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Washington’s Brassy Influence Peddlers

Retired generals and admirals cozy up to their old buddies to swing billions of dollars in defense contracts!

By FRANK DEGNAN

LAST JULY, three of the largest defense contractors in the nation readied plans to entertain Air Force Lt. General Bernard S. Schriever, head of the Air Research and Development Command. Party invitations described the affair as cocktails and dinner with an off-the-record chat by General Schriever about his plans and problems.

The party was suddenly cancelled when a newspaper carried a report on it. Why? Because at that very moment the House Armed Services Committee was investigating influence peddling by retired high-ranking officers suspected of using undue influence and pressure to get defense contracts amounting to millions of dollars for their new employers.

Hosts for General Schriever’s party—scheduled for the Pan-American Room of the Statler-Hilton Hotel in Washington—were Frank Pace, Jr., Secretary of the Army during 1950-53 and now chairman of the board of General Dynamics Corp.; Dan A. Kimball, Secretary of the Navy during 1951-53 and now president of Aerojet-General Corp., and William B. Bergen, president of the Martin Co.

Washington is famed for its parties for high Government officials, foreign dignitaries, industry moguls and hundreds of lesser lights. None of them outdo the serenading the high Pentagon brass gets from friendly emissaries of defense contractors with the emissary usually being a retired general or admiral. When the evening wears on and conviviality runs high, conversation turns to the lush multi-million dollar defense contracts that big companies fight for.

Up and down Connecticut Avenue and Sixteenth Street; in swanky homes and former embassy mansions; in fine hotels like the Mayflower, the Congressional and the Shoreham; these nightly gatherings entertain Government officials and generals and admirals responsible for awarding defense contracts.

Before the generals and admirals switch to civilian life on retirement, they are courted assiduously by the defense contractors who dangle the lure of high salaries to get their influence and friendships inside the Pentagon on contract letting.

How serious is this influence peddling? At a recent Presidential press conference, these generals and admirals and other influence peddlers working for large defense contractors were referred to by President Eisenhower as a “munitions lobby.” And they certainly are! In the scramble to get and keep defense contracts it’s invaluable for a company to have a few retired admirals or generals on tap. And companies spare no efforts to see they do have a few sitting around the board rooms, ready for a trip to Washington for a chat with a key Defense Department official. Here’s the importance North American Aviation, Inc., of Columbus, Ohio, places on a military man: The following is an advertisement placed by North American in the Wall Street Journal of May 7, 1959:

MILITARY ADVISOR To advise—counsel—report to high level management on military matters as they apply to long range development planning. Must be personable with high degree of speaking and writing ability. Military background with rank of Air Force Colonel or Navy Captain or higher. Experience on Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff desirable. (Author’s italics) Mail Resume to: Mr. J. A. Swanson North American Aviation, Inc.

4300 East Fifth Ave.

Columbus 16, Ohio Asked Representative F. Edward Hebert (D., La.), chairman of the House Special Investigations Subcommittee, about this advertisement: “In effect you were trying to buy not only the ability of the applicant but also the knowledge he acquired in the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization where all the papers are secret?”

How many retired military officers are now working for defense contractors? Unofficial estimates place the number at 2,500. Senator Paul “Douglas (D., Ill.) revealed that there were 769 officers holding the rank of Colonel in the Air Force or Army, or Captain in the Navy, and above, in the employ of companies that got nearly three-fourths of all defense business, with contracts running into billions.

These retired officers using their names and influence to wangle fat contracts for the companies now employing them boost the nation’s defense bill, since most of the contracts are negotiated rather than let by competitive bidding.

Listen to Representative Alfred E. Santangelo (D., N.Y.): “If we are to reduce the wasteful defense expenditures, we must eliminate the Pentagon influence by former retired general officers upon those who let contracts.”

A former assistant Air Force Secretary admitted that retired military officers did try to influence decisions at the Pentagon—at least while he was there several years ago. Edwin V. Huggins, now executive vice president of Westinghouse Electric Corp., testified to this before the House Special Investigations Subcommittee. Mr. Huggins said that while he was a top Air Force official from 1952 to 1953, some retired officers were “too evident” by their presence in the Pentagon. It was clear they were “around too much,” he added.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the atomic submarine, was asked by a Congressional committee: “Do you have visits from former associates?” He replied, “I used to, but the word got around that I’m obtuse. But they go higher up and I sometimes get pressures from that.”

Commenting on influence peddling to get lush Government contracts, Senator Douglas said that 85% of all defense contracts are negotiated by the Pentagon, rather than awarded to the lowest bidder. “When companies with defense contracts hire officers of high rank, some of whom negotiate with their fellow officers, or who may sit in the back room while such negotiations are going on, or who have information from their former comrades which is useful to their companies, the potential and actual abuses of the negotiated contract system are magnified,” added Senator Douglas.

Negotiated contracts have resulted in the Government getting gypped many times in the past. On one occasion the Government was overcharged more than $12 million on contracts because of careless negotiation. Even Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Cecil P. Milne admitted to a House Committee that the Navy did a “bad job” on the contracts.

The Government has had its pocket picked before. Largely forgotten, but still good examples of what indifference to influence peddling can cost, are past scandals. Remember the five-percenters! In July, 1949, Major General Herman Feldman, 59, who joined the army as a private and served for 42 years, finally reaching the post of Quartermaster General, was suspended by Army Secretary Gray. The charge—furnishing a contractor’s representative procurement information under irregular circumstances.

At the same time Major General Alden H. Waitt, 56, head of the Chemical Corps was also suspended because he “improperly furnished personnel data” to a civilian.

The two generals were friends of retired Army Colonel James VK Hunt, a five-percenter, whose friends helped him get defense contracts.

Getting weapons contracts from the Government is still too often conducted on a close personal basis. Recently, a top official of the Martin Company, missile manufacturers, admitted to House investigators that his firm had flown high-ranking military officers to an exclusive country club in the Bahamas for gay weekend parties. This official was George M. Bunker, chairman of the board.

Martin deducts the cost of the junkets from its tax payments. Martin has about $800 million worth of defense work under contract. Bunker said the purpose of the weekend pleasure trips was to bring about a “closer relationship” between Martin officials and those in the military, the Government and industry. He said the Martin Company picks up the tab for the weekend entertainment at an exclusive country club called Eleutheria on one of the Atlantic Ocean isles off the Florida coast.

The cost of all this entertainment to benefit the companies’ and tickle the vanity of the generals and admirals comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket. And on top of that he can get stuck again by lax negotiating of contract terms when influence creeps in.

That’s not all! The retirement pay of ex-officers also comes from the lean wallets of the taxpayer. Retired generals on defense contractors’ payroll are also on Uncle Sam’s payroll. “Double-dipping,” Representative Hebert calls this. He says, “Isn’t that In effect getting two paychecks from the Government? Isn’t the officer—as we call it down in Louisiana—double -dipping?”

Retired officers are still members of the armed forces and subject to court martial. Existing laws bar officers from drawing retirement pay while selling to their former services. The Navy prohibits a retired officer from drawing retirement pay as long as he sells defense materials to the Navy. The Army and Air Force hold up retirement pay for two years after an officer retires if he is selling material to them.

But, what is selling? Anybody that knows anything about salesmanship knows that the days of the old time drummer are gone. Today’s salesmen use the soft sell techniques and hidden persuasion. They pretend to be anything but a salesman. To avoid the law, it’s easy enough to have the retired general close the sale and send an order-taker around to pick up the contract Apparently this is what happens.

Thomas S. Gates, as Deputy Secretary of Defense, said it was common for a retired officer to come to him to “talk business.” He said none had tried to exert pressure on him. But Senator Douglas accuses Defense Department officials of trying to “cover up” abuses by claiming that limitations on the employment of retired officers would hurt the defense program.

Are the services taking any action to prevent influence peddling? Mr.

Gates said that the Navy was investigating 300 cases that indicated “some possibility of conflict of interest” among retired Navy officers now working for defense industries. He said the Navy sent out more than 4,200 questionnaires to former officers. Replies were received from about 3,400. From these come the 300 cases under investigation.

That’s about as far as it gets. The only recent case of a retired military officer being penalized for representing a defense contractor is a retired Navy lieutenant commander forced to forfeit his retirement pay during an eight-month period when he sold beer to officers’ clubs and ships’ stores.

Representative Santangelo charges that an “unsavory aura” has been cast over all defense procurement by the “extensive hiring of retired military personnel. This practice of hiring retired officials smells to the high heavens,” he declares.

He advocates a ban on defense industry employment of senior officers for five years after their retirement. And Representative Charles E. Bennett (D., Fla.) has introduced a bill to make it a crime for any business that has dealt with the Government through a particular officer to employ him or offer him employment for two years before as well as two years after his retirement. Either of these two bills, if passed, would go a long way toward cutting down on the influence-peddling.

The pressures generated within the Pentagon and in Washington by the billions of dollars expended annually for defense are enormous. Can we be sure we are getting the best weapons for this money if contracts are awarded on the basis of influence?

Hardly! What happens when a company is in danger of losing a lucrative government contract or isn’t getting its supposed share of a new one? What happens is a mobilization of forces and pressures by the company on a scale of vast proportions. If it’s a missile contract that’s being withdrawn, for example, the company fights back by advertising the missile’s great importance in magazines and newspapers; and their inside men swing into action with retired officers leading the charge.

Gates, the new Secretary of Defense, said he didn’t like magazine advertisements by companies with defense contracts pointing up their contributions to defense. He might have added that the taxpayer doesn’t like it either, since all the crowing is paid for by him. The cost of the advertisements is tax-deductible as a business expense.

Representative Hebert, chairman of the House Special Investigations Subcommittee, says: “The American people are alarmed and aroused at what they see and what they hear today about the conduct of our weapons procurement and about the alleged conduct of some military men who depart from the ranks of defense for lush places on the payrolls of defense contractors.”

That’s no overstatement.

In an atmosphere of big spending and the urgency to keep up in the missile race, the cost of war readiness goes up faster than a high speed rocket. The tab runs into billions. Corporations are adept infighters at competing for this business. Their methods are costing us all more than it should to protect ourselves. And when influence decides who gets a contract there is always the possibility that we are getting something less than the best. We can’t afford any undercover alliances between big defense contractors and officers of the armed services. • • •

HISTORY WITH A BANG!

