I love the name “Devil Junk” that he gave his jeep, though it does make it sound like the kid might have a heroin problem.
The midget jeep at the left was built by Valentin Labata. of Leyte. Philippine Islands. He starts his letter by asking, “I wonder if Filipinos are qualified to enter your Workbench Award contest?” They sure are, Val. We base our awards on ability, not nationality. He goes on to say. “A 3-hp. Wisconsin engine drives one rear wheel through a belt, giving 25 m.p.h, top speed and 75 to 80 miles per gallon. The brake works through the other rear wheel. I received help from my father, who donated the engine and the wheels, and two relatives. That’s me in the middle. The other two boys are the helpful relatives.”
This is the third in a series of 5 articles I’ve scanned from an amazing 1952 issue of Scientific American about Automatic Control. Discussing automatic machine tools, feedback loops, and the role of computers in manufacturing and information theory, these are really astounding articles considering the time in which they were written.
THE ROLE OF THE COMPUTER
The multifarious control loops of a fully automatic factory must be gathered into one big loop. This can best be done by means of a digital computing machine
by Louis N. Ridenour
IF THE thermostat is a prime elementary example of the principle of automatic control, the computer is its most sophisticated expression. The thermostat and other simple control mechanisms, such as the automatic pilot and engine-governor, are specialized devices limited to a single function. An automatic pilot can control an airplane but would be helpless if faced with the problem of driving a car. Obviously for fully automatic control we must have mechanisms that simulate the generalized abilities of a human being, who can operate the damper on a furnace, drive a car or fly a plane, set a rheostat to control a voltage, work the throttle of an engine, and do many other things besides. The modern computer is the first machine to approach such general abilities.
Computer is really an inadequate name for these machines. They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them. The name has somewhat obscured the fact that they are capable of much greater generality. When these machines are applied to automatic control, they will permit a vast extension of the control art— an extension from the use of rather simple specialized control mechanisms, which merely assist a human operator in doing a complicated task, to over-all controllers which will supervise a whole job. They will be able to do so more rapidly, more reliably, more cheaply and with just as much ingenuity as a human operator.
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AROUND THE WORLD BY KART!
“They said we were crazy to try — but we’ve already traveled 10,000 miles!”
By William Glen Davis
DRIVE a kart around the world?
Man, you’re nuts! You’ll never make it!”
This was the almost universal reaction that greeted my announced intention to circle the globe on a four-wheeled beetle smaller than many a baby carriage. Now, 10,000 miles later, I like to think the scoffers have been silenced.
My plan was first to drive from Los Angeles to Mexico City and back in order to test the feasibility of a ’round-the-world trip by kart. Then I would head for New York and from there take a boat to Europe. Once in Europe I would work out the details of my itinerary.
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One interesting side note about this passage:
“Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.”
Why, you might ask, couldn’t they just put the dye in the margarine? Well it turns out that the dairy lobby in this country had/has some serious pull. They saw margarine as competition to butter and had many laws passed that restricted the it’s appearance, primarily making it illegal to dye it to look like butter. The last state to repeal these laws was Wisconson in 1967. In Quebec, Canada it is STILL illegal to sell yellow margarine. More information on wikipedia.
Oh, and does anyone think that machine below looks at all “human-like”?
GADGETS Can Make Your FORTUNE
By West Peterson
THIRTY-FIVE thousand inventions will be patented in the United States this year. If one of them is yours— possibly a simple gadget with universal appeal—you may reap a fortune!
Anything from a new household appliance to an improved method of food processing, from a unique use of plastics to another member of the wonder drug family can pay off huge dividends to the lucky— and skillful—discoverer. While it’s true that many inventions are now made by research teams in well-equipped laboratories, there’s still plenty of opportunity for the scientific or gadget-minded individual.
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This is a really cool looking car.
Home Made Streamliner
HERE’S a little workbench project you can try out some evening. But remember, the job (pictured above) took mechanical engineer Norman E. Timbs 2-1/2 years of sparetime work and cost him around $10,000.
The chassis is of tubular construction and the car itself is 17-1/2 feet long with a 117-inch wheelbase. It weighs 2300 pounds. The hydraulically raised rear deck (1) covers a Buick engine (just behind the driver’s seat), gas tank (between the wheels) and a spare tire and wheel. And the front hood (2) covers a luggage compartment.
Some pedestrians think the auto looks like a whale; others think it resembles a turtle. But, whale or turtle, all agree they’d like to own the “critter” themselves.
