This is insane. I had no idea that anyone raced pigeons, let alone thousands of people in races that often exceeded 1,000 miles! Apparently people still race them. Check out the American Racing Pigeon Union.
Mile-a-Minute Pigeons Thrill Millions in Races Against Time
By Edwin Teale
STREAKING through the skies with the speed of crack express trains, feathered racing champions, trained by amateur pigeon fanciers, are shuttling across the map on amazing flights. In recent years, the sport of pigeon racing has spread rapidly. In the United States alone, upwards of 10,000 amateurs own lofts, and each year the American Racing Pigeon Union sends out half a million numbered aluminum bands that go on the legs of newly hatched “squeakers.” As this is written, all over the East and Middle West fanciers are grooming their prize birds for the Chattanooga National, the Kentucky Derby of the air. This annual event, held about the middle of June, sometimes attracts as many as 1,700 entries. Last year, a one-year-old male pigeon, which had never won a contest in its life, carried off the prize. It averaged almost fifty miles an hour for the 535 miles from Chattanooga, Term., to its home loft at Washington, D. C.
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Propeller-Driven Car Hangs from Monorail
An improved airline cab, capable of 155 miles an hour, is the latest invention of the French engineer who developed the trench mortar used during the World War. Suspended on monorails, the cabs resemble airplane fuselages. A small propeller at the front of the cab is driven by a fifteen-horsepower electric motor.
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This would be even cooler if there was a string to make his nose grow.
Pinocchio the Puppet
HOW TO DUPLICATE THE AMUSING LITTLE MODEL WALT DISNEY’S ANIMATORS USED
By HI SIBLEY
PINOCCHIO, the wistful puppet created by Geppetto, the wood carver, in Walt Disney’s second full-length production, is an inviting subject for either a homemade puppet or an amusing and companionable little doll. The accompanying illustrations show how to go about making one patterned after the original, which was created by the Disney model department as an inspiration to the animators drawing Pinocchio.
If you are an expert wood carver yourself, the head might be fashioned from a solid block of soft white pine and the nose inserted (Fig. 1), but a surer way to achieve a fair likeness is first to make a clay model. From this a plaster-of-Paris mold is taken, and the head is cast in plastic composition wood (Figs. 2, 3, and 4). The hat is made in the same way as the head and glued on.
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Iceless “Ice Box” Lowered in Ground Keeps the Food Cool
A COUNTERWEIGHT on one end, and a cylindrical container on the other end of a steel rope running over two pulleys supported on a pole, makes up the major portion of an ingenious contrivance for cooling foods.
The container, shown in the accompanying photo, fits loosely into a seven-foot hole in the ground lined with a steel casing. It has three shelves, and a door closes it off from the outside. Three iron rods about four feet long run from the top of this “cooler” container to the sustaining end of the rope or cable.
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This is a fun look at the city of the future. Their New York of 2000 seems fairly similar that of today, just with more blimps and less variety of food. And I can’t wait to see the giant milkquitducts “carrying great white streams into the city from the dairy regions, 200 miles away.”
Babies Born Today May See
Cities of 30,000,000, Skyscraper Sidewalks, Roof Top Airports and Food Piped As Water Is Today
By MYRON M. STEARNS
FROM the height of a great precipice two men looked down on a continuous stream of moving automobiles. Farther from the ground than the Palisades rise above the Hudson River at the highest point, they were on no natural crag. They were looking down from a window on the twentieth story of a New York hotel—not a fabulous building of a hundred years hence—but a matter-of-fact structure of today. Dinner was served in their room. The fish had traveled more than 6,000 miles to reach them— Alaska salmon. The steak came from a steer raised near the Mexican border, shipped a thousand miles to be “finished” by a special feeding, another five hundred miles to be dressed, and still another thousand miles in refrigerator cars to reach the metropolis. Fruit from Southern California, vegetables from Georgia, olives from Italy. And the eggs in the Mayonnaise dressing for the salad—no joking—were laid on the other side of the world, in China, nearly two years before. It was good Mayonnaise, too. There was a knock at the door.
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Baskets Rolled Him To Riches
Grocer S. N. Goldman looked at a folding chair and came up with a $1,000,000 idea-collapsible wire pushcarts.
By Gilbert Hill
MOST folks look too far away for that “big chance.” It’s usually right in front of you, just daring you to do something about it.
S. N. Goldman, of Oklahoma City, believes this. He can prove it, too, because he’s built a multi-million-dollar business —on the side, away from his regular business—with a product known around the world, just by “looking close.”
Goldman is a groceryman. He operates 30 huge super-markets in Oklahoma in his Standard & Humpty Dumpty chain. But he’s just a little guy in the grocery business compared with some firms and yet many of his competitors couldn’t get along without him.
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Wow, the airplane ride and especially the skyride look awesome.
Mechanical Wonders of Chicago World’s Fair
“CENTURY of Progress” is the name given the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and the whole show is well named, for it is an exposition depicting the progress of man’s advance in civilization in the last 100 years. And this progress revolves almost entirely around the advances made in science and mechanics in that length of time.
Every conceivable mechanical oddity worth displaying is on show, and each month during the course of the exposition Modern Mechanix and Inventions will display for readers who are unable to view the fair an increasingly augmented series of unusual pictures to help carry the true import of the exposition.
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Service Station for Skeletons
Medical-School Specimens Overhauled in Novel Shop
FIRST AID to skeletons! That’s the business of a strange “hospital” in New York City that annually takes apart, cleans, repairs, ana reassembles scores of dusty and damaged skeletons sent in by medical schools where they are used for study and demonstration. After skilled technicians have finished work on the eerie figures they are returned to their owners as good as new!
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