ROBERT Lewis of Tujunga, Calif., gets a big bang from his hobby—a private gun collection said to be one of the finest in the country. He began gunning for guns 25 years ago and has amassed 135 historically significant weapons ranging from the 15th Century to the present day and including flintlocks, percussion and cartridge types. All are in perfect working order and he’s fired most of them. Each item has a personal history which he can support by documentary evidence. For example, the Burnside carbine in photo below, left, belonged to famous outlaw, Harry Tracy, who was killed in a jailbreak at Steamboat Springs, Colo., in 1898.

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King of Cymbals

An ancient Turkish formula has grown into one of the world’s most fabulous monopolies.

By H. W. Kellick

IN quiet, colonial North Quincy, Massachusetts, a small vault-like structure as impenetrable as Fort Knox reverberates with a crash echoed ’round the world by 99 per cent of the professional bands and orchestras. There, behind double-locked doors in an explosion-proofed room, Avedis Zildjian zealously blends his secret cymbal formula kept for over 331 years and handed down to the eldest male of each succeeding generation like the royal crowns of France and Spain.

In 1623 the first Avedis, a Constantinople alchemist searching for the mythical method of making gold from base metals, bent over his smoking crucible and saw a yellow substance that glittered. And it was gold for his descendants who hammered it into the Zildjian cymbal—and one of history’s most fabulous monopolies.

No one has succeeded in duplicating the tone, quality and durability of Zildjian’s metal alloy. Competitors, chemists, scientists have sought the secret as adventurers have sought for Captain Kidd’s treasure— all without success and some with disaster. A German firm in 1925 wasted months of research and a small fortune in tin, copper and silver trying to duplicate the metal then gave up in despair. The Imperial Chemical Company of England experimented for three months before admitting defeat. An American sheet-metal manufacturer attempted to convince Zildjian it could supply him with comparable alloys. To demonstrate the quality of the Zildjian metal to the engineer, Avedis threw on the floor one of his cymbals only 15 thousandths of an inch thick, stamped on it, struck it with a sledgehammer without marring the contours of the disk. Six weeks later the representative returned and decreed it was absolutely impossible to hammer the metal; it was as brittle as glass. Then in 1920 a senior male family member not in the line of inheritance and therefore excluded from the process believed he nevertheless could duplicate it and set up his plant in Mexico City. The first day he blew up the plant and his head, literally, went with it.

A Hollywood producer flew a staff of cameramen and writers to the plant to film Zildjian’s process. They left the same day empty-handed when Avedis refused to divulge his secret.

The blending of the copper, tin and silver is a dangerous process. Explosions occur once or twice a week but the Zildjians have learned how to control them. Before they were localized, however, the plant went through a series of major explosions. After the first blow-up, the Aetna Insurance Co. returned three years’ premiums in full. Another put Avedis in the hospital for four months. Another burned off all his hair and eyebrows. The roof of the laboratory has been blown off so many times that after the last explosion Avedis replaced it with one of six-inch reinforced concrete—to “eliminate the nuisance of repairing it.”

One night about 20 years ago two thieves broke into the plant and in three trips carried off thousands of dollars worth of cymbals. Now a number of huge vaults have been installed. Over the factory windows are metal bars so hard that a special cutting tool is necessary to part them. The windows themselves open at an angle so acute that no human could possibly crawl through them. The entire building is theft-proof.

The modern history of the cymbal began with the first Avedis. As his fame spread he became known to patrons and guilds-men as Zildjian, the Turkish term for cymbalsmith. The cymbal had been used in the highly rhythmic music of the Byzantine civilization and down through the Middle Ages of most of the Eastern nations. When Strungk, Gluck and other romantic composers of the 18th century began to exploit the brilliant effects of the instrument in their scores, the demand spread to Western Europe.

A later Avedis, more salesminded than his predecessor, built a 25-foot schooner, loaded it with his art, and in 1851 sailed from Constantinople to Marseilles and then to London. At Paris and London fairs his cymbals won all prizes for excellence. He died in 1865 leaving two sons, neither of age. The secret passed, according to the Salic law, to his younger brother, Kerope, and in 1910 to Aram, son of the late Avedis. But Aram was as interested in the turbulent politics of Mid-Europe as he was in cymbal making and finally moved to another country, where he experimented with cymbal manufacture. Later when the political unrest subsided, Aram returned to Constantinople and continued his business.

With the World War came martial music, marching bands, drum and bugle corps paced by the clash of the Zildjian cymbal. America went jazz-happy and every band and dance orchestra resounded to its music. The cymbal market shifted to America. In 1929 when Aram decided to retire he passed the secret to the present Avedis.

Avedis Zildjian came to America in 1909 as companion of a son of a wealthy Turkish family. The two boys wandered to Boston where Avedis established a confectionery firm. In 1929 Uncle Aram wrote and told Avedis of his plans to pass on to him the cymbal secret but insisted he return to Constantinople. When Avedis argued that the industry could be established in America, Aram was skeptical. He maintained that a certain proximity to the salt water of the Bosphorus was necessary for the successful blending of the formula and Avedis had to convince him that America’s salt water was equally potent. Only after Aram had come to Massachusetts, tested its salt water and measured carefully the distance from Avedis’ proposed plant site in North Quincy to the ocean and found it was identical with that of the home factory, did he give his consent.

Avedis had difficulty obtaining qualified hammersmiths in America. The best in the country couldn’t handle his metal although he tried many at the then exorbitant rate of $3.00 per hour. With an employe of the original Turkish plant he hammered the cymbals himself and finally imported two metalsmiths from Europe whom he trained for three years. Today these are recognized as the most skillful craftsmen in the world of cymbals.

Because of existing restrictions on importing items which can be made in the country, England prohibits sale of Zildjian cymbals in her markets. Several months ago Avedis received a letter from a Scotsman complaining of the outrageous price he had paid for a Zildjian cymbal. Avedis, who despite increased costs of material has kept his prices at post-war level, wrote in reply, “This particular cymbal sells for $25 in Arnerica. My friend, you bought yours on the black market.”

Cymbals, like wine, improve with age. None is sold less than one year old and some age as long as 15 years. Many thousands now are curing in the Zildjian vaults. About 20,000 are sold each year. Artists such as Gene Krupa, Shelley Mann, Lionel Hampton, Cozy Cole, Louie Bellson, and Boston Symphony, N. Y. Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Co. players appear in person at the plant to select their instruments. Prices range from $7 for the smallest, 7-inch cymbal to $108 for the largest, 28-inch cymbal. Gongs, better than the oriental, cost $132 each.

No two cymbals have the same sound. They vary from 15 to 20 thousandths of an inch in thickness. There are 14 varieties: fast, fast-crash, crash, splash, swish, bounce, bebop, hi-hat, flange hi-hat, ride, finger, concert band, brass band and symphony. There are 25 different ways of playing each.

Avedis has two sons: Armand, the factory manager, and Robert, sales manager. Robert is the younger. Armand has three daughters and the absence of a male descendant caused much worry to the Zildjian household till two years ago when his wife presented him with a son to inherit the secret.

Armand tests all cymbals for tone before they leave the plant and plays in a local band for amusement. Avedis, an expert player himself, and Armand sometimes lock themselves in the curing vault and treat themselves to a concert.

The firm is so unique that it receives much unsolicited publicity. One night while listening to the radio, the Zildjians were startled by the words, “Like the name Avedis Zildjian on a cymbal, the name of DuPont is your assurance of the utmost in quality.” A well-deserved and significant compliment.

Avedis can tell why the family secret has remained as such for so long. “We have never entrusted it to a woman,” he says. “As Americans we respect our wives completely with this one reservation. Mrs. Zildjian can order me to do the shopping, but she has never been allowed through the double-locked doors of our laboratory.”

The cymbals are made of approximately 80 per cent copper, 19 per cent tin and 1 per cent silver. The exact mixing process and chemical formula which marries the metals together is, of course, the Zildjian secret. When they are mixed in the electric furnaces, they emerge as circular ingots. These are tempered still longer and then hand-hammered into final shape even including the center cup which affects the cymbal’s final tone. It takes about seven years to master the technique of hammering and Zildjian has high regard for experts in his employ. Even so, about one cymbal in ten cracks and is ruined during shaping.

Finally they are shaved in a lathe and polished after which they are annealed 10 or 20 times and then tempered 10 or 12 times. Then they go into the curing vaults. Armand tests each carefully by ear before storing and when a great drummer or cymbal player visits the little factory to buy an instrument, he usually says, “Leave it to Armand.”

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WORLD’S LARGEST STATUE CARVED IN MOUNTAIN

THE world regards with awe the stupendous sculptural achievements of the ancient engineers who built the Egyptian Sphinx, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pyramids, but now it has a new monumental edifice to marvel at which dwarfs the projects of the ancients to almost insignificant proportions.

In the Black Hills of South Dakota a group of engineers, captained by the famous sculptor-engineer, Gutzom Borglum, are carving from a mountain of living granite the figures of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, whose faces alone measure sixty feet from chin to cranium top—twice the height of the face of the Sphinx of Gizeh. Borglum Explains Engineering Procedure In a special interview with a MODERN Mechanix correspondent, Mr. Borglum explained the engineering procedure by which he is attacking his titanic job.

“First,” the bronzed and rugged sculptor said, “I prepared a small scale model to get the proper grouping of the three figures. This work was done in a studio with a great plate glass window looking out upon Bush-more.

“Next I made a working model of Washington which was five feet from the chin to the top of his head. This model was taken to the top of Rushmore and used to guide the carving of the great stone head.

“The measurements taken from the working models are multiplied by twelve—an inch on the model being a foot on the statue—and are transferred to the granite of Mount Rushmore with the aid of a 30 ft. swinging boom and plumb bob.

“This boom swings horizontally through a graduated arc of 180 degrees. The plumb bob may be suspended from any point upon it. After setting the angle, the distances horizontally outward and vertically downward to the rock are measured by tape. Skillful engineering here is as important to the work as artistic modeling.