I wish I could clean my house this way…
Giant Cleaner Sucks Out Bus
A Chicago company cleans out 110 buses every 24 hours with a king-size vacuum cleaner that attaches to the front door’ and inhales all the debris in each vehicle. Two 28-inch vacuum fans “create air pressure behind a huge bellows that does the job. A man helps remove stubborn particles with an air hose.
For a lot more info check out this page on the amazing New York Worlds Fair ‘64 site.
Inside IBM’s World’s Fair ‘Egg’
FROM a distance, it looks like the storage tank for the Festival of Gas. But as New York World’s Fair visitors draw nearer, they find themselves in a people trap—IBM’s wonderfully zany exhibit pavilion, featuring the Information Machine.
It’s really a theater that sits atop a forest of 45 stylized, 32-foot-high sheet-metal trees. Their cleverly dovetailed branches support 14,000 gray and green Plexiglas leaves, forming a continuous, one-acre canopy.
You join a couple of thousand others who are queueing up on a complex of catwalks suspended above a shallow pool. The ramps lead to a 45-degree tilted grandstand, holding 500 spectators. Eventually, you take your place on what IBM calls the “people wall.” Its 12 tiers of seats are no sooner filled than an M.C. in white tie and tails comes gliding down above you in a “bucket.” He promises that in the next 12 minutes you’ll learn that computers make use of everyday methods we all use in our daily lives to solve complicated problems.
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I’m not sure if they still do this at the new Hayden, or if they do elsewhere, but it’s really cool. Basically using a set of mirrors they project an image of the sun onto the roof of the planetarium, so you get 26 foot wide image that’s safe to stare at.
Bringing the Sun Indoors
AT the Hayden Planetarium in New York a huge 26-foot image of the sun is being projected on the interior of the dome every day that the sun shines. This is accomplished by means of a first system of moving and fixed flat mirrors for bringing the sun’s image indoors and a second system of mirrors and lenses for enlarging and projecting it.
The actual sun is shown at the top of the drawing. Its rays are caught by an eight-inch flat mirror mounted on an axis parallel with the earth’s axis. A clock-like mechanism slowly turns this mirror as the earth’s turning “moves” the sun. This image, after passing through an opening in the building, is kept constantly spotted on a second flat mirror which is permanently fixed in position. It in turn passes the image downward to the third element of the Jong optical train, a flat mirror fixed at a 45-degree angle which turns it horizontally. The sun’s image is now where it can be used but as yet it is neither magnified nor projected.
Magnification is done in an ordinary eight-inch reflecting telescope, just as it would be if that telescope were directed at the sun out of doors; and since it is possible with any telescope to view the image not alone by looking into the eyepiece but also by projecting it on a screen at some distance from the eyepiece, the same is done at the planetarium. Here the distance is long, hence the image is very large—larger, in fact, than any solar image previously projected by similar methods. All this apparatus—the coelostat, fixed flats, and telescope—is entirely separate from the regular planetarium apparatus and could be similarly used with any ordinary house or building.
This looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
Human Squirrel Cage
THRILL ADDICTS registered their screaming approval of a German-made fun machine introduced at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park this summer. Little cars circle a drum 27 feet in diameter which supports five circular tracks. The cars are loosely attached to the tracks and, by operating a foot pedal, the rider can lock his car to the track. As the drum revolves at about 15 miles per hour, the cars go around with it. Timid riders can release the brake pedal and their cars merely rock back and forth. But braver souls press the pedals and make like squirrels in a squirrel cage.
Article about an incredible clock designed and built by a Danish Locksmith that was supposed to be accurate for several millenia. In addition the clock was to provide a dozen different kinds of astronomical data such as the the phases of the moon, precession and the orbits of the planets (Pluto is absent, I don’t think it had been discovered when the design was started).
In 1991 it was noted that many of its measurements were wrong. An examination found that grime and corrosion had were the culprits and from 1995-97 the clock was dismantled and restored.
More information on the restoration here.
A very similar, but much more ambitious and technically complex project is currently being undertaken by the Long Now Foundation. Led by Danny Hillis (founder of Thinking Machines and general all round genius) they are attempting to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years. Check out the project page for more information.
A Clock for Eternity
Jens Olsen, a little Danish craftsman — you’d have taken him for Santa Claus -— died before he finished the incredible task he set for himself. His countrymen have completed his life’s work for him—
By Kai Norredam
LATE THIS YEAR a new clock will start ticking away in the old Town Hall at Copenhagen, Denmark. It is not an ordinary clock, for this is a timepiece built for eternity, a mechanism that will keep an accurate record of the time throughout the solar system, a clock we expect to tick away for three or four thousand years.
The maze of gears and shafts in our clock is so accurate that the pointer showing the eclipses of the sun and moon makes one revolution in precisely 6798.36152 days!
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