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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.

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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.

Phonograph Carried as Vanity Case Plays Standard-Size Records

Carried like a vanity case and about the same size, a collapsible phonograph that plays standard records has been invented.
The motor is wound by a detachable crank and the horn opens and closes like a telescope so that it can be folded into small space. The entire instrument weighs but little and is said to reproduce tones as satisfactorily as many larger and more expensive machines.

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The World of Tomorrow

AMERICA’S largest city next year will stage the world’s largest fair, a $150,000,000 exposition costing about three times as much as Chicago’s famed Century of Progress.

In addition to costing three times as much, the New York fair will be three times as big as the Chicago fair. The Century of Progress covered 424 acres. The New York World’s Fair of 1939 will extend over 1,216 acres.

In fact, New Yorkers point out happily, if Chicago’s Columbian Exposition and Century of Progress were combined, both of them together would not be as large in area or as costly as the fair New York is planning. And whereas the Century of Progress attracted about 38,650,-000 visitors in two seasons, New York expects to entertain 50,000,000 visitors in six months.

Building the world of tomorrow will be the New York fair’s central theme and when it opens next April 30, just 150 years after the inauguration of George Washington in New York City as our first president, it will present an example of man-made magic as amazing as the blooming of a lily out of the mire. For Flushing Meadow Park, the exposition site on Long Island, was formerly a city dump and this fair is rising out of a mountain of ashes to demonstrate how the tools and processes and knowledge of today can be used to create a better world tomorrow.

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Tanklike Tractor Carries Welder to Repair Job
Maneuverable as a war tank, an endless-tread tractor, just developed by Westinghouse engineers, carries a built-in welding outfit right to the point where it is needed for railway repairs. The fifteen-foot machine easily ambles across rails, runs along side slopes as steep as forty-five degrees without overturning, and climbs a ramp onto a flat car when its work of repairing battered rail ends and worn crossings is done. Its gasoline motor drives dynamos that supply current for the welding electrodes.

This exposition looks like a blast, I wish they still did things like this.

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History’s Biggest Show

REVIEWS WORLD’S GREATEST CENTURY

By Edwin Teale

AFTER a forty-year journey through space, a reddish ray of starlight has just struck a photo-electric cell and flashed on the lights of a $25,000,000 extravaganza of science, the Century of Progress Exposition at Chicago.

Islands to accommodate the show, were built in the waters of Lake Michigan. Grass and trees and towering buildings cover them and hundreds of thousands of glowing, gas-filled tubes illuminate the great exposition.

Covering 338 acres, the thousands of exhibits compress into the scope of an exposition the drama and wonder of history’s most amazing century of scientific advance. Under your eyes, crude rubber changes into auto tires; casein, extracted from milk, becomes a fountain pen; piles of parts turn into automobiles that speed away under their own power.

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