“When the work was first begun, I picked the largest sound piece of granite for the figure of Washington,” Mr. Borglum continued. “The carving of the rock monument consisted in excavating the excess granite by a process of drilling and blasting which removes successive thin layers without injuring the mountain itself. As little as ten inches of granite can be moved at one time. Engineers Work in Safety Harness “This process proceeds to within a few inches of the final surface, and then the finishing is done by a ‘broaching’ process.

“There are no reserved seats at Rush-more. Workmen when engaged in actual carving are suspended over the edge of the cliff in steel and leather harnesses attached to a % inch steel cable. These cables are ‘paid out’ or reeled in by hand winches.

“Usually ten Ingersoll-Rand ‘R12 Jack-hammer’ drills are on the job for the rougher work. When in use these, too, are attached to cables. The drills are % inch steel finished with cross bits.

“All drilling is dry. On the head of the three figures, now roughly completed, the drill holes were from 10 to 12 inches deep, about three inches apart and set about six inches from the face.

“About a 40 per cent special gelatin dynamite is used in each hole. The cap wires of a row of holes, usually from 60 to 75, are connected and the charges in the row of holes are fired simultaneously by means of a 110-volt power circuit. The dynamite does its work rapidly and smoothly.

“When blasting has brought the work to within three or four inches of the finished surface, another procedure is employed for the final “sculpturing.” Holes three or four inches in depth are drilled vertically into the face at intervals of about three inches over the entire surface.

“Chisel bits are used in this step, as they do faster work. Once all the holes have been drilled, the rock between is ‘broached’ out with the aid of short pointed steel gads driven by plugger drills. Broaching produces the finer finished surface.”

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SPIN YOUR GLOBE TO LONG ISLAND

Only Six States Have More People than the Insular Empire that Ranges from a World’s Fair Through Potato Patches, Princely Estates, and Historic Shrines

By Frederick Simpich
With Illustrations from Photographs by Willard R. Culver

WHAT if a super-tugboat could cast a line about Long Island and haul it out to sea! Left exposed would be the broken ends of all the bridges and the under-river tunnels that now tie it to Manhattan.

Riding off on the runaway island would go more than 4-1/2 million people—but only if the start were made at night, for in the daytime a large share of these people work in New York.

Off on the floating island would also go about one-fourth of the sea trade of the whole United States, Uncle Sam’s Brooklyn Navy Yard, radio towers from which he talks with 34 countries overseas, his busiest coffee and sugar mart, 3,454 trains that run daily between New York and the island, shops that make navigation instruments for the whole world, strategic airports and plane factories, millionaire estates, herds of polo ponies, Forest Hills’ famous tennis courts, five million white ducks, to say nothing of Coney Island and other resorts where millions come to play, and a World’s Fair!

SHAPED LIKE A MONSTER FISH.

Look on the map and you see this island is shaped like a big fish.* Its blunt, whalelike head, capped by Brooklyn on its west end, pushes into New York’s East River. For 118 miles it stretches east, where two flukelike land points stick out into the Atlantic; they seem on stormy .days to be whipping the salt water into foam and spray, just as the split tail of a big mad fish might do.

Like a dorsal fin, its north shore is set off from Connecticut by that blue-water playground, Long Island Sound.

Finally, to clinch this figment of fancy, the island outlines show not only the fish’s form, but suggest that this leviathan has just swum in from the Gulf Stream and is nibbling at the hook of lower Manhattan.

Actually, it isn’t nibbling, but gobbling. Already Long Island has swallowed about one-third of New York State’s whole population.

Gone now is the day when Gotham comedians could get a laugh at Brooklyn’s expense, when Brooklyn Bridge was dubbed “the road to yesterday,” and Brooklyn itself was merely “New York’s bedroom.”

Long Island now has more people than most of the States in the Union, being exceeded by only six; more assessed wealth than all Texas; and more sea trade than Manhattan. While Brooklyn, politically, is a part of New York City, considered separately it is America’s second largest city, surpassed only by Chicago.

Quick, cheap, easy travel turned this tide.

As French Strother once wrote: “John A. Roebling, dying of tetanus in the home on Brooklyn Heights that he had built to overlook the construction of his ‘crazy’ suspension bridge over East River, had sealed the doom of Manhattan as the prime city of the Western World. Not westward, but eastward, the star of New York City’s empire made its way” (page 422).

751 COMMUTERS’ TRAINS A DAY.

Today truck farms turn into parks, golf courses, new homes, and business blocks.

In and about Queens you see literally square miles of new houses, laid out like London’s vast new suburbs. Beyond spreading Forest Hills and Kew Gardens sprawls Jamaica, with 751 trains a day to Brooklyn and New York. If it stood somewhere out in a Rocky Mountain State, it would be a nationally known American city; here it is only one more spot in the lengthening shadow of New York, which creeps steadily out Long Island.

Beyond this shadow, farther east, lies yet another island world, whose people still have the “island feeling”; in their 200- and 300-year-old houses and churches, and in their old flintlocks, harpoons, and spinning wheels, there’s still a hint of English settlers’ life, of Captain Kidd, and the Sag Harbor whalers.

Ride all the way round this island and you see how wild, desolate, and thinly settled its eastern tip is; yet how monuments to man’s mechanical genius fairly clutter its west end.

Between these extremes, what profound contrast! Out on storm-pounded Montauk Point, with its ancient lighthouse and lonely beaches, where the ribs of wrecked and forgotten ships stick up like camel bones on an Arab desert, you feel the full imaginative content of that word “island” that “verbal hieroglyph” for romance, piracy, and adventure (Plate XII).

But come back to Brooklyn, on the island’s west end, and you see yet another picture. Here is Western civilization, heroically sketched on a gigantic canvas, alive with glimpses of inventions—queer robots from gyroscopes and linotypes to miraculous machines that flash photographs around the world on wireless waves.

How vividly Sir Francis Bacon foresaw these wonders 316 years ago! In his essay on the civilization of the “New Atlantis,” writ- ten in 1623, he says: “We have boates for going under water. . . . Flying in the Ayre. . . . Artificial echoes reflecting the voice many times. . . . Lights of all colors. . . . Lights, which we carry to great distances.” Here are all these things: submarines, airplanes, radio telephones, neon lights, and giant searchlights.

“MOTHER OF NAVY YARDS”.

At Brooklyn Navy Yard you may see Bacon’s “boates for going under water.” With a permit to visit this “mother of all our navy yards,” you can see Uncle Sam building his “fancy war canoes,” where Indians built theirs long ago (page 425).

Since 1801 this yard has laid keels for wooden “ships of the line,” for frigates, sloops of war, paddle-wheel steamers, torpedo boats, destroyers—for many kinds of warcraft from brigs to battleships.

Read the brass name plate on any American war vessel from Miami to Manila and you may see it was launched at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

From here slid the ill-fated Maine, whose destruction in Habana Harbor was followed by our War with Spain. First of first-class battleships launched here was the old Connecticut. Years later, off Olongapo, I was aboard her at target practice, and also saw the boxing matches, after mess, when rival gun crews fought out the evening postmortem. Today some 9,000 men work here. That’s about three times as many as the whole enlisted strength of the Navy when this yard opened.

INSTRUMENTS TO STEER PLANES AND SHIPS.

Bacon foretold searchlights. Today Long Island makes them, of almost supernatural penetration, in a tightly guarded factory at the foot of Manhattan Bridge.

If you can get in, here you see not only powerful searchlights for spotting enemy airplanes on a dark night, but also other startling Jules Verne wonders of the “Mysterious Isle” kind.

How times have changed since Henry Hudson sent a shore party to explore Coney Island in 1609!* He steered uncertainly, by crude instruments. Today, in Brooklyn, the Sperry Gyroscope Company turns out sensitive gyropilots and other magic aids to navigation which are now used by vast fleets of sea and air craft moving over the wide world.

Among all colleges on this island, none has so heterogeneous a student body as the navigation school conducted by the Sperry Company. In one classroom, crowded with sailors from more than thirty different nations, you see a life-size ship’s bridge—a dummy, of course—but equipped with all the scientific navigation instruments used now on modern battleships and ocean luxury liners.

From this school more than 8,000 seamen of every nationality from Argentinian to Chinese have been graduated and licensed to handle the gyrocompass, gyro-pilot, and other Sperry marine instruments.

A corresponding aeronautical school gives similar instruction on Sperry aeronautical instruments, the “blind flying” instruments —the gyro-horizon and directional gyro— and the gyro-pilot for automatic flying. From the Sperry Company’s magic shop come also such “gadgets,” to use sailor slang, as rudder indicators, gunfire-control apparatus, searchlights (both high-intensity arc and incandescent), steering-control equipment, course recorders, and salinity indicators.

ONETIME TOY NOW SAVES LIVES.

Twenty-five years ago the gyroscope merely amused people, as a spinning toy. Today, on land, sea, and in the air, it makes travel safer. Ships of more than 170 of the world’s merchant fleets use this gyrocompass for safer and more efficient navigation.

More than 20,000 airplanes maintain flight altitude and course, under blind flying conditions, thanks to the gyro-horizon and directional gyro. By keeping the plane on its course, the gyro or “automatic” pilot relieves the human pilot of the burden of handling his controls and gives him more time for observation, navigation, radio, and engine work.

With the gyro-pilot, at sea, it is the same; in rough weather as in calm, it saves hard work at the wheel by keeping even the most heavily loaded ship straight on its course.

Out on Ryerson Street, in Brooklyn, Mergenthaler makes a typesetting machine that speeds up the world’s newspaper printing and revolutionizes the reading habits of civilization (page 427). This is no phantasy of phrasemaking; look at the facts: News that the Sioux had killed Custer and all his men, in 1876, was carried in a total newspaper circulation of only about 4,000,000.

By the time Edison had invented his practical type of electric bulb; by the time Garfield had been assassinated and the James boys were raiding across the Middle West, printing was still a slow job because all type had to be set by hand.

Then came the linotype; Whitelaw Reid so named it in 1886, when his New York Tribune was first to use the revolutionary machine. Today, American daily papers circulate more than 40,000,000, which only mechanical typesetting makes possible.

