While not quite to this scale, Greg Leyh had an amazing pair of 9-foot tall Tesla Coils this weekend at Maker Faire.
Maker Faire was unbelievably cool and wonderful. All of the exhibits were great and the everybody was incredibly warm and generous. It was a very heartening experience. If you can, I highly recommend you go when they do it all again in Austin this October.
Giant Sparks To Thrill Visitors At Exposition
PEERING into a cylindrical cage eighty feet in diameter and equally tall, visitors to the international exposition at Paris, France, next summer, will see one of the world’s most powerful high-voltage electric generators in action. Ten-foot-long sparks will snap between huge brass spheres mounted on insulating pillars, with a sound like the cracking of a giant whip. Should any of the sparks go astray, they will be harmlessly grounded by the metal cage, which safeguards the spectators from their terrific power. Operators will control the spectacular display from within the hollow spheres, where, strangely enough, they will be equally safe.
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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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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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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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