiting the White Pillar of Doom.

Kerosene Lamp Powers Radio

REMOTE areas of Siberia and China use thermoelectric generators like the one shown here to convert heat from a kerosene lamp into electricity for radios.

The 20-lb. device is being studied by scientists at the Martin Co., Baltimore, Md., where similar direct conversion principles have been applied to nuclear heat sources. They paid $56 for the Russian-built device.

A series of thermocouples is arranged around the upper portion of the lamp. As each set of elements is heated at one end by the lamp, a small amount of electricity flows through the pair. Metallic fins remove the excess heat.

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Room with Bath – On Wheels

IF YOU SAW Louis Matter’s car rolling along the streets of San Diego, Calif., you’d probably consider it just another attractive automobile. But if you looked inside the car you’d find everything from a barbecue pit to an Arabian water-cooled pipe. And if Mattar really wanted to show off his wondrous vehicle he might let you take a shower bath just off the right front fender.

Mattar has equipped his 1947 Cadillac with more luxuries than can be found in most homes. Just to the right of the driver’s seat is the Arabian pipe. If someone else happens to be driving, Mattar can pull the long tube all the way to the back seat where he can puff in pleasure. Installed beneath the pipe is a demountable wire recorder and beneath the dash is a miniature soda fountain. Switches operate electric pumps to send the beverages flowing
out through spigots. And beneath the fountain is a pull-out sink.

In the rear seat, Mattar can pull down the center armrest to reveal the electric barbecue, which slides out along its own tracks.

After a dip in the ocean, Mattar takes a shower bath under a fresh-water spray. He removes a dummy radio antenna from the right front fender and slips a pipe and shower head into place. Water is pumped from tanks in the engine compartment, with the water in one tank heated in copper tubing wound around the engine exhaust. Press a button and the water sprays out at the right temperature.

Mattar, who owns a garage, eventually plans to install hot running coffee, a television set, a two-way telephone and a table in the back seat. When that’s done he figures he’ll buy a brand new car and start switching his improvements to it.

Motorized Trailer Pushes Bicycle

An itinerant knife grinder has devised a “cart-before-the-horse” rig to ease his labors on long-distance bicycle journeys. When he tires of pulling his trailer, with its motor-driven grinding machinery, he hitches the motor to the wheels and the trailer pushes him.

Monkey Tells Time By Rolling Eyes
You have to look a monkey in the eye to tell what time it is on a novelty clock manufactured in Germany. The monkey’s right eye tells the hour and the left eye the minutes. The eyeballs revolve as the minutes elapse and a line painted on each iris serves as a clock hand. At quarter past three, the monkey has a sly expression, looking out of the corners of his eyes. At six o’clock, the monkey becomes completely confused with one eye looking up, the other down.

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World’s Strangest Circus PRODUCED BY AMATEURS

By A. Morton Smith

LEARNING to turn somersaults from the back of a cantering horse, to hang by one’s teeth high in the air, or to run and dance on a tight wire after the manner of circus performers, is not necessarily limited to those who have spent their lives under the big tops, or those possessed of physical development and endurance particularly fitting them to excel in this field. That the many and varied arts of the circus may be mastered by any normal person who has the will to engage in extensive practice, has been conclusively demonstrated by a unique organization in the little city of Gainesville, Texas.

Francis Leach is considered an accurate and speedy telegraph operator in Gainesville, but he can also turn as neat a row of flip flaps and back somersaults as the most seasoned veteran of the sawdust ring. Mabel Cunningham spends most of her day cooking meals, sweeping floors, making beds, and catering to the whims of her four-year-old son, Tommy. When the day’s chores are done, however, she amuses herself by climbing a rope hand over hand some thirty feet and learning new and daring stunts on the Spanish web. While Bill Ritchie does not find mixing ice-cream sodas and cherry-nut sundaes such an exciting job, he does get a thrill out of diving from a trapeze and catching by his toes as he drops through space.

None of these people aspire to become famous stars of the arena, but they are members of the Gainesville Community Circus, the only show of its kind in the world since its personnel is composed entirely of citizens of the town, none of whom has had any professional experience. Yet, this community circus presents a program in three rings which runs the gamut of circus thrills, from loop-the-loop trapeze performers to the slide for life, from shoulder-to-shoulder somersaulting acrobats to head-balancing perch-pole artists.

WHY such an organization is perpetuated and expanded year after year, is difficult to explain, for the town, with a population of 10,000, has not given to the circus world one outstanding artist, no circus caravan has ever maintained its winter quarters there, and the city park does not even boast of a zoo.