Mergenthaler’s factory exports typesetting machines so widely that it has speeded up the whole world’s reading habits. Nearly one hundred different languages and vernaculars are set on this machine, including all those using Arabic script, such as Urdu, Persian, Kurdish, and Malayan, as well as Sanskrit and all East Indian vernaculars written in the Devanagari.

Uncle Sams printing office in Washington uses 171 linotypes, and 71 foreign governments, from the Vatican City* to the Fijis, set type on this machine in any size from tiny “4-point” to big letters two inches high.

On 25 battleships of our Navy, type is set on these Long Island-built machines, which also set bills of fare and ocean newspapers on many a big liner.

Incredible almost is the feat of a teletype and a linotype working jointly. On this almost human composite of mechanical genius, one machine receives and sends the news into the linotype, which sets it up ready for the printer!

BROOKLYN WHARVES, AMERICA’S BIGGEST GROCERY.

Home port of the Seven Seas, Brooklyn water front, with pier space for 700 steamers, barters with 200 foreign ports in 71 different countries (page 423).

Strange names on ship sterns hint at far places. What you don’t see you can imagine—the Zlowtub, out of North Sea ports, or the Fling Punk Hi, from China.

You get hungry on this water front if you only walk along and smell all the exotic fruits, cloves, pepper, sage, sugar, dates, coffee, coconuts, smoked fish, cheese, cocoa, and other good things to eat that unload on this “Isle of Spice.”

“America’s biggest grocery store” is this water front. More coffee, alone, comes here than to any other spot on earth.

Here is the goal post for the annual date-ship race, which starts from the Persian Gulf. We get most of our dates from about Basra, old haunt of Sindbad the Sailor.

Dates ripen, and rival boats load, all in a brief period; then home they race, across the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Suez, Mediterranean, Atlantic, and all the way to Long Island, because the first load in sells for the highest price.

One Brooklyn shop takes bales of crude quinine bark from Peru and turns out nice clean pills and powder. Another gets big dirty chunks of beeswax from Africa to make lipstick, shoe polish, and other things.

Since Egyptians varnished their first mummy, the making of lacquer and paint has been a good business. Here, in Queens and Brooklyn, figure fans say enough paint is made every year to cover all buildings now standing in the Thirteen Original States of the Union.

Enough rope to lasso Mars has been made here. Brooklyn had eight ropewalks, but only seven churches and seven saloons in clipper ship days of the 1820’s. To fit out a full-rigged ship then took 40,000 pounds of cordage.

Today, ships don’t take so much. But hemp, jute, and sisal still pour in from fiber-growing hot lands; and besides all the hawsers, halyards, and braces made for sailors, a world of rope and cordage goes inland for use in derricks, binder twine in wheat fields, even to make rope rugs.

Today Long Island makes better rope than the Romans did, but it’s all twisted in the traditional Roman way—strands left, final rope to the right (Plate VIII).

Proximity to New York and its great harbor fostered Brooklyn’s industrial growth. Now one city complements the other.

How the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians is an old story. From there whites crossed East River to farm, fight the savages, build homes, and barter on Long Island.

That was the day of straw roofs, wooden chimneys, and windmills. Little remains now, except documents yellow with age, to recall that era—little except family and place names.

Brooklyn itself was then Breukelen, so changed after the English took New Amsterdam and renamed it New York for their Duke. Midwout became Flatbush, and Rust dorp changed to Jamaica.

Though the Dutch again took New York in 1672, the English won it back two years later and held it until the Revolution. In Brooklyn the British defeated American troops in that historic battle of our War for Independence (page 421).

But from that August day in 1776 the history of Long Island began as a part of the United States.

From his pulpit in Brooklyn’s famous Plymouth Church, Henry Ward Beecher sold the slave girl “Pinky” into freedom at public auction, when Abolitionists clashed with Southerners (page 415). Roosevelt landed his Rough Riders at Montauk Point after the War with Spain; at Yaphank and Roosevelt Field in World War days Uncle Sam made the greatest mobilization of man power in our history.

Go where you will on this island, past potato patches or princely estates, and you find it thick with scenes of historic events in the making of America. In one place Captain Kidd hid his treasure; in another stands the old house that inspired John Howard Payne to write “Home, Sweet Home” (Plate VIII and page 445).

GARDENS RIVAL THOSE AT VERSAILLES.

Take Route 25-A east, along the island’s North Shore, turn off now and then, and you enter another world.

Up Glen Cove way lie some of the island’s family estates. One we saw, for quiet beauty of landscape and gardens, brought to mind the royal parks at Versailles, or at Sanssouci in Potsdam. Some hatch their own game birds; others have stables and private race tracks and steeplechase courses (Plate XIII).

Turn south along Wheatley Road and the old Post Road and you come to West-bury, world polo center (Plate X).

Of all games using a stick and ball, polo is most ancient. Its name comes from the Tibetan word pulu, or ball, but Long Island got the game from England, which got it from India.* Since John Watson first brought an English team to the States in 1886, and since the first American team repaid that visit in 1902, this game has spread to all America’s “horsy” spots. Now thousands play it, including schools, universities, and a few women.

Today, without doubt, the Long Island town of Westbury is the world polo center. At famous Meadowbrook Club, locking mallets, you may see Indian rajahs, titled Britons, cattle kings from Australia and Argentina, cavalry officers from many lands.

Pony buyers swarm here, too, and since 1924 best mounts have sold for as much as $10,000 each, and more.

Wherever good polo is played, riders know the names of such famed American players as Hitchcock, Milburn, Waterbury, Bostwick, Iglehart, Gerry, Guest, Stoddard, and Stevenson.

“Meadowbrook, Long Island,” will be the date line on a great polo news story to be filed there in June, 1939; that is the schedule of the International Polo Challenge Cup Series between England and the United States, which will draw many visitors from the near-by World’s Fair Grounds.

Turn north from 25-A at East Norwich and you come to Oyster Bay. Here is an old house on whose windowpanes you can still read names cut in the glass by British officers when they were quartered here during the Revolution. Here also is the family home of Theodore Roosevelt, former President, who led the Rough Riders, gave America the Panama Canal, hunted in Africa,* sought a lost river in Brazil, and spiced up our language with such apt phrases as “the strenuous life,” “the big stick,” “weasel words,” and the “lunatic fringe.” To his simple tomb, upon a roadside hill, thousands of Americans have worn a path (pages 442, 444).

Near by is the Roosevelt Bird Sanctuary, apt tribute to that President whose interest in all wild creatures was a predominant passion. Particularly did he love the birds of Long Island.

ISLAND LIKE ONE BIG BIRDHOUSE.

So many snipe waded about here when Henry Hudson came in 1609 that this fact was noted in the Half Moon’s log.

Every sailor knows how islands attract birds. Migrating strangers stop to eat and sleep. Storms blow others ashore. Caribbean hurricanes have brought strange tropic birds to Long Island. Of the 1,420 species and subspecies found in North America north of Mexico, only about 120 nest here, but many others pay calls.

One European widgeon shot here had been banded in Iceland, says one authority; a fish hawk marked at Orient Point was found dead in Brazil; another hawk carried his band for 21 years.

On Shelter Island one September day we saw telephone wires lined with small swallows for more than a mile—tens of thousands of them.

Ospreys built such heavy nests hereabouts on telephone crossarms that they short-circuited the wires. To stop this, and yet to oblige the ospreys, the company set up other poles near by, with convenient platforms on top where these fish hawks in knee pants now build their big nests.

Bird life here changes with increasing population. Heath hens quit the sand barrens a century ago. No more Labrador ducks come to Great South Bay. One story says that in April, 1759, about 75,000 passenger pigeons were sold in New York meat shops, some at 50 for a shilling! They went away with the 19th century.

To preserve many species and perhaps to bring others back, both conservationists and island sportsmen work now to increase and improve bird sanctuaries.

Go east to Huntington and they show you a monument to the patriot, Nathan Hale; also, south of town, the house where Walt Whitman was born.

From Huntington smooth, shady roads wind around the quiet shores of blue-water bays to Northport, on east, past Sunken Meadow State Park, and so to Port Jefferson.

High steel towers of RCA’s sending station rise at Rocky Point (page 439). They recall another line from Bacon’s Atlantis essay: “We have sound houses . . . and means to convey sounds.”

Farther east, at Riverhead, is RCA’s receiving station. Taken together, the two plants form the “giant voice” and the “big ear” which converse with countries overseas. Words can be sent at speeds up to 200 a minute; these stations also bounce and catch music and speeches back and forth over the seas for distribution on broadcast programs.

TELEVISION SHOWN AT WORLD’S FAIR.

Odd, futuristic-looking sound trucks you may meet, too, with poles sticking up on top like masts. These are the RCA television trucks (page 416). At the World’s Fair of 1939, this first baby of radio takes its first step in public. Though on a very small curtain, with reception limited to points within 50 miles of the sending station, RCA will give World’s Fair visitors their first taste of television.

Think of sitting in a small theater at the fair grounds and watching a Forest Hills tennis game—seeing the players hit the ball, hearing the actual smack at the instant of impact, and hearing the crowds cheer (Plate XI); or of seeing the finish of a horse race or a boxing match; or a television broadcast of street scenes at the fair itself, with all their simultaneous sounds, picked up from some distant part of the grounds.

Long Island was the birthplace of American wireless; at Babylon town in 1901 a pioneer station first talked with ships at sea. Now, by television apparatus come news pictures from abroad for use in our daily papers. Even fingerprints have been sent by “photoradio,” to aid in identifying fugitive criminals.

Sailors far out on the ocean can see these high wireless towers.

They appreciate their importance. Men digging in the near-by potato fields or cutting cauliflower show no interest in the towers, nor their function. Of one fieldworker I asked, “Do you ever think about the millions of words—all about shipwrecks and dictators and wars—that fly over the oceans to be caught by those big towers, or try to imagine how it all works?”

He said “No,” and went on digging potatoes.

Its map spot, climate, and physiography make this island a good place for food crops. America’s biggest food market is near-by New York.

A TRUCK FARM FOR NEW YORK.

