Hospital Boasts Safety Chute

The Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Ga. is equipped with a spiral chute by means of which bed-ridden patients can reach the ground quickly in the event of fire. On each floor of the hospital there is an entrance to the chute and in an emergency the patients are slid down it on a mattress.

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Planes “Type” Messages in Sky

Radio taps the keys as seven-ship flying typewriter prints 15-mile-long placards at 10,000 feet.

By Herbert Johansen

WRITERS in the sky have abandoned old-fashioned, one-plane “penmanship.” Now they’re “typing” out their aerial messages in neat block letters.

The “keys” of Skytyping are seven planes that fly a straight, parallel course across the sky. Electronic controls puff smoke at preselected intervals to form celestial letters as in the word “T E S T,” shown in the photo at the top of this page.

A “mother” plane, flying in the center of the formation, automatically controls the entire operation. It transmits a constant stream of radio tone signals at one-second intervals. As receiving sets in each of the seven planes, including the mother plane, pick up the signals, switches are thrown in a control board that has 200 plug-in sockets. The board in each plane has been preset according to a message pattern.

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Fountains of Flame Played Like a Pipe Organ

By KENNETH M. SWEZEY

WATER, light, flame, music, and fireworks, synchronized into a vast extravaganza, are providing new entertainment thrills nightly as one of the most spectacular outdoor attractions of the New York World’s Fair.

This Lagoon of Nations display centers in a giant fountain which rises from an oval lake two blocks wide by four blocks long. Water, geysering in beautiful patterns from 1,400 nozzles, is painted in constantly changing rainbow hues by batteries of powerful electric lights from below. At climaxes in a performance, towering gas flames roar through the columns of scintillating water, from more than a hundred jets. Showers of fireworks burst overhead. Stirring music thunders an accompaniment to the display from the heart of the fountain.

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Music visualizations that beat WinAmp by about 70 years.

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The “Telecolor” Translates Music Into Light

COLOR has long been a favorite word to describe the quality and the mood of music; perhaps because some individuals inevitably associate a certain chord with a certain color. This is doubtless only an individual peculiarity; because all people do not match the same music with the same colors. However, a scientific means has been found to turn music into light; and thus make a radio program appeal to the eye (even without television), as well as the ear. The new invention, the “tele-color” shown here, differs from earlier color organs, such as the “clavilux,” in being automatic in its actions.

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Car “Crashes” Wall 24 Hours a Day
Motorists driving on Route 78 near Escondido, Calif., are startled momentarily by the sight of a car “crashing” into a restaurant. A closer look reassures them, however, since the car is really only half a car and the “crash” is painted on. The restaurant is located on a sharp curve, thus heightening the effect.

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Making of a Funny

By EDWARD W. MURTFELDT

RESEARCH workers studying the reading habits of newspaper buyers have found out that more people look at the “funny” pages than at any other single section of a newspaper. Yet few cartoon enthusiasts realize how elaborate is the process that brings a comic from the brain and drawing board of a cartoonist through the involved stages of coloring, engraving, mat making, stereotyping, and printing to its final form as
part of a published paper.

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This is so cool. I wish Les Paul would start a private radio station in my building!

Tenants Run Apartment Network
TO ENTERTAIN friends and neighbors in a New York apartment house, a group of professional radio performers operates a unique basement “broadcasting” station. Every Friday and Sunday evening, led by Les Paul and Earnie Newton, they go on the air from their homemade soundproof studio near the furnace room. Programs go to all the apartments through a two-wire ground and aerial system which had been built into the structure and previously never used.

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JAPANESE get a capsule-size view of the U.S.A. at the America Fair, sponsored by newspapers in Nishinomiya. Covering 75 acres, the fair includes models of famed American buildings as well as such natural phenomena as Grand Canyon, in miniature, of course. New York City’s sky line is represented by a detailed scale model as are many of Washington’s impressive buildings. On the lighter side are exhibits of bingo games and slot machines! Even the famous sculptures on Mount Rushmore have been skillfully reproduced, with a strange Oriental look.

Automobile With Aerial Cable Tracks Is Latest in Ferries
ALL records for novelty in the field of ferry boating have been smashed by a couple of Virginia youths. What they did to achieve this distinction was to stretch a couple of strong steel cables across a creek to form a pair of aerial tracks an which an automobile actually crosses back and forth. The tires have been removed, however, and the rims especially revamped to fit the cableway. Just in case the car jumps the track, there is an overhead trolley ready to take the load, so that passengers on the unique ferry need have no fear of an unannounced ducking. No turntable is necessary at the terminus of the tracks, for the car just backs up on the return trip

Usually old articles of the form “Your x of tomorrow” be it house, car, phone, city, plane, etc are full of ideas that are wildly off the mark or just plain ridiculous. This article about the future of phones is remarkable because virtually everything in it has come true. Worldwide Direct Touchtone Dialing, Transistorized Switching, Audio/Video data compression, Voice Recognition and rampant miniaturization. All true. Not to mention that a tiny, touchtone, color videophone you can watch TV on is a pretty accurate description of my Motorola RAZR.

I also love the idea that everyone will get a phone number at birth and keep it for the rest of their life. If you call someone and they don’t pick up, you’ll know they’re dead. Or perhaps just sleeping.

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Your Telephone Of Tomorrow

Future may bring push-button dialing, videophones, direct calls anywhere on earth and pocket-size sets.

By Robert G. Beason

ON SOME night in the future a young man walking along Market Street in San Francisco may suddenly think of a friend in Rome. Reaching into his pocket, he will pull out a watch-size disc with a set of buttons on one side. He will punch ten times. Turning the device over, he will hear his friend’s voice and see his face on a tiny screen, in color and 3-D. At the same moment his friend in Rome will see and hear him.

The disc will be a telephone, a miniature model equipped for both audio and video service. Back in 1952, Harold S. Osborne, retiring chief engineer of American Telephone & Telegraph, envisioned this tiny instrument as the ultimate shape of the phone. In the future, said Mr. Osborne, a telephone number will be given at birth to every baby in the world. It will be his for life. When he wants to call anyone, no matter where, he will merely push the buttons on his Lilliputian phone.

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Excellent article focusing on robots and computers (they didn’t really distinguish between the two at this point). Topics include: self-driving cars, robot elephants, prime number crunching computers, automatic factories, automatic sewing machines, etc. It even mentions self replicating Von Neumann machines.

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The ROBOTS Are Coming!

Our civilization is being invaded by a horde of mechanical men who are determined to change our way of life. But there’s no need to worry. It’s all in the spirit of good fellowship.

By Lester David

A STRANGE, awesome army of Things is invading the planet Earth!

This is not science fiction but cold fact. The Vanguard of this army is here already and has secured a firm beachhead. A vast body of others is on the way.

These weird monsters are busy altering your world even now. Within the next several decades, after they are firmly entrenched in farm, home, laboratory and factory, your work, your habits, your entire life will be unrecognizable.

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At Last ~ Movie Cartoons in Color

by JAMES BOWLES

After years of a successful black-and-white career, animated cartoons are due to take on the additional appeal of color, thanks to the perfection of a process which is explained in detail in this article.

THE first of 13 one-reel animated cartoon comedies in color have just been completed in Hollywood, marking the beginning of a new era in this popular form of entertainment which has already made Mickey Mouse and his cohorts the highest paid actors in the movie world, although they draw no salaries. Ted Eshbaugh, a Boston artist, is the man who has at last succeeded in producing animateds in color.

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