Just as a diversion from its routine of dramatic fare, a little theater club in Gainesville produced a burlesque circus in the spring of 1930, and from this show has grown the community circus, now composed of 150 members, who pitch their tents each fall at county and district fairs in Texas and Oklahoma, to provide entertainment for the amusement-seeking crowds. When there are profits, they are invested in additional equipment, for no member receives any remuneration for his services and, in addition, provides his own costumes and rigging.

Anyone who displays enough interest to buy equipment and is willing to give the time required for rehearsals, can join the circus. Usually the performers learn acts that are assigned to them. During the winter months, a committee arranges a tentative program for the next season and selects members to learn new acts. Seldom are there failures in the ranks. The “iron jaw” girls, or the young women who hang by their teeth, furnish a striking example of training for the show.

Prior to the present season, the circus had no “teeth” acts and the program committee welcomed the opportunity to add such a number when a professional aerialist came to town and organized a class of girls for aerial acts. Seven were chosen to learn to hang by their teeth. Six of them were already members of the circus. They ranged from ten to twenty years of age, several of them school students, one a sandwich-shop waitress. When the girls went to a dentist to have plaster impressions of their mouths made, from which hard rubber casts are obtained for the manufacture of their mouthpieces, one was eliminated. The dentist said she did not have all of her permanent teeth.

THE other six girls began rehearsals, devoting an hour daily to the work, six days a week. These rehearsals tested their mettle, for there is no more painful, and exhausting act in the circus program. During the first month, the girls were able to hang by their teeth for only a few seconds at a time and great quantities of liniment were applied to sore necks. During the second month, they learned to swing pendulum fashion a few feet from the ground, and at the end of the fourth month, they were ready for the show, doing a standard “iron jaw” routine.

Billie Lu Purcell, a junior college student, became so proficient in the teeth act that her instructor devised a special endurance number for her. The young woman hangs by her knees from a high bar and with her mouthpiece supports a spinning girl.

Rehearsals are conducted the year round at frequent intervals and are intensified when a new season is near at hand. Group rehearsals are held at the homes of several members and each of the performers who do individual acts, has his own practice equipment. Practice rings for rehearsals of bareback riding and for training horses, are maintained at the homes of Virgil P. Keel, a grain dealer, and W. A. Murrell, an electrical engineer. These men are owners of several horses used in the circus performances. The Murrell home is the scene of rehearsals of the entire show for on the spacious grounds is laid out a complete arena with a sawdust ring, an iron frame supporting rigging for aerial acts, and an elevated stage for acrobatic turns. A gymnasium where performers learn tumbling, horizontal bar work and tight wire walking has been fitted up in a vacant room at the sporting goods store operated by S. G. Staniforth, who trains and participates in the acrobatic numbers. There is hardly an hour in the day when some individual is not working in this practice room.

REHEARSALS of the clowns are conducted principally on paper, that is, the devising of new gags, and their favorite gathering place is the office of the county tax collector in the courthouse, for Joe B. Pettit, postmaster of Gainesville, and Wayne Collins, deputy county tax collector, are the principal clowns, who conceive the acts and walkarounds for the score of funmakers. In a workshop at his home, Collins constructs the equipment.

Every precaution against injury during rehearsals is taken by instructors in charge of acts. The practice rings for the bareback acts are designed to save the performers from damaging falls. They are thirty-two feet in diameter, matching in size those used in the circus tent, but unlike the wooden ring curbs, eight inches high and six inches wide, which are used for performances, the practice rings are constructed of eight-inch shiplap staked out to form a circle, and then generously dirt-banked to provide a soft landing place for the inevitable falls.

In the practice of bareback acts, the performers are further aided by leaping boards, which are elevated about ten inches from the ground, with slanting surfaces.

The embryo performer is aided in leaping on the back of the galloping horse by this elevation which is discarded as soon as the rider becomes proficient in timing his leaps to insure an artistic performance.

A mechanic, or safety belt, has been found indispensable in the practice of several types of acts. A leather belt, which fastens around the performer’s waist, has large harness rings sewed on each side, to which are attached ropes that run through pulleys hung from the ceiling of the gymnasium or from the frame to which aerial rigging is attached. The ends of the ropes are held by the instructor or assistant, and when a performer makes a slip and a fall is inevitable, he is prevented from striking the ground by the assistant who takes up the slack in the rope and leaves the performer suspended in the air. The mechanic is used for practice tumbling which involves somersaults and flip flaps, tight-wire walking and certain aerial acts.

