Salvaged Bomb Makes Juvenile Space Ship
Its central structure a discarded 500-pound aerial bomb, a juvenile “space ship” gives two-foot-power transportation to Gene Montoya of Honolulu. The space ship was built by Gene’s father, D. L. Montoya, in a single week end at a cost of less than a dollar. The surplus bomb is lined with rubber padding and the wire wheels are from another juvenile vehicle.

Cream Whipped By Expanding Gas

AT THE push of a button, ordinary cream, subjected to a new process, can now be turned into whipping cream. The cream is first put up by the dairy in containers of automobile steel. Rendered air-tight by the elimination of oxygen, the container next receives an injection of nitrous oxide gas. As the housewife presses the button on the top of the small cask, the nitrous oxide expands, forcing out the cream under pressure and, through aeration, whips the product.

This is a Popular Science article from 1949 which teaches budding young chemists how to make nitrous oxide. It even helpfully explains that the gas produces “a feeling of exhilaration when inhaled”.

Other articles in this series include:

• The crystal which eliminates the need for sleep.
• The dust that lets you lift a car.
• The weed that makes you feed.
• The liquid that gives you control of time and space

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The Gas That Makes You Laugh

Chemists call it nitrous oxide. You can generate this and other oxides of nitrogen in a home laboratory.

By Kenneth M. Swezey

AN ACHING tooth is never tunny, but i. the dentist who yanks it out may well first put you to sleep with a few whiffs of nitrous oxide, commonly known as “laughing gas.”

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Camera Gives Print in a Minute

NOW you can snap a picture and see it only a minute later. The camera that does this is an entirely new type. It’s the first production model of the Polaroid Land Camera (PS, May, ‘47, p. 150). It costs less than $100.
The camera uses a special film that gives you eight pictures. Each one costs just a little more than you’d pay for drug-store processing of ordinary prints of this size.
Contained in the roll of positive paper are eight tiny capsules of jellied reagent. When you advance the film after snapping a picture, a capsule is opened as it passes between two rollers. The jelly simultaneously develops the negative and forms a print. You pull out the print after a 60-second wait. For extra prints, you make another exposure or copy the original.
One control sets both shutter speed and lens opening. Numbers from 1 to 8 in an opening above the lens show whether the camera’s set for bright sun or poor light conditions. The camera has flash contacts.

This show looks like it was really cool. It’s basically American Inventor without the overt competition.

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BBC Puts Inventors On TV
INVENTIONS ARE the stars of one of the most popular television shows in Britain.

The Television Inventors’ Club of the British Broadcasting Corporation has been on the air for seven years. During this time more than 7000 inventions have been submitted to the club, of which 580 have been shown on the air. A quarter of these have caught the eyes of manufacturers and many are already in production.

The inventions range from a simple shirt stud which allows for the shrinkage of the collar, to a compressible ship’s fender which eases a 24,000-ton vessel against a dock.

A number of British inventors have hit the jackpot through the program. One of them actually did it with a better mousetrap, and the world has already beaten a path to his door to the tune of over a million sales. Years of patient observation taught the inventor that a mouse twists its head when approaching the bait and nibbles from below. His trap therefore springs when the bait is lifted—not pushed down. A tidy profit was also made by the inventor of a stair elevator for invalids. A moving step, carried on rails, is drawn up the staircase by a cable and winch. More than 500 inquiries poured into the BBC when this device was shown on TV.

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Russian car-sled has speed of about 45 mph, can tote 1,100-lb. load over firm snow.

The guy in this article absolutely fits my definition of a hacker. There was a problem where two radio stations were broadcasting the same syndicated content on the same frequency. Listeners near either station had no problem. However there were locations where both signals could be recieved. This would be fine, except for the fact that the cable running to one of the stations was longer than the other, so the signal was delayed by 1/23000 of a second. Enough to cause destructive interference. So the engineers solution was to create an acoustic delay line out of 23 feet of lead pipe stuffed with cloth and gauze with a speaker on one side and a microphone on the other. The slower speed of sound delayed the signal long enough for the two stations to be in sync.

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DELAYING THE BROADCAST

A FEW weeks ago the popular radio show, Information Please, used the following catch question:

“Who hears the speaker first, the people at the back of the auditorium, or the people 3,000 miles across the country who are listening to the broadcast of the speech?”

The catch was that radio waves travel with the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, and sound waves only 1,080 feet per second. Therefore, the answer went, the listeners three thousand miles away would hear it first.

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This is actually a really good idea. Most fans have really irritating and balky aiming mechanisms. Where can I buy one of these?

Fan in Place of Light Bulb Makes Lamp Produce Breeze

You can turn a desk lamp into a ventilating unit with a recent German invention. It’s a compact fan that screws into any light-bulb socket. The three propeller blades are plastic and the device comes in a variety of colors.

Next time you bitch about trying to get your video blogging software to work, check out what this guy had to scrape together to get an amateur TV station running in 1949. He built a garage full of equipment and had three giant antennas.

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Radio ‘Ham’ Builds TV Station

California amateur sends voice and picture over transmitter made from $500 worth of war-surplus parts.

By Andrew R. Boone

PULSING through the California skies from a weather-beaten back-yard shack, the image of a beautiful brunette flows into television receivers around San Francisco Bay. The boys who have seen her call the vision Gwendolyn.

Reproduced by a collection of secondhand tubes and war-surplus video equipment, Gwendolyn represents the first standard TV image broadcast successfully and repeatedly by an amateur. Soon, from the same station, W6JDI-TV, radio ham Clarence Wolfe, Jr. hopes to televise live images.

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Machine Speeds Pretzel Bending

THERE are more crunchy pretzels to munch when you sip long, cold drinks this summer, thanks to a new automatic pretzel-twisting machine that rolls and ties them at the rate of 50 a minute—more than twice as fast as skilled hand twisters can make them. Developed by the American Machine & Foundry Co., of New York City, the pretzel . bender is helping to meet the increased demand of pretzel lovers, who eat millions of pounds each year. On this and the following page is the story of how pretzels march from raw dough to baked twist.

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The fact is, Jean Luc Picard can make anything look cool.

Safety Holder for Fag Smokers

For men whose wives complain about ashes on the rug, the invention of a Cincinnati, Ohio man will prove a great boon. This new “safety smoker,” as the gadget is called, consists of a small box like affair of light metal, with top and sides covered by a light screen. The fag is inserted and held as shown.

Gyro-Wheel Car Zooms Along On Giant Tires At 116 m.p.h.

RADICAL in design, a pleasure vehicle, known as the “gyrauto,” has been introduced in Europe to replace the orthodox type of automobile in use today.

Designed by Ernest Fraquelli, young Italian engineer, the gyrauto is said to be capable of attaining a speed of 116 miles per hour and to operate at a much lower running cost than do more conventional cars. Seats, engine and all controls are suspended between two huge rubber-tired wheels which revolve as the car moves forward. There are accommodations for an extra passenger in addition to the driver.

The unusual piece of apparatus was demonstrated recently in Brussels, Belgium.
Fraquelli’s unique vehicle is similar in general design to the Dyno-Wheel motor bus featured on the cover of this issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions and described on page 87.