Anybody have a similar shot from today?
NEW YORK SKYLINE NOW AND FIFTY YEARS AGO
Nearly half a century lies between the two views of New York City’s skyline shown in the pictures above. The two photographs were taken from the same point—a tower of the famous Brooklyn Bridge. The upper one was made only the other day and the lower one is over forty-seven years old.
INVENTORS BY ACCIDENT
A mishap can make you a millionaire— if you’re alert enough to recognize a million-dollar idea when it hits you.
By Robert Cutler
WOULD you recognize a million-dollar idea if you fell over it? More than one man owes his good fortune to an accident —plus his own ability to learn and profit from it. Many inventions we enjoy today are the direct results of mishaps that have made their “victims” rich.
With Harry Waters of St. Louis, though, it was not one accident but a whole series that brought him a fortune. First, a stenographer in his office spilled a glass of water on him. Due for an appointment, Waters had to get a quick pressing job—not quick enough, however, to prevent his being late. So he had to take a taxi, even though he was nearly broke and desperate for money.
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I found this magazine on eBay. I thought that the author was this Arthur Miller. An article about the personal privacy threats inherent in massive government databases, written by the author of the Crucible sounded amazing. It turns out that the author was actually this Arthur Miller, and I don’t think anyone could have done a better job.
This is the most amazingly prescient article I’ve ever read. When people write about the future they are usually wrong. When people write about the future of computers, they are usually even more wrong. This article got everything right. If you changed the tense and a few bits of jargon, then handed to me and told me it was written by the EFF, I’d believe it.
Just to give you an idea of how right he was on even the basic computer stuff, here’s the second paragraph of the article. Keep in mind that this is what desktop computers looked like in 1967.
“The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.”
Forty-one years ago Arthur R. Miller laid out all of the privacy threats that we face now. The power that credit reporting databases have over us. The illegal government use of our financial and phone records. The attempt to build a master database tying all of these together. The fact that the government might consider you a threat if you so much as sent a Christmas card to someone the government has on a watch list. It’s all here. He basically predicted and laid out all of the arguments against the Total Information Awareness program and the current NSA programs that have been so much in the news.
It’s nice to know there were people who were so ahead of the curve in trying to protect our rights, and it’s a tragedy that more people didn’t listen. I think it speaks strongly to the need to pay attention to this stuff now, because this problem will only get worse.
THE NATIONAL DATA CENTER AND PERSONAL PRIVACY
by ARTHUR R. MILLER
The computer age is not to be stayed, as anyone knows who has been billed for another citizen’s charge account or has wondered what has happened to his paid-up magazine subscription. The computer science is already so advanced that experts envisage a huge National Data Center to speed and simplify the collection of pertinent information about Americans. Properly run, it could be a boon. But any person who has seen an FBI file or been party to a U.S. government “security check” has reason to know how the abuse or misuse of dossiers of unevaluated information can threaten an individual’s rights. A professor of law at the University of Michigan here discusses the precautions necessary to protect citizens from “governmental snooping and bureaucratic spinelessness or perfidy.”
Golden Signatures
By E. R. Kurnik
Whenever great men take pen in hand, they create valuable historical documents, avidly sought after by America’s autograph collectors.
AT the National Antique Show held in . New York City recently, a New Jersey housewife presented a bundle of letters for evaluation. She had found them in her attic. Sigmund Rothschild, well-known appraiser, looked them over carefully.
“Madam,” he said excitedly, “these letters are a very important historical find.”
Six of them proved to have been written by Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary to Abram Wakeman. Rothschild valued them at more than $100,000.
This seemed sadly topical.
Flying Gold Out of Tibet
Planes Invade Land of the Lamas CARRYING millions of dollars worth of gold out of Tibet by airplane is the job of a young American who has become a cabinet minister in the Government of the Panchen Lama.
Until the present, Tibet, remote and inaccessible, has resisted all encroachments of the Machine Age.
Now, the Panchen Lama, back on the throne after a 12-year exile in China, has decided to modernize the country with radios, automobiles, hydro-electric plants, and other inventions.
Boy Giant, 8 Feet Tally Weighs 365 Pounds
ALTHOUGH but sixteen years old, Robert Wadlow, Alton, Illinois, schoolboy giant is 7 feet, 10-1/2 inches tall and weighs 365 pounds. Robert added two inches to his height in the last year, and gained twenty-five pounds. At this rate it will not be long before he will be holding world’s records for tallest and heaviest men.
Doctors are watching him closely, trying to discover the reason for his unusual growth. They do not allow him to participate in high school sports.
Exposing Houdini’s Tricks of Magic
By R. D. ADAMS
The mechanic who made Houdini’s Trick Magic Apparatus
Harry Houdini, Prince of Magicians, carried with him to the grave the secrets of his extraordinary feats of illusion. Only one man, the artisan who made his magic apparatus, knows the working secrets of Houdini’s most mystifying stunts. That man, Mr. R. D. Adams, continues here his fascinating expose of the master magician’s methods.