The safety belt is discarded only after the instructor and performer are confident that the act has been perfected.- As a result of these precautions, there has never been a serious accident during the sixty performances given by the circus in the past five years.

Performers have been injured but, curiously enough, they were hurt only in rehearsals and no one has been prevented from continuing his circus activities. Ray Whit-taker, telegraph messenger boy, sustained a broken arm making an improper landing after turning a somersault from a teeter-board. Mrs. Floyd Garret, who is instructor for the aerial ladder act, broke her left arm at the elbow while demonstrating for a class of girls. Dorothy Murphy had practiced daily for three months in a bare-back riding act, only to catch her toe in a hand grip on her horse’s rigging on the eve of the first performance of the season, and suffered a broken leg in the fall. County Judge B. F. Mitchell, 67, the oldest member of the circus, missed the net into which he was supposed to jump during the clowns’ fire-house act; and suffered a wrenched back. For several weeks he conducted court from his bedside.

From one year to another, the quality of the program has improved. The first two years, several of the acts were not strictly of a circus nature. In the beginning, only men and boys took part in strenuous acrobatic and aerial acts and to add a feminine touch to the performance, there were solo dances, ballet and human statue numbers. Typically amateur features were barrel walking and rope skipping, and from the popular sport of the southwest, the rodeo, were borrowed rope spinning and trick riding.

These fill-in numbers have been gradually eliminated and today the program is exclusively circus from the opening tournament to the high-school and dancing horses that close the show. Oddly enough, there are now more feminine performers in every type of act than men. Girls have learned trapeze, acrobatic, riding, tight wire, and balancing feats with even more enthusiasm and skill than the men and boys.

There has been a minimum of professional training of performers. Two years ago, a professional contortionist spent two months in Gainesville and trained several youngsters in contortion work and a group of girls to perform on aerial ladders. Last winter, two professional performers, James Parker, an English gymnast, and Ethel Livingston, one-time aerialist of Sells-Floto Circus, spent several months in town. They organized classes, Parker teaching acrobatic routines, while Miss Livingston gave instructions in trapeze, roman rings, and “iron jaw” acts. Otherwise the performers have been taught by volunteers from the amateur ranks of the circus, who have studied the work of professional artists seen by frequent visits to the circuses which tour that section of the country.

The program is presented in two rings, on an elevated stage and on a hippodrome track which surrounds the arena. This season, the performance consists of eighteen numbers with from two to eight acts presented simultaneously, opening with a pageant in which the performing personnel is attired in oriental costumes. Mrs. Pauline McArdle, a church choir soloist, is prima donna, and Camilla Williams, a dancing teacher, is premier dan-seuse. A fireworks display closes the spectacle.

Acts change at the direction of J. N. McArdle, a cotton merchant, who is ringmaster or equestrian director, his shrill whistle a mace of authority. The aerial acts include girls on swinging ladders, the “teeth” acts, single trapeze performers and others who work on the loop-the-loop trapeze, Spanish web, roman rings, aerial cradle, and double trapeze. The animal acts include juvenile and adult bareback riders, high-school and liberty horses, and a high-diving dog. The ground numbers include two tight-wire acts, juvenile and adult tumbling groups, and horizontal-bar artists. The clown numbers feature comedy acrobats, bucking mules, a synthetic giraffe, a funny Ford, and the clown firehouse act, as well as numerous clown walkarounds on the track which take up time between numbers as rigging is being changed by the property men.

IN THIS diversified program are several features which would do credit to any circus program. Little Jimmie Scruggs, an eleven-year-old school girl, performs on the loop-the-loop trapeze. Mrs. Geraldine Murrell, young society matron, supports the weight of a 200-pound man on a rope looped around her waist as she does a split on the roman rings. Margaret Talley, beauty shop operator, throws her body over a trapeze bar in a muscle-grind endurance test as many as 103 times at a single performance. Verne Brewer jumps a table held above his tight wire, and Camilla Williams does a split while performing on a tight wire. Virgil Keel’s troupe of bareback riders offers a unique feat, two girls mounting the shoulders of George Tyler, gasoline filling station operator and principal rider, to do a “three high” on the galloping horse. And the feature of the acrobatic act is a “basket” somersault by young Joe Pet-tit, Jr., twelve-year-old son of the postmaster-clown, who stands on a basket formed by the arms of two fellow acrobats and is tossed into a backward somersault to land standing on the shoulders of another youth twenty feet away.

