Wow, the airplane ride and especially the skyride look awesome.

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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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GRAVITY BALLS Tell EXACT TIME

A CLOCK without hands, which tells the exact time by the rolling down hill of steel balls, has been perfected by a Philadelphia inventor. It required twenty years to discover the secret of accuracy in rolling the balk mile after mile, but on a recent three months’ test run the clock showed a gain of only a few minutes.

The steel balls are automatically released at the top and travel in relays to the bottom on track made by two fine music wires. The mechanism starts a new ball every 2-1/2 minutes. When a ball reaches the 60 mark it enters a trip cage which lowers it onto the hour beam. When 60 balls have descended to the beam it tilts and turns indicator to next hour. The device is especially adaptable to window advertising displays.

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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Trained Cockroach Smuggles Smokes
How a prisoner in solitary confinement received forbidden cigarettes was revealed by Amarillo, Tex., jail officials. Inmates tied a cigarette and match to the back of a trained cockroach, which smuggled them into the cell.

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color

By ANDREW R. BOONE

BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.

Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.
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It’s really amazing how much these pictures look like the modern music visualizers in WinAmp or iTunes.

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Music Is Turned Into Glowing Color

Soundless Symphonies from Keys of “Organ” Projected on Screen Are Hailed as Birth of a New Art

THE audience sat in hushed and wondering expectancy within the darkened theater. Without accompaniment of sound, soft color suddenly glowed upon the screen. Slowly it moved into definite form, its modulation of figures evolving in majestic sweeps. Its hue deepened and then melted radiantly into iridescent crimson, and from the restless, ever-changing shapes a slow rhythm was born. It grew and blossomed, a symphony of light, plastic and mobile. The “clavilux,” as Thomas Wilfred, the inventor, has named the organ, opens the door to a new art, the expression of moving color and form, which the artist-craftsman believes is destined to take a place as a sister of music and sculpture. It has long been the vision of dreamers; Mr. Wilfred has actualized the dream and provided the instrument that visualizes it.
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Homemade Tractor Has One Wheel

WITH a power plant that is suspended securely inside of a big ring-shaped wheel, a garden tractor has been built largely from odds and ends by R. D. Read of Akron, Ohio. It operates like the unicycle automobile developed in England. (P.S.M. May, ‘32, p. 63.) A single-cylinder motorcycle engine was used without modification except for the installation of an additional gear for cranking, and a planetary type clutch operated from the plow handle. Read the rest of this entry »

Elevator Garage Stores Auto Under Lawn Of Home

LACKING room to build a garage at the side of his home and being forbidden by city ordinance to erect one in front or at the rear, a suburban Londoner solved his problem by installing an elevator garage under the front garden. The elevator is electrically driven and control switches within the house cause it to rise or lower within a few seconds. When in a fully lowered position, the elevator roof is flush with the ground.

Freak Movies Easy with New Amateur Camera

A NEW sixteen-millimeter movie camera now places the professional’s bag of tricks in the hands of the amateur. Fade-outs, double exposures, animations, and enlarged close-ups are only a few of the unusual shots that can be obtained merely by pressing buttons.

Besides lens turret and slow-motion shutter, this new product of the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, N. Y., has a number of other improvements not found on the ordinary high-grade home movie camera. A crank that runs the film through the camera backwards, an accurate, geared film footage indicator, a unique focusing device, and a shutter that can be opened or closed while the camera is operating are important features.
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COATS COAT COAT STORE AS NOVEL SALES SCHEME

OVERSTOCKED with a large supply of men’s spring and winter coats, a clothier in Copenhagen, Denmark, adopted a unique sales scheme. He erected a scaffolding around his store building and completely covered it from roof to sidewalk with more than a thousand overcoats. The novel display attracted prospective customers in such droves that police were summoned. Although the police ordered the proprietor to remove the display, he succeeded in selling all the overcoats.

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No Job Too Tough for Minute-Men Cops

Emergency Division of Police Trained to Handle Tragedies and Freak Accidents of a Great City

By Thomas M. Johnson

A NEW building was going up. Before it stood a big concrete mixer. To chew up stone, gravel, and sand, its vat-like interior had strong teeth, powerful flanges, and cogwheels. To keep these fed, was the job of one man who stood on a running-board and watched those teeth grind concrete. Suddenly the man slipped. Frantically, vainly clutching for safety, he toppled into the mixer’s jaws. Bruised, half-smothered in liquid concrete, he was shocked by violent pain. His leg had been caught in the cogs. Those crunching teeth were tearing flesh and breaking bones. His screams of pain and terror brought men on the run.
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PHONOGRAPH RECORD IS MADE ON PAPER

Phonograph records on paper, costing a cent or two apiece and playing twice as long as standard records, are promised by an entirely new process developed by two young Argentinian engineers. In principle the scheme resembles the method used for sound motion pictures. Apparatus in the recording studio transforms a singer’s voice into a flickering beam of light, leaving a sound track of black and white lines upon a sheet of photographic paper moving beneath it upon a revolving drum. The reproducer employs a photo-electric cell to translate the lines back into sound. The paper record is shown above.