HOUDINI was a master at the art of obtaining free publicity. No performer ever put on as many free shows for the purpose of breaking into print, and for that matter, few if any, were ever as liberal as he in the matter of entertaining lodges and other groups without charge. Many times he risked death in his publicity seeking stunts.
If you haven’t read it yet, here is part one.
I WAS A SLAVE-SCIENTIST IN RUSSIA
PART TWO
Suicide or Siberia seemed the only ways out for the “captive brains” in the secret research camp.
By Dr. Otto Maar
ART BY GURNEY MILLER
(Note: In the first part of this report (September MI) by a German scientist imprisoned in Russia and forced to do research for the Reds, Dr. Maar tells how he was arrested in the East Zone of Germany and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for “espionage” and “anti- Soviet propaganda.” With other German scientists and technicians he makes a long, harrowing journey to the Russian prison camp at Kutschino, in the environs of Moscow. Here he works on “border protection devices” for the Reds and learn first-hand of their slip- shod production methods and the ignorance of some of their scientists. Conditions at Kutschino are relatively mild. But over the prisoners hangs the threat of Workuta—a dreaded prison camp in Siberia. Now continue Dr. Maar’s remarkable story . . .)
Here is part two.
I WAS A SLAVE-SCIENTIST IN RUSSIA EXCLUSIVE!
An eyewitness report on the fate of German scientists enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.
By Dr. Otto Maar
FOR six months we have been imprisoned in the Bautzen detention camp—the first six months of a 25-year sentence to which we were condemned by a Soviet Military Court for supposed espionage and “anti-Soviet propaganda.” We squat all day on our bunks, because the cell is so small that we cannot move around in it.
One begins to run out of conversation after half a year and the only break comes at meal- times. It is an advantage to have studied physics and mathematics; you find many problems to ponder and in the seclusion of a cell it is easier to think out many of these than when free. But it is tiresome to solve differential equations in your head. A kingdom for a scrap of paper and a pencil!
U. S. Invest in Exiled Scientists?
SYSTEMATIC investment by America in European scientists of proved ability now being driven out of their own countries by racial prejudices or by other features of the vast social disturbances abroad is urged by American scientific leaders.
Just now a large number of highly skilled and able scientists among German Jews are losing their positions in that country and are being forced to emigrate, as happened recently to Professor Einstein. In Russia and some other European countries emigrations of scientific men are being forced by other prejudices or by poverty. Why not endow in perpetuity five thousand of the ablest scientific men of the world with $200,000 each? It would be the most profitable investment ever made, it is argued.
Compton gives a nice history of the rise of American science and engineering prowess as well as making some pretty good predictions here.
Some answers to this question seem clear, and others seem very uncertain. It is safe to predict that the 2002 person will be clothed with synthetic textiles which will not fade, shrink or wrinkle and in which the desired creases will stay put. Atomic energy will be in use for special, but not for general, power purposes. Gasoline will be coming more from oil shale than from oil wells, and may be already produced commercially from coal. Cancer may then be as well under control as tuberculosis is now. Television may have proved to be an instrument to perpetuate dictatorship, or to make the democratic process more effective, depending on the trends of control and public concern.
Cancer is certainly not under control, though we do have much better treatments and shale oil is only now starting to take off but he nailed clothes, atomic power and TV.
As an aside; the design of this article is really nice, however, for people who are supposed to predict the future I wish the PM’s designers would have shown a little consideration for schmucks like me who have to scan their articles. Why didn’t they realize that putting an illustration of balloons behind the text of the article would play havoc with my already finicky OCR software? (Lest you think I’m picking on PM, Modern Mechanix also had a nasty habit of doing this.
SCIENCE ON THE MARCH
By Dr. Karl T. ComptonChairman of the Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology THE AMERICAN TRADITION of mechanical skill and inventiveness, often called “Yankee Ingenuity,” goes far back of the turn of this century. It grew out of the challenge of pioneer life to a people of high native intelligence engaged in forging a new way of life in an environment of rich but undeveloped resources. But our development of scientific knowledge and its useful applications is, despite a few notable predecessors like Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Henry and Thomas Edison, essentially an achievement of the last 50 years.
While we’re on the topic of Edison, what better way to memorialize him than with a giant light bulb.
Edison Memorial Bulb Ready
A GIANT electric light bulb, 14 feet high, which will surmount the $100,000 Edison Memorial Tower at Menlo Park, N. J., in commemoration of the invention of the incandescent lamp by the famous inventor, has been completed. The bulb, in position atop the 150-foot tower, will also serve as an airways beacon.
The bulb consists of 164 pieces of glass cast in two-inch diamond patterns around a steel skeleton frame. The interior features 960 incandescent lights and a 24-inch reflector.
25 queries. 0.554 seconds.