Most of the equipment used in the circus is homemade under the direction of W. A. Murrell, who is general superintendent of the circus. In several instances, it has been necessary to invent equipment for certain acts. This is true in the case of the loop-the-loop trapeze. The amateur performers had seen such an act in a professional circus. An aerial bar was attached to steel uprights instead of ropes, and standing on the bar the performer revolves arouncd the crane bar. Using steel tubing and two discarded automobile bearings, a satisfactory loop trapeze was made in a Gainesville machine shop.

THE funny Ford used by the clowns, which apparently is operated without a driver, was a stock car donated to the circus by a Gainesville automobile dealer, and transformed into a trick machine by Lloyd Saunders, an automobile mechanic, who is the circus’s volunteer electrician. Saunders removed the back seat of the machine and arranged a covering of upholstery which gives the effect of a back seat, but allows a driver to sit on the floor of the machine with his back resting against the rear of the car, and hidden from view by the false seat cushion. The driver’s quarters are so small that the steering wheel is removable and is fitted onto a short vertical steering post between the driver’s legs only after he is seated. Pedals for clutch, brake, and gearshift are set in the floor of the machine under the front seat and made workable by iron rods connected with the regular pedals. The hidden driver operates a starter by hand, and in addition to driving the machine, fires a revolver for blow-out effects, operates an air compresser which squirts a stream of water from the radiator, blows a horn and rings a bell for a telephone attached to the side of the car.

The trampolene bed used by the clown acrobats is still another example of ingenuity called forth by lack of capital. The trampolene consists of an iron frame seven feet wide and fourteen feet long resting on legs two feet high. Stretched in the frame is a canvas bed on which the acrobats bound. Lacking the trampolene springs used by professional artists, the resourceful amateurs made a bed of fourteen-ounce canvas doubled and securely sewed, and attached it to the frame with strips of discarded automobile tire tubes, one inch wide and spaced two inches apart along the sides and ends of the canvas. While the strips of rubber must be frequently replaced, the bed has sufficient spring to allow for double somersaults and other straight and comedy effects.

DURING the performances the equipment is handled by fifteen property men who volunteer their services. These property men include among others, a civil engineer, an insurance salesman, a dry-cleaning plant operator, a city street department foreman, and several college football players.

When the circus goes on the road, the paraphernalia is moved from town to town on trucks. On show day, the performers go about their daily tasks as usual and leave Gainesville late in the afternoon, motoring to the scene of their night’s performance. They return home after the show and the procedure is repeated each night of the engagement. Thus they do not lose any time from their regular employment. Citizens of Gainesville volunteer the use of their automobiles to transport the performers.

The circus is governed by a board of directors. George J. Carroll, a mortician, is president; Dr. Jerry C. Price, a physician, is vice president; and D. E. O’Brien, a bank cashier, is secretary-treasurer.

The membership is democratic to the extreme, and no person of good character who wishes to belong, is refused admittance. There are no dues and no by-laws. In the ranks are society leaders and railroad brakemen; city officials and messenger boys; bankers and newspaper reporters, lawyers and ranchmen.

There are few circus “widows” for when one member of a family joins the circus, others follow. Mayor Frank Morris, Jr., is snare drummer in the circus band and his son, Fletcher, is an acrobat. Floyd Garrett is chief rigging man and his wife, Sarah, is an aerialist. Yancy Culp is an acrobat and his wife, Mildred, is wardrobe mistress. Portis Sims is the female impersonator of clown alley, and his daughter, Jane, is a trapeze performer.

ALTHOUGH the show has been in existence for five years, none of the members have graduated to the ranks of the profession. Salaries are notoriously low in the small traveling shows and while numerous offers have been made to members of the amateur circus, in every instance the opportunity has been declined.

“What if I did join a real circus?” says Ray Whittaker. “When I came back home they wouldn’t let me take part in the community circus, for then I would be a professional. No, sir, I’ll keep my amateur status.”

The various members of the circus give different reasons for the pleasure they find in it. Some like the spirit of cooperation and comradeship it fosters; others are thrilled by the sense of achievement in mastering difficult feats. Gainesville is justly proud of its circus as a wholesome community activity.

Night Club in Cave Whips Summer Heat

ST. PAUL, Minnesota, boasts a new night club said to be without equal anywhere in the world for novelty and comfort during torrid summer months. Called the “Mystic Caverns,” the club occupies a labyrinth of caves which form a natural refrigerator with a year round temperature of 48 degrees.

The subterranean chambers where the revelers disport themselves have their opening in the face of a towering sandstone cliff bordering the Mississippi. Once you step inside you are literally in the bowels of the earth, with solid sandstone walls all around you and 150 feet of solid sandrock overhead.