Likewise, in 1844, the Long Island Railroad, reaching east to Greenport, brought island farmers within hours of New York markets, instead of days. They began turning from hayfields and dairy herds to put their land into intensive gardening crops. New plants were introduced to build up truck farms. Any night in the harvest season you can now see long lines of trucks, with potatoes, cauliflower, asparagus, and cucumbers—and ducks—rolling into market.

Route 25 veers northeast from River-head, touching Southold, settled in 1640, and runs on through Greenport and out to Orient Point, the tip of Long Island’s northern fluke.

Moss-grown tombstones, road markers made of ballast stone from English sailing ships, museums filled with relics of whaling days, old houses and churches, all link Long Island with colonial days. Our country grew so fast in size and man power after 1776 that we are apt now to skip all too hastily over the profoundly significant pioneering of the English and other whites who founded civilization here long before the U. S. A. was ever thought of.

On Long Island these pioneers fought Indians, fished, farmed, built towns, drank, smoked, and gambled, prayed, argued politics, married, begat, and were buried through five or six generations before Washington, D. C, was even surveyed.

BACK TO COLONIAL TIMES.

Your mind goes back to colonial times when you see Gardiners Island, which lies between Orient and Montauk Points. It is not only a dramatic survival of colonial days; it shows once more how, from Rabelais’ island tales to Hollywood films of Tahiti, mutiny on the Bounty, and South Sea hurricanes, this island theme has stirred men’s souls.

When Lion Gardiner bought his island in 1639, he must have felt the same romantic nostalgia that moved Blennerhassett to settle on that Ohio River island.

Gardiner, who had built forts for the Lords Say and Brook at New London, paid for his island with a dog, a gun, some rum, and blankets. As a true baronial estate, with manor house and slaves, this domain persisted unspoiled through long generations. After 300 years, it still belongs to the Gardiners. At a society wild west show on Montauk Point, I saw a daughter of that family facetiously introduced as “a cow girl from Texas.”

This family knew Captain Kidd the pirate. He paid them an unexpected visit one day, demanded certain favors, and hid some of his loot on their island home. Later it was recovered, and Kidd was hanged on London’s Execution Dock.

Shelter Island, between the north and south flukes of Long Island, is another example. Its story centers about Nathaniel Sylvester, advocate of religious liberty. He founded its Manor House in 1651. Today’s Manor House, dating from 1735, is a fine example of Long Island colonial architecture. On the manor grounds is a wooden windmill 144 years old, still in running order.

Sylvester Manor reminds you that eastern Long Island was largely settled by religious and political zealots, some of whom were exiled from New England as “heretics.” For many years some of these early English towns on east Long Island did not acknowledge the royal authority, but ruled themselves entirely through town meetings.

As one writer says: “Of the four New York patriots who risked hanging together (or separately) by signing the Declaration of Independence, two were supplied by Long Island.” They were Francis Lewis and William Floyd.

Merely to scan quaint epitaphs on moss-grown stone; to finger rusty old harpoons or cap-and-ball pistols; or to chat with wrinkled veterans of offshore whaling days is to sense the rich color and quality of the life that was.

Today these historic sites, plus fishing, sailing, and other summer sports, form this region’s stock in trade. Many visitors hunt up the old inn at Orient Point, where James Fenimore Cooper wrote Sea Lions.

A CYCLE PATH TO CONEY ISLAND.

Here, now, is a “Pleasure Island” whose social revolution began with the Long Island Railroad. It ended isolation. Later came bicycles. From England, about 1876, we got the high-wheeled pioneer ” boneshaker.” On Long Island this new vehicle saw the rise of the L. A. W., or League of American Wheelmen. Then came the safety, with pneumatic tires.

By the 1890’s men, women, and children

all over Long Island were riding bicycles. Munsey’s Magazine for May, 1896, tells how the L. A. W. raised funds to build a cycle path from Brooklyn to Coney Island and issued 5,000 tour books.

When cheap, quick rides brought this half-wild, isolated back country close to crowded New York, it began to turn into what it is now, a colossal playground (Plate IX and page 447).

Fishing, hunting, and horse racing were pioneer American sports. But only after the Civil War, slowly, people from growing cities began to seek the outdoors and learn to play. The thirty years after the seventies saw the rise of baseball, bicycling, boating, tennis, and the beginnings of golf. Long Island was a pioneering spot in America for these games. Shinnecock Golf Club, at Southampton, was one of the first in the United States. By 1900 Long Island had 24 golf courses; and today there are listed close to 120.

Ferry from Shelter Island over to Sag Harbor and drive east to Montauk Point, and you see how man has turned the wilderness into playgrounds (Plate XII and page 448).

Facing the open Atlantic, Montauk’s luxurious hotel hints at Long Island’s kinship with the sea. In State parks other thousands motor out to camp, cook in the open, or sleep on the warm sands while the children “play Indian.”

CARRIER PIGEONS GO TO SEA ON FISHING BOATS.

Steam in from Europe any fine summer morning toward Fire Island; see how yachts, sailboats, speedboats, and fishermen scour these waters.

About 25,000 motorboats frequent Long Island waters (Plate I). Off its shores for decades famous races have been run, especially the cup contests between American and British challengers and defenders.

Every Long Island port has some kind of aquatic society. One youthful yachting group at Sayville calls itself “The Wet Pants Club.” To join, all you need is a craft resembling a sailboat and $1 for dues. In the Wet Pants Club one class is called the “Diapers,” and the emblem on their sails is a baby’s “didy pin.”

Freeport was conceived by sail and born of salt water. As a big-game-fish center, more than 1,000 boats make this their home port. “Party boats” ply for hire. Some have catwalks extending ahead like bowsprits, on which men stand to harpoon sleeping swordfish, turtles, and any other swimming monster they can hit.

Into Freeport, into Great Pond (Lake Montauk), and other bases late any summer afternoon you may see tired, sunburnt fishing parties returning, the lucky grimly exultant over a big marlin, a giant tuna, or maybe even a shark or a sea turtle.

Some shiny cruisers carry two-way radio telephones. A few others take carrier pigeons to sea; if skippers catch a prize fish or get into trouble and need help, they send word ashore by the birds.

“Sunday Morning Fish Specials” whiz out Long Island railway in summer, carrying thousands of eager men and women. Off they pour, at Peconic Bay and at Montauk Point, run for the nearest party boat, scramble in, and make for “where they are.” To keep your string fresh on the ride back at night to New York, the company helps out with a special baggage car wherein you can “check your fish on ice.” No fish anywhere get “worked over” any harder than these around Long Island, and some devotees get only fisherman’s luck— wet pants and a hungry tummy. I watched some disgusted school girls fishing near Orient. All they pulled in, time and again; was toadfish.

“Ugly mugs!” complained one girl. “I’m tired wasting good crab-meat bait on you. Let’s all quit fishing and eat some canned salmon!”

“Or eat our own bait,” said another.

SOWING AND REAPING UNDER THE SEA.

Farmers who plant and raise oysters own or lease thousands of submarine acres under Long Island bays. Clams, scallops, and mussels are also brought in by baymen and tongers; only oyster work is called “farming.” One difference between this and dirt farming is that on land you can see corn or potatoes growing, but the oyster crop is out of sight, under water.

Sea-bottom fields also have to be cleared and made ready for planting; while young oysters grow up, the farmer has to thin them, as young corn is thinned, and protect them from sea stars and other enemies, just as land plants are defended against voracious crows and other pests.

Return from Montauk to Brooklyn over Route 27, and you pass through East Hampton. High spots for sight-seers here are the old windmills, topiary hedges, and the “Home, Sweet Home” House. Here in boyhood lived John Howard Payne (Plate VIII). In Paris he wrote the words of “Home, Sweet Home” to the measure of the Ranz des Vaches and had it sung in his play, Clari, or the Maid of Milan. It opened at a Co vent Garden theater in London, and that song swept the world; after a century it is sung wherever English is known, and Easthampton people have made a shrine of Payne’s boyhood home.

On this old stagecoach road, now Route 27, lies Southampton. People here say that Job’s Lane, now a village street, was opened as a pioneer road in 1636. The town was founded in 1640. Some houses of the colonial period still stand. Venerated, vine-clad Hollyhock House was built about 1650.

Lawns as vast as smaller-city parks surround some Southampton mansions. The Beach Club here is known from Nice to Santa Barbara. Camera addicts invariably halt to photograph the dignified War Memorial at the head of Agawam Lake.

“Worms!”

Startling in its ominous brevity, that signboard flanks the road as you near Shinnecock Canal, heaven to confirmed anglers.

Alfred E. Smith, former Governor of New York and candidate for President, was out wetting a line. “I’ve been coming here thirty-four years,” he said.

Go west, skirt Moriches Bay, and the raucous quack of infinite white ducks shatters the morning calm.

More ducks than people live on Long Island (page 446).

In a peak year 5,000,000, or over one-half as many as all wild ducks and geese shot annually in the United States, are dressed and shipped in iced barrels to a gluttonous world. On menus from Maine to Manila you find “Long Island Duckling,” some of which never saw Long Island.

Ride near a typical duck farm, with its low sheds, feeding pens, and fenced-in swimming pools, toward dusk or about sunup, and your eyes, ears, and nose join in quick recognition of it. Pass at night, and you see that lights are turned on, because young ducks thrive better that way.

People can’t throw stones between Sayville and Brookhaven because of the many glass hothouses. This business is enormous—acres and acres of glass roofs. Here they call it “the glass industry.”

Quit the cold outer air on a chill winter day and step into one of these warm, steamy, fragrant hothouses, and you feel as if you’re down in Rio de Janeiro’s botanical garden.

Switch from Route 27 to 109 at Babylon, and you come to Farmingdale. Here is more farming under glass, but of far more importance to all New York is the State Institute of Applied Agriculture. We watched a group of its ambitious young students planting an experimental garden.

“Can you place your graduates in jobs?” I asked a faculty member.

“Usually, yes, on the big estates for garden and landscape work, as well as on farms over the State.”

Airplanes have been built about Farmingdale for years. Seversky’s proving field is near by.

SPRINGBOARD FOR AIRPLANES.

Springboard for land and sea planes, Long Island and its waters swarm with aircraft. Spin your library globe and see how not only ship lanes but sky paths converge here.

