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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This is a really fun read for anyone who has ever ridden the NYC subway and wants to know how it works. I think that besides the fact that subways are all one unified system now not much has changed since this article was written 70 years ago.

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Flying the Subway Express

by Donald G. Cooley

YOU shoot through a winding tunnel streaked with colored lights, dive under a river, zoom up on the other side, fly past crowded platforms, sway dizzily as you dash around a curve at breakneck speed—it’s a crashing, flashing, thrilling scene that thunders past as you ride the subway express!

Sightseers in New York soon discover the subway to be one of the city’s miracles. For five cents they can ride for hours or for days on the world’s most exciting underground railroad. When the American Legion held its big 1937 convention in New York, hundreds of Legionnaires stated that the big thrill of their outing came when they stood in the first car of a speeding subway train and found adventure around every curve.
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Very cool. This article was written back when they still had a big network of pneumatic tubes connecting all of the post offices in Manhattan.

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What Happens When You Mail a Letter

By Herbert O. Johansen

With the Christmas rush on, the complex network of men and machines that speeds the mails is working in high gear.

WHEN you drop a letter in a mailbox and hear the slot lid click, you probably give the lid a couple of extra flips for good measure. In return for that effort, plus licking the stamp, you take it for granted that your message of love, business, sorrow, cheer or complaint will be delivered to the right person at the right place in the shortest possible time.

And it almost certainly will be—along with the other 127,677,738 letters that are mailed in the United States on an average day—enough letters, if their envelopes were laid end-to-end, to reach from New York to Shanghai.
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Stitching Steel Into Streamliners

Budd’s new assembly line rolls out cars like cans.

By MORTON C. WALLING

AS YOU stand on a catwalk high above the plant you can scarcely see where it ends, dim in the distance, five city blocks away. The workmen dwindle to mere specks, the gigantic U-shaped welders become tiny tweezers. Toward you stretch three long, silver caterpillars: assembly lines. Here and there comes a flicker of blue flame from an arc welder, reflected and reflected again from shining stainless steel. Occasionally there is a rumbling medley of thumps from shot welders; otherwise there is only a low hum from the thousands of workmen and machines.

Here is modern technology in action—the assembly-line system the auto industry made famous. But as the great cranes swoop down along the line and the silvery bodies roll nearer and nearer you can see they are too shiny for automobiles—and too big. Each is as long as half a dozen motor cars—a stainless steel railway coach.
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Amazing Miniature Machine Successfully Makes Paper

FROM crude pulp to the unwinding of the finished rolls, this miniature paper-making machine is complete in every amazing detail.

A beater first cuts the pulp to shreds. The mass is then impregnated with 99 percent water and is passed over various screens and between rollers to shape the paper and eliminate moisture.

Sixteen feet long and two feet high, the machine turns out a four-inch roll of paper three feet long every minute. In comparison Modern Mechanix and Inventions uses enough paper in a year to cover a sidewalk 5000 miles in length.

This is awesome.

ESKIMO’S MAP OF DRIFTWOOD
An Eskimo, who had never before seen a map, has just provided the Library of Congress with the first accurate chart of the islands of Dis-ko Bay, Greenland. After a careful survey by sledge and kayak, he whittled relief models of the islands from driftwood and painted them in colors to show lakes, marshes, and vegetation. Sewed to sealskin, they form the map illustrated at left.

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High-Voltage Magic

By Eugene M. Hanson

WHEN THE mad scientist in the movies pulls the switch and his fantastic machinery begins to hum and glow, causing flashes of man-made lightning to leap and crackle around the room, you can be fairly certain that Kenneth Strickfaden is somewhere in the picture.

Ever since he created the electrical effects for “Frankenstein,” Strickfaden’s genius has been in great demand among motion-picture producers when spectacular laboratory trickery can be made to fit into the plot.

Strickfaden not only created the effects for “Frankenstein,” but also doubled for Boris Karloff in sequences which called for million-volt sparks playing over his body.

Since then, he has added his wizardry to “Son of Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” and the other sequels; the “Buck Rogers,” “Flash Gordon,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “Chandu,” and “Fu Manchu” features—altogether more than 50 movies in the last 15 years.
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WALKING IN TREADMILL DRAWS WATER

A British country dweller walks a quarter of a mile to get a drink of water, without leaving his own cellar! To raise the large bucket in his 300-foot well, Fred Hoare, of Beauworth, Hants, installed a twelve-foot treadmill beside the shaft.

When he steps inside it to take his daily constitutional, a windlass puts his exercise to practical use and winds in the cable to which the bucket, shown in the photograph below, is attached. Thus he secures his daily supply of water.

This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part One
Part Two

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