About eight degrees of heat make the atmosphere decidedly comfortable inside the caverns when the mercury is flirting with the hundred mark outdoors. In winter, 20 degrees of furnace heat convert the labyrinthine chambers into a cozy beer hall.

CHINESE WINDMILL WATERS FARM
Adapting an Oriental idea for raising water for his own needs and to irrigate his fields, a California farmer has constructed the curious apparatus shown in the accompanying photographs. Power from a windmill, transmitted through gears, revolves a spiral-shaped tube of pipe open at both ends. The outside end dips into a water-filled ditch at each revolution. Water is thus picked up, and runs by gravity around the spiral to the hub as the wheel revolves. An opening in the hub dis-charges the water into a trough four feet above the level in the ditch, giving a sufficient lift for the irrigation purposes desired.

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Neon Lamp Traces Sound Wave’s Picture
That’s a sound wave you see in the picture above. Here demonstrating how an acoustic lens focuses sound from a horn, the wave was made visible with the device at left—an aluminum rod with a microphone and a neon lamp at the end. A small motor swings the rod in a wide arc, scanning the area. The microphone picks up the sound and turns it into electric current to feed the lamp. Wherever the sound is strongest, the light is brightest, and the wave is traced out. A complete sound photo, such as this from Bell Labs, takes 10 minutes exposure.

ICEBOX ON WRIST TO COOL THE WHOLE BODY

Purdue University physicists say the whole body may be kept cool during the hottest weather by a recently developed miniature refrigerator that straps to the wrist in the manner of a watch. The refrigerator is somewhat larger than a wrist watch and encloses a pellet of dry ice— solid carbon dioxide. As the dry ice evaporates, it forms an invisible gas. Escaping from the case, the gas has the same effect as cold water poured over the wrists. It lowers the temperature of the blood in the arteries and this cooled blood is carried to every part of the body. The metal case is insulated from the wrist by rubber, as the temperature of the dry ice is 109 degrees below zero and its contact with the skin would result in a severe burn. With proper insulation, however, there is no danger of this occurring. And thus the device can be worn in perfect safety.

Pedaling Peddler Sharpens Scissors
Both transportation and power supply for his work are furnished by the bicycle of the British scissors grinder pictured at the left. For the rear wheel of the bicycle that rolls this sharp-witted grinder from house to house in search of jobs also whirls the grinding wheels on a shaft mounted on the handlebars. A belt connects shaft and rear wheel.

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VOODOO DO-IT-YOURSELF

IF YOU know somebody who always beats you at croquet or who likes to swat you on the head and call you, “Old aardvark”—and who doesn’t know someone like that?— then what you need is a voodoo kit. With this you’ll spend many happy hours sticking needles into a little doll and pretending it’s your playmate. Voodoo is West Indian for black magic, which is the art of inflicting pain, sickness, death and bad luck by remote control. Another profitable trick you can do with it is cast love spells. You pick a real live doll to whom you aspire and, working through your voodoo doll, draw her to you as a magnet draws iron filings. You don’t need a toothless old practitioner any more; you buy this Do-It-Yourself Voodoo Kit, which is sold by a genius named Don Poynter of Cincinnati, Ohio. Don read a crack in a magazine about how there should be such a kit and promptly went to Haiti to arrange details. It sells well to people who say they want it for laughs.

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Foam Furniture Rises Like Bread

What goes up and doesn’t come down? A new kind of furniture called “Up.” You buy it flat-as-a-pancake in a vinyl package. Cut open the vinyl and the pancake automatically expands into a modern chair. Once expanded, it cannot be recompressed and cannot be punctured.

It works like this: At the factory in Italy the furniture is molded of poly-urethane foam, and covered with stretch upholstery. Then, in a vacuum chamber, the piece is compressed to force out the air, and sealed in the airtight package. Open the package and the foam absorbs air, expanding to its
designed size and shape.

The foam in this furniture is very heavy, and dense enough to fully support you when you sit. The chair below, for example, weighs 90 pounds-packed. Price? A child’s chair costs $63; the armchair below costs $588. In the U.S. you can get it from Atelier International, 139 E. 57th St., New York City 10022.

Rose Glasses on Chickens Reduce Fighting
There was murder going on in a New Jersey penitentiary yard. The prison chickens were killing each other. One after another, the young White Leghorns would fight among themselves to the death. Nothing was effective in preventing the quarrels until the warden tried putting rose-colored glasses on the birds. That stopped the fighting instantly. The Leghorns, the only fighters in the poultry lot, now are all equipped with aluminum-framed spectacles with center pieces extending in front of the bill.