Mitchell, Roosevelt, and Floyd Bennett Fields, the Aviation Country Club, the new international Air Base at North Beach, and Coast Guard stations and private test fields of Seversky, Grumman, and Fairchild factories are among the island’s busy spots.

Look up any flying day and you see planes, big and little, soaring like pelicans and gulls over a fishing fleet.

Lindbergh, Byrd, Chamberlin, Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, Corrigan, Mollison, and many another transatlantic flyer has used this island base. From here they ventured, conquering time and space, blazing sky paths from pole to Equator, adding to the world’s history of adventure and travel, which is the history of civilization.

From here went Howard Hughes around the world in 91 hours, to land again on Long Island. Forgotten are others who flew east into gray Atlantic fog, and oblivion; for them no wreath, no statue, no welcome of the city.

West from Farmingdale, over Route 24, lies Hempstead, with a Presbyterian church organized in 1644. In St. George’s Episcopal Church here they still use a communion set given them by Queen Anne; their rector’s prayer book was a gift from George III. It holds a handwritten sheet pasted over that part of the prayer which asks God to bless “the King and all others in authority”; after independence, this was changed to read “the President of the United States,” etc.

Eat, drink, and be merry; from Brooklyn clear out to Montauk, 118 miles of cafe, casino, dance hall, and nocturnal hot spots flaunt their signs.

One sign reads “Chicken to Take Out.” Says another, “Here You Can Eat With Your Fingers.” Food costs what you can pay. In a “quick and dirty” a good fish sandwich sells for ten cents; in ultra-swanky casinos, where a doorman in field marshal’s uniform bows you in, you get a good cup of coffee for $1.50.

Ride out any night, and madhouses echo with swing music and the passionate, paid moans of blond torch singers who enchant the innocent traveler here just as sirens on another isle vamped the sailors of Odysseus coming home from Troy.

TOWERS OF BABEL AT A WORLD’S FAIR.

North from Forest Hills rises that glittering, futuristic city, the World’s Fair, “The World of Tomorrow” (pages 418-9). When yet a long way off you see its queer, polyhedric piles limned against the horizon— spheres, pylons, obelisks—an architecture as of another planet. It suggests nothing familiar, unless it be big painted gravestones, grain elevators from our western plains, round, pink gas tanks, or castles in Bryce Canyon.

Rich in fancy as was Bacon’s prophetic mind, not even he could have imagined an Atlantis Island of such breath-taking wonders as this World of Tomorrow. Here one miracle follows another so swiftly as to be almost unendurable to any ordinary man who watches too long and thinks too hard.

Supreme sensation of it all is a ride on “magic carpets” through the hollow Peri-sphere. From inside this globe you look down as if from two miles up in the sky upon an idealized “city of tomorrow.” Music fills the vast 200-foot globe. By means of adroit projection, moving pictures show legions of workers walking down out of the clouds, arms upraised, singing the “Song of Tomorrow.”

Bits of the “Auld Sod,” dug up in Ireland, are laid down on a miniature of that Emerald Isle set in the Irish Free State exhibit. Tiny lakes and rivulets are filled with water actually brought from such beloved sources as the River Shannon and the Lakes of Killarney!

Blooming in all their glory one million brilliant tulips nod to visitors on the Fair’s opening day. Planted, also, at just the right time, a field of knee-deep green wheat —the world’s most costly field, because of high value of fairground space—is also a part of the food exhibit.

Shot through the whole Fair’s brilliant pattern is a spectacular use of glass. Today glass blocks form an increasing part in a gayer, brighter, and more lavish architecture. Some surrealistic structures are almost great goldfish bowls.

Mixing Vesuvius with Niagara—blending fire, water, color, and sound—nightly extravaganzas of furious beauty are formed by leaping fountains and burning gas jets 150 feet high on Meadow Lake and Mall Lagoon.

Fantastic patterns in colored fire and water range from giant peacocks to a golden sheaf of wheat 90 feet tall!

Amplified above the roar of fireworks and fountains, music comes from a pipe organ, from brass fanfares, a carillon, and percussion instruments. Captive balloons, played on by searchlights, form a ceiling over this man-made inferno.

By ingenious valve controls, patterns can

be changed at will, from night to night, or the whole incomparable scene instantly “blacked out” by the operators.

With tremendous effect a giant, integrated color scheme also paints the whole geometric pattern of these two square miles of astonishing architecture.

As if squeezed from myriad rainbows, here float infinite vistas of color, some painted walls blending so gradually into a skylike blue that sometimes it’s hard to tell where man’s work ends and real sky begins. Across vast facades march colored murals of majestic proportions, some by American artists, some by famous painters from abroad. Many of them cover from 4,000 to 6,000 square feet; their themes range from man’s quest for food to the history of communications.

Set here and there are more than sixty pieces of heroic sculpture, much of it pure white, the work of such artists as Malvina Hoffman, Gertrude Whitney, Mahonri Young, Paul Manship, Derujinsky, Savage, Gregory, and others.

Tumbling high in air are 150 tons of water, tossed up and held there by powerful fountains.

Transplanted forests of more than 10,000 growing trees add sylvan charm and afford shady paths for strolling visitors.

Crack railway trains, including streamlined flyers from overseas, take part in the stirring pageant, “Railroads on Parade.” This exhibit covers 16 acres and includes a complete operating railway system in miniature.* From sixty foreign nations come other revealing exhibits which add their conceptions of the “World of Tomorrow.”

Designed by Norman Bel Geddes, one vast, living panorama shows what highspeed motor traffic on tomorrow’s superhighways may be like. Projected in the General Motors exhibit and known as “Highways and Horizons,” this dramatic visual demonstration reveals how progress in transportation is linked to advancing civilization.

By this ideal highway plan, crowds may move with more ease; populations may shift, with farms and cities linked more closely together. To see this road net of tomorrow, visitors sit in chairs on a moving escalator.

Nobody knows, of course, what actual form tomorrow’s highway net may assume; * See “Trains of Today—and Tomorrow,” National Geographic Magazine, November, 1936.

yet profound change is inevitable. It may come sooner than many people now imagine; certainly, in “Highways and Horizons” there is eye and brain food for plenty of fresh thinking.

Pause at Ford’s novel exhibit, and you see cars actually running over a house and around the sides of it!

One odd house in Amusement Area is formed like a giant human eye. Its pupil makes a landscape window; you walk in, look out through this big round pupil, and enjoy a panorama of the fairgrounds.

If you want to see how adventurous men in the World of Tomorrow may attempt being shot up to Mars, here’s a working model of a “Rocket Gun,” complete with a nice little cabin.

EVOLUTION OF WORLD FAIRS.

World’s Fair! What words to conjure with! For decades they hinted at the din of many bands all playing different tunes, at races and balloon ascensions, at the sweet whiff of hot grease on frying doughnuts, at side-show barkers with their bored wild men of Borneo, their scaly, tattooed women, whirling dervishes, diving horses, and earth’s heaviest hog.

Infinitely more comprehensive, symbolic of man’s conquest of Nature, are today’s colossal expositions. Now amusement walks hand in hand with instruction. Crowds love play, but also they pack the great halls where magic machines work as deftly, as surely, as if a human brain guided their motions, and even children pause to ponder the miraculous laboratory feats of chemistry.

They expect 60,000,000 paid admissions to the Fair. What a crowd! Think of the lost children, and the aching feet!

What Long Island will be 5,000 years from now nobody can say. At the World’s Fair, in an “Immortal Well,” they sank a metal “Time Capsule.” It holds samples of our civilization and millions of microfilm words, for the benefit of future archeologists—if they can find the capsule!

Meantime, Long Island gears its daily rhythm of breakfast, labor, dinner, and love to the schedule of suburban trains, shoots its mail from Brooklyn to New York in underwater pneumatic tubes, builds its planes, gyroscopes, and typesetting machines, and raises ducks; and, fulfilling the prophecies of Bacon, it sends sounds to faraway lands.

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The NATION Sits in on National Conventions

Politics becomes mechanically minded in 1936, and both Republicans and Democrats are providing the machinery which will permit the nation to listen in to the proceedings.

by BOB GORDON

THE political machinery for nominating the presidential candidates of the two major parties remains as old as the parties, but in June this year the entire nation will be given ringside seats at the National Conventions at Philadelphia and Cleveland, with both parties taking advantage of every latest scientific wrinkle to bring the conventions to your home or local movie.

In stadiums, ball parks and town squares loud speaker systems will be set up for the hundreds of thousands of persons who will assemble on the evening of June 27 to hear President Roosevelt accept the Democratic nomination. Republicans, too, are planning on having their candidate broadcast his acceptance of the nomination from their convention hall.

More than six thousand persons will journey to the convention cities to select the men for whom you will vote this fall. There will be 1,200 delegates at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, with 1,700 alternates, while the Republicans at Cleveland will have 997 delegates and 1,116 alternates. Then there will be the 106 National Committeemen of each party, more than 1,000 reporters, and several hundred telegraph, radio, newsreel men and news photographers.

The voting delegates will be seated in the front of the hall in four gigantic banks of seats. Delegations from each state will be seated together, with huge signs designating the seats. The alternates will have chairs on the auditorium floor directly behind the delegates. Aisles between the banks of seats will be especially wide.

The speakers’ stand will be an elevated platform erected on the front center of the stage. On this platform will be the Chairman of the Convention and the principal speakers for the day. On this platform also will be the operator who will control the radio and newsreel microphones and the public address system through a maze of 53 switches.

From a technical point of view, this switchboard operator will be the most important man in the convention hall, for he will have complete control of all sound effects. It will be he who will, under the direction of the Convention Chairman, sort out the correct speeches from the bedlam created by a thousand men all anxious to talk at once, and to see that the voice of only the speaker recognized by the chair is amplified on the public address system, is broadcast to the nation over the three networks, and is recorded by the newsreel camermen.

On the rostrum of the speakers’ platform will be the three microphones of the broadcasting companies. The voice of the regular speakers will be carried directly to the soundproof studios erected over the back of the stage, and from there, over telephone lines, will be carried to the hundreds of broadcasting stations on the networks. The five news-reel companies will also have microphones here connected directly with recording apparatus, while another microphone will amplify the speech so it may be heard in the farthest corner of the hall. So far there is nothing unusual about the procedure.

