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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It seems to me that if the two scientists from “Firm A” are geeking out about their work and not paying attention to the “Sweet Young Thing” then they deserve to lose any secrets they may have.
Electronic Mata Haris
Watch out for that girl, laddie; you might be talking over her head but into her microphone.
AS Willie Shakespeare once said, - “There’s more to this than meets the eye!” This, in the present case, happens to be the bodice of a Sweet Young Thing, said bodice containing microphone, batteries, antenna and transmitter—constituting a miniature radio station with a range of 200-300 feet.
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Yes, I know the ASCII standard wan’t established untill 1967, but it’s the same general idea.
Typewriter Artist Produces Pictures Like Tapestry
Pictures that resemble tapestry are produced with a typewriter by Rosaire J. Belanger, a mill worker in Saco, Me. Belanger first draws a pencil sketch on a sheet of paper, then inserts it in his typewriter and fills in the sketch with various characters to produce shading and outlines. With carbon paper, he transfers the picture onto graph paper, and copies it on blank paper.
What to do for a splitting backache…
… automated caveman gets a rear-end drive
Despite his wide-open situation, the caveman on the preceding page is feeling no pain.
With fellow tribesmen, he will soon be settling down for a stay in the Ford Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Members of the “clan grin, groan, and grunt, view a giant bear with alarm, point, push, and haul a dead mammoth, draw wall pictures, and create fire. One of them invents the wheel.
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Magic Garden
Dissolve a few chemical salts in waterglass and—presto!
CHEMICAL magic in one of its most spectacular forms can be practiced by any amateur who will borrow a leaf from his high school “chem” book and conjure up a few “crystal gardens.”
These aren’t difficult to make, and require no more material than the necessary chemicals, a good size aquarium and enough sand or fine gravel to cover the bottom to a depth of about 1 inch. The aquarium is filled with a solution of water-glass (sodium silicate), and the chemicals are dropped in it. As they settle to the bottom, they grow into a colorful pattern of intertwining clusters which might resemble a submarine forest in some as yet unexplored deep.
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Excellent exposé about all of the ways slot machines are rigged to screw you.
Machines that Pick Your Pocket - AND MAKE YOU LIKE IT! —Inside Story of the Slot Machine Racket
by WALTER A. RASCHICK
No matter how clever you are, you can’t beat the slot machine racket. If you play the game, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to seeing your nickels flowing away in a steady stream, paying tribute to the engineering brains which have designed these mechanical pick-pockets so efficiently that they can’t fail to keep half or more of the coins fed into them, giving the player nothing in return except the thrill of seeing his money vanish.
“GOSH!” you’ve probably said more than once, as the symbols halted, hesitated, and then swung tantalizingly away from the center row, “I almost got the bells that time. Watch this one” —and out of your pocket and into the slot machine goes another hard-earned nickel.
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This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Beaver paratroopers!
Airborne Beavers Fight Floods
OUT in Idaho, the Department of Fish and Game is teaching eager beavers to yell “Geronimo!” These busy little creatures are being dropped by parachute to terrain where they can do their bit in the conservation battle.
Idaho state caretakers trap unwanted beavers which may be a nuisance in certain areas, round them up at central points and pack them in pairs in specially constructed wooden crates. After they are dropped, the boxes remain closed as long as there’s some tension on the parachute shrouds but pull open as soon as the chute collapses on the ground. Then, out crawl Mama and Papa beaver, ready to start work.
After they’re settled, the 40-pound, web-footed rodents multiply and become outpost agents of flood control and soil conservation. Fur supervisor John Smith reports that in carefully observed early operations,
the beavers headed straight for water and started building a new dam within a couple of days.
However, one problem still remains to be solved—a question of ethics more than conservation. Are these eager beavers bona fide members of the Caterpillar Club?
Behold! The most dreadful of Primeval Monsters, the Holstein Cow!
Bringing Primeval Monsters to Life for Chicago Fair
A remarkably life-like model of the saber tooth tiger, which ranged the primeval forests, is here seen nearing completion for display at the Chicago Century of Progress Fair, opening on the first of June.
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Coneless speaker uses plasma driver
“Jack’s Welding? My loudspeakers are low. Fill ‘em up with helium, please.”
Strange phone call? It’ll be routine for affluent audiophiles using a new speaker system, the Hill Type 1. Type 1 cabinets contain a helium bottle good for about 300 hours of playing time. Minute amounts of helium bleed into a glowing plasma, or highly ionized gas—heart of the speaker from Plasmatronics Inc. (2460 Alamo, S.E., Albuquerque, N.M. 87106).
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This is a fantastic article about the IBM ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), or Harvard Mark I. The first large-scale automatic digital computer in the USA.
Some interesting facts about the ASCC:
- It cost $250,000 in 1944 dollars.
- It could calculate using numbers with up to 23 signifigant digits. These were set with an array of 1,440 dials (check out the picture below)
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It took 3/10 second for add/subtract, 5.8 for multiplication and 14.7 seconds for division.
- It weighed 35 tons and was powered by a 2 horse-power motor. (With mhz, ghz, mb, gb, tb, dpi, ms, bps, etc don’t you think it’s time hp got back into the computer lexicon?)
- It contained 500 miles of wire
I was surprised to see a reference to the Harvard Supercomputing laboratory. I would have thought that supercomputing was a much newer term, but according to Wikipedia, it dates from 1929.
Robot Mathematician Knows All the Answers
Thirty-five tons of dials, wheels, and wires knock out problems that would take the best human expert a lifetime.
By VOLTA TORREY
SOME boy may soon work his way through Harvard University by watching a 51-foot switchboard all night in an air-conditioned basement. Behind its polished panels, electricity will be solving the longest and most difficult mathematical problems ever conceived. It will be doing everything that is known to be mathematically possible with such numbers as 12,743,287,341,045,502,372,098.
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Very interesting article about how film and photographic paper is made:
“The story behind the actual film-making begins in a huge vault where five tons of bar silver —a week’s supply of the precious metal— may be stored for almost immediate consumption.”
That’s a lot of silver, and this was only 1936!
TWILIGHT CITY — Where Snapshots are Born
“It’s easy to take a snapshot,” as 500,000,000 pictures a year will testify. But behind the click of the lens there lies a story of high speed chemistry fascinating in its scope.
The early amateur photographer carried a bulky apparatus in a portable, tent-shaped darkroom into which he plunged for a freshly-sensitized glass plate every time he wished to take a picture. Today’s amateur, exposing some 500,000,000 snapshots yearly, has at his command a vast array of lightning-speed emulsions in convenient sizes and shapes, which are ready for instant use.
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