But there are a thousand delegates seated on the floor of the hall, each of whom has the right to speak when he has been recognized by the chairman. Actually, each state delegation has a spokesman, who is authorized to speak for all.

Pages Will Carry Microphones Owing to the size of the meeting, it would unnecessarily delay the business of the Convention if every delegate desiring to be heard had to mount the speaker’s platform. To obviate this there will be ten microphones suspended from the ceiling, each mike in charge of a page boy. When the chairman recognizes a speaker on the floor, the nearest boy will bring him a microphone, into which he may speak, while the switchboard operator plugs in that mike to the loud speakers, radio and newsreels. It will be futile for anyone to attempt to shout down a speaker, once he has the exclusive use of all sound facilities.

Howard Leland Smith, the architect for the Democratic Convention, has designed a way of taking care of newspapermen that will do away with the complaint that the most favored pressmen had the worst seats. Press boxes at such affairs have usually resembled two huge sections of grandstand, sloping downward toward the center, so that the representatives of the big press associations and largest papers have been directly under the speaker’s stand, unable to see, and often to hear, what is going on. Smith has reversed this arrangement, elevating the center of the press box, and sloping it downward toward the ends, thus enabling all to see and hear. This press box has been placed over the orchestra pit, with press rooms directly beneath.

Newsreels Will Be Active Three platforms have been erected for use of the newsreel cameramen. One, a double deck affair, will be at the edge of the stage, so the camera may catch a profile view of the speaker, or may be turned outward to take in the Auditorium floor. Two other platforms will be erected 120 feet from the speaker’s platform, at either side of the hall. The cameramen here will use telescopic lenses. Accredited newspaper photographers taking stills will be permitted the run of the auditorium, mainly because those in charge realize the futility of trying to confine their activities to one spot.

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• Political Spellbinding by Radio (Jul, 1936)
• Mechanical Ballot to Elect Next President (Jul, 1936)

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Looking for Louisiana’s Lost Loot

Legends are many of the Bayou state’s buried treasure but facts prove it’s there, waiting to be taken out.

By William L. Rivers

THERE are so many legends of buried gold in Louisiana that it would seem all the would-be treasure hunter had to do was pick up a shovel and start to dig. Sadly enough all these tales aren’t true. If they were, there wouldn’t be room beneath the Bayou State for much else.

But the encouraging fact is that at least some of the many buried treasure tales are fact. Perhaps 30 all told. The problem is which 30 are worth investigating?

For example: Who can say with any degree of certainty that Jean Lafitte, pirate king of kings who made his headquarters at Grand Isle off the Gulf Coast, didn’t leave much of his loot there or along the Mississippi bluffs near Baton Rouge?

Lafitte had three islands that are still believed to be the best locales for a serious search. Besides Grand Isle (also a base for Henry Morgan) Lafitte often landed at Coca Island and $1,000,000 in gold is said to be buried on Kelso’s Island. The pirate is also believed to have left at least $11,000,000 in gold along the South Louisiana coast and in the Mississippi bluffs.

Rumors have been persistent for decades that all these would be good sites for a treasure hunt. And when author Ben Luien Burman went into the South Louisiana swamps to write a fur-trapping story, two men at Barataria Bay were pointed out to him as discoverers of part of Lafitte’s loot.

“Ain’t done a lick of work in their lives. Everybody knows it’s because they found where Lafitte’s money was buried,” Burman was told.

However, like most of the other tales, the story of Lafitte’s caches in the levees and swamps are hard to track down—largely because treasure finders are a notoriously close-mouthed lot.

But the stories can’t be dismissed easily. Lafitte wasn’t in the pirate business just to wear a cutlass and swagger. Even if it is possible that most of his loot has been discovered, scores of other finds have been made in Louisiana.

George Maher, Jr., and his father for example, are reported to have found more than $200,000 in old coins, jewelry and silverware in Louisiana with a patented machine they call the Ground Radio.

This device, an invention of the father-son team, operates via the variable induction of a magnetic field and has a strange affinity for locating buried treasure, the Mahers claim.

A farmer in Avoyelles Parish (county) who was plowing in his fields one day stumbled on an iron pot filled with 1,000 gold pieces.

In 1929, 21 Spanish doubloons were found in a load of gravel at the Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad tracks in Baton Rouge.

And a farmer named John Skinner, who lived near Ruston in North Louisiana, fell over a box which yielded nearly 1,000 gold coins while plowing his fields.

The second largest find in Louisiana history was made at Gretna by a group of men who were searching for treasure, not farming. They unearthed $65,000.

A vocal minority of Louisiana treasure seekers believed another pirate, Pierre Rameau, whose operating base on Honey Island has already paid off handsomely, is still the best locale for a search. Bordering Louisiana and Mississippi on the Pearl River, “Rameau’s Kingdom” yielded an iron chest filled with $1,000 worth of coins.

Connoisseurs of treasure tales also rank Honey Island high because latter-day pirates, fugitives from the law during the 1880’s, found the island an ideal out-of-the-way place.

In 1929, one of the richest treasure strikes in history was made on the dry bed of the Calcasieu River. The take was $75,000 in coins.

The lost world of Louisiana in Tensas Parish, pre-Civil War home of Col. Norman Frisbee on the Tensas River, is a prime inland treasure-hunting site now being explored again.

Frisbee, who lived vividly and died violently in a knife fight, laid the foundations and built the walls and pillars of a magnificent mansion eight miles up-river from Flower’s Landing. He was one of the world’s great landowners, with 52 miles of river-front and 12,000 acres planted in cotton.

When the plantation baron died, he left only the memory of a day shortly before Union soldiers came when he went into the forests near his home with two slaves and wagonload of gold.

The slaves who accompanied Frisbee were killed and none of the Tensas treasure has ever been found. Descendants of the Tensas king have scanned maps over the years. Four years ago, two young Frisbees led an expedition to the old plantation but the party was ill-equipped and only scratched the surface.

The residents of Natchitoches Parish in Northwest Louisiana haven’t been so casual about the search for a trove that is estimated at $9,000,000 to $30,000,000. For more than 30 years, fortune seekers have been sinking holes in the ground at points near old Camp Salubrity, a bivouac area during the Civil War.

Unlike Florida, which has a complicated system of permits, Louisiana is easy-going, perhaps because treasure-hunters rarely bother to let state officials know they’re looking for buried and sunken wealth on the lands and in the waters of Louisiana.

For permission to search on state lands and information about state property, the treasure-hunter should work through the office of Register of the State Land Office, Ellen By ran Moore, in Baton Rouge. General information on maps, histories of the plantations and pirates can be obtained from the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry in Baton Rouge.

The law that sets forth the rights of property owners runs: “Although a treasure be not of the number of things which are lost or abandoned or which never belonged to anybody, yet he who finds it on his own land or on land belonging to nobody acquires the entire ownership of it; and should such treasure be found on the land of another, one-half of it shall belong to the finder and the other half to the owner of the soil.”

At least 1,000 possible treasure sites have been rumored in Louisiana and even scholarly state historians agree that several locales offer excellent possibilities for treasure-seekers.

Where are the best sites to look for treasure ?

A planter near Hubbardville buried his money and silver plate outside the town before the Civil War; the ruins of the old fort at Barataria yielded a box containing doubloons and earrings; $300,000 is believed to have been buried at Parlange Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish; last summer, two Tulane students took a mine detector to the barren site of Fort de la Boulaye 38 miles down the Mississippi from New Orleans—and what they found led them to believe French gold would be discovered there.

The old bed of the Red River near Dixie, the “Lost Mine of Wyndham Creek,” an Indian mound near the highway between Convent and Lutcher—all might pay dividends to anyone who makes an all-out effort to tap the fabulous buried treasure of the Bayou State.

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HOW PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT Keeps Fit

Faced with problems that would have staggered a superman. President Roosevelt has come through his first year in better physical shape than when he took office. This story reveals the secret of his amazing vitality and what he does to maintain it.

by JAMES NEVIN MILLER

EVERY day of his official life President Roosevelt is faced with momentous decisions affecting our national life; yet his greatest problem is not the settling of affairs of state but the safeguarding of his personal health.

The White House pressure is terrific. Once officially saddled with the destinies of more than a hundred million people, our chief executive faces a task which leads, almost inevitably, to shattered nerves, premature old age, physical breakdown and sometimes loss of life itself.

Proof of the tremendous pressure of the office may be had in the fact that only one of our former Presidents is alive today. Their average life span is less than 64 years. On the other hand seven wives of former Presidents are still living.

Keeping fit and trying to escape the crushing pressure of official affairs has long been the concern of our chief executives. Woodrow Wilson was a rabid baseball fan and found relaxation in reading detective stories. Harding tried to forget his executive worries in social gatherings with his friends and an occasional game of cards. Calvin Coolidge was an intermittent fisher- man and sought physical stimulus in a mechanical hobby horse. Hoover stole away on fishing trips to his Rapidan camp whenever time permitted; and his “medicine ball cabinet” became a national byword.

Yet of them all, only Hoover survived the rigors of the President’s office. That is what makes the career of President Roosevelt extraordinary.

Although handicapped, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a veritable dynamo of human energy. His mind is lightning quick, his decisions sure, his speech forceful. He is a vibrant, electric personality living to a staccato tempo whose overtones abound in refreshing, gusty humor.

President Roosevelt has never missed a single night’s sleep nor experienced anything approaching a nerve crisis. Today, after one of the most exacting years faced by any President since the World War, he is in better shape than when he took office, according to Dr. Ross T. Mclntire, official White House physician.

How does he do it? The President’s formula for keeping fit is simple. Regular hours, regular exercise and temperance in all things are the basis for his code of physical and mental health. To keep his body fit the chief executive rides horseback, swims in the White House pool and takes long auto rides into the country. When time permits, he boards a sea-going yacht for a bit of deep-sea fishing and ocean air, hurries off to his experimental farm at Warm Springs, Georgia, or joins his boys on a carefree, coastwise sailing cruise.

When in Washington, the President’s chief form of physical relaxation is swimming in the executive pool. Built by popular subscription, the beautifully tiled water playground is located in the west wing of the White House extension under a cover which makes it available at all times, regardless of weather conditions. Here, for half an hour every evening, the President Wallows and frolics like a boy at play, while the cares of office literally drip off his broad back.

No chief of the White House—not even Teddy Roosevelt—has taken a keener inter- est in the outdoors than the present President. Before illness robbed him of the full use of his legs he was an all-around athlete, enjoying tennis, hunting, iceboating, swimming, baseball and football.

But although the President’s, enormous energy is geared to the production peak of a precision-tooled machine, he does not allow his energy to run away with him. He knows when to work and when to rest—a lesson brought home to him in force when in 1921 paralysis struck him down. Deprived of the use of both his arms and his legs and given scant aid from physicians who knew next to nothing about his disease, Roosevelt was forced to work out his own salvation. His subsequent victory was two-fold: physical recovery and a basic knowledge of mental discipline.

Today, a great part of the President’s health program is given over to mental relaxation. He is a great reader, enjoys moving pictures, likes to listen to the radio and is enthusiastic about music, both popular and classical tunes.

Indoor games are one of the President’s favorite methods of relieving mental pressure. He enjoys rummy, solitaire, bridge and parchesi, playing them all with his characteristic gusto, but never worrying about their outcome. The President is also one of America’s leading hobbyists. His stamp collection is noteworthy and his group of ship models and naval paintings and lithographs is one of the most extensive in existence.

X-Ray Detects Disease in Mummies

THE X-ray is the latest instrument of science being empolyed by experts in photographing Egyptian mummies to determine the nature of the diseases which ravaged the ancients. The above X-ray of an Egyptian boy’s mummy is interesting in its disclosure of the fact that he suffered from malnutrition. Scientists determine this from the irregular development of the ends of the long bones, indicating deficiency of calcium in the diet. Photographs of other mummies show distinct curvatures of the spine. Teeth condition is also studied fron the photographs.

The advantage of the X-ray is that the bone structure of the mummies can be studied without unwrapping the body, with the consequent lowering in value of the mum-my as a museum specimen.

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IF Atomic Fuel Were Shared…

The world would be healthier, wealthier and wiser, say AEC scientists, discussing President’s daring proposal to United Nations.

editor’s note: President Eisenhower’s dramatic proposal to the United A at ions that a world pool of fissionable materials he created for peaceful purposes had no greater appeal to any hearts and minds than those of nuclear scientists. Popular Science Monthly invited some of them, on the staff of the Atomic Energy-Commission’s labs at Brookhaven, N. Y., to tell yon what they think of the plan’s potentialities. Their discussion, recorded on magnetic tape, is transcribed here. The various speakers are: William A. Higinbotham, Harry Palevsky, Drs. Clarke Williams, Marvin Fox and Charles P. Baker, physicists; Mrs. Beth Baker, a chemist; and Wesley S. Griswold, of PSM’s editorial staff.

MR. GRISWOLD: What do you people think of the President’s plan to pool fissionable materials for peaceful uses?

Dr. Fox: I think it’s brilliant—a stroke of genius to solve this whole dilemma that has confronted us for the last half-dozen years.

Mr. Palevsky: It provides a central focal point that serves a very necessary purpose. It starts us off.

Dr. Baker: The Acheson-Lilienthal proposal, in 1946, was a brilliant proposal, but in order to get anywhere, you have to start. And with that proposal you had to start by taking off all your clothes and jumping in. Whereas in Eisenhower’s proposal, you say, “Take off your coat, loosen your tie, and sit down. ” There are many people who will do this that wont go the whole way.

Griswold: If you were given the task of setting up such a pool, would you anticipate getting large amounts of fissionable materials, or small amounts? Mr. Higinbotham: The fact is that no countries except Russia and the U. S. (which are well stocked) and England and Canada have the capital to buy—or, as a matter of fact, have access to—a substantial amount of source materials.

You see. thorium is useless until you’ve gone a long way with uranium and its products. And the U. S.. Great Britain and Canada have virtually cornered the free-world market in uranium.

Palevsky: So the three of us and Russia control all the source materials, except for truly trivial quantities.

Higinbotham: The U. S. and Russia control a lot of materials, but they don’t own them. I think the first step is to get these two major parties to loosen up on their controls, so that other people can play around.

I’m thinking of natural uranium and thorium ores—source material.

Griswold: You think, then, that it would be ores that would be contributed to this pool, and not enriched stuff?

Higinbotham: Yes.

Grisuold: How would you ship the materials to the pool?

Higinbotham: I suspect that you are thinking of this pool as a big concrete building somewhere, loaded with radioactive stuff. It seems to me that what Eisenhower contemplates will be a holding company, like the AEC. The stuff will be stockpiled all over the world. It will go by the pound or the truckload or the shipload direct from the donor to research laboratories in different countries all over the world.

Griswold: Is it dangerous to ship? Would it require shielding?

Fox: Not in ore form.

Griswold: What does the stuff look like?

Fox: Well, uranium is shiny silver when freshly made but tarnishes to brown or black quickly when it’s exposed to the air.

Griswold: I’ve heard that it can be obtained in fairly small ingots, almost the size of flashlight batteries.

Fox: You can get it in any size you like.

Griswold: What countries besides the ones you have already mentioned would be likely to have surplus fissionable materials for the world pool?

Baker: I think you should include the Belgian Congo, South Africa and Czechoslovakia—if you can distinguish that country from Russia.

Higinbotham: You’d also include India and Brazil, wouldn’t you?

Baker: Oh, yes.

Higinbotham: India and Brazil would most assuredly be interested in the power potentialities of a world atomic pool. Brazil is peculiarly poor in water resources. The waterfalls are a long way from the coast. The Amazon is flat for many, many miles inland. I think the Brazilians are working small streams mostly.

As a result, Rio and Sao Paulo, the two biggest cities—about 200 miles apart with decidedly mountainous country between—have a common power supply. And they are so hard up for electricity that the different sections of the cities are shut down in succession.

Griswold: Is it possible that we can have smaller atomic power plants than any yet built—plants that could be used, say, to run planes and trains?

Fox: Oh, yes.

Dr. Williams: Especially Russian trains, which are broader gauge. [Laughter. ] Griswold: But not small enough to run automobiles?

Higinbotham: Well, the only possibility in this line is that someone might design a really good battery that you could have charged at an atomic power station, and then run your car by electricity.

Baker: There are other ways. If you had cheap power you could store it chemically by taking water and carbon dioxide and making gasoline out of them, then pouring the gasoline into your car. [Laughter. ] Well, if you had cheap power, you could do this.

Palevsky: That’s true. If you can make cheap power, there are just unlimited processes that could be developed.

If you can reduce the cost of power by, say, 20 or 30 percent, I think that many new industrial processes would just spring up overnight. They will then be feasible.

Griswold: How could atomic power be useful in barren lands—like Arabia or the Australian desert?

Palevsky: Why, in making fertilizer. You need power to make fertilizer.

Griswold: Yes, but what about water?

Water would still be the essential ingredient, wouldn’t it?

Baker: If you have the energy, you can demineralize sea water. If you have the energy, you can also pump it as far as yon like, if you’re willing to pay for it.

It’s not a matter of discovering any fundamentally new principle. It’s a matter of getting the science, the technology and the economics together.

Palevsky: Even in those desert regions, I think if you go down far enough, you get water. It just happens to be uneconomical to pump it now. But cheap power from atomic energy would easily make the pumping job feasible.

Griswold: Have we yet come up with any practical atomic explosive for changing the course of rivers, or for changing the course of hurricanes or tornadoes?

Mrs. Baker: Well, you’d pollute your rivers, for one thing.

Palevsky: And if you dropped an atomic bomb into the eye of a tornado, you’d scatter lethal radioactivity all over the countryside.

Baker: The Eastman Kodak Company would certainly be unhappy. [Laughter. ] Griswold: If the proposed atomic pool is going to exist in several different places, scattered throughout the world, how can it feasibly be guarded?

Higinbotham: First, is it worth guarding? Probably all the material contemplated for the pool will not be enough to make a single atomic bomb. And when the atomic bombs in the world already are counted in the hundreds or the thousands, material that could possibly make one more is not really important.

Griswold: Isn’t it true that, with the right kind of reactor and the necessary raw material, in the course of making atomic power you also make plutonium?

Higinbotham: Yes, but it isn’t until you have really big power plants that the amount of plutonium you are going to produce in a year will be significant.

Baker: Besides, in order to make this plutonium useful, you would have to run your plant in a particular way and it would involve certainly an equivalent plant to extract the plutonium. In other words, if you went and looked at the power plant, you wouldn’t need to be a detective to tell if people were Africa, and now had plutonium, where would you send the plutonium?

Baker: Send some back to South Africa, so that they can start their power plant.

That is, I would think that if the pool delivers uranium to somebody and they use it in a power plant, and use the power for their benefit, then the plutonium which they make incidentally should, of a certainty, belong to the pool and might be sent to help make a quart of milk for every Hottentot, or whatever else seems to be a worthy undertaking.

Mrs. Baker: Essentially, then, you could just rent the material, and then pay it back to the lender.

Higinbotham: It would be ideal if, when we allow another nation to take from the international pool certain material that had been allocated to us, we would also permit that nation’s scientists to visit our laboratories, see our reactors, learn our techniques. Some of our scientists, too, would be expected to go to those countries and help them get started on their research—let them in on our know-how.

Williams: The information is fully as important as the materials, if not more so.

Higinbotham: This proposal of Eisenhower’s really will be something that will be awfully hard for the Russians to turn down.

If you can get a start at talking on a practical level about these problems of the exchange of information and people and cooperation, there will certainly be an entirely different atmosphere from the one we’re presently living in.

And one could hope that out of these discussions would come something at least as attractive as the Eisenhower proposal, and that this would be the beginning of breaking down the iron curtains that exist not only around Russia but around a good many of the rest of us, too. end

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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.

Architects, engineers, and modern machinery seem literally to have raised Manhattan Island out of the waters surrounding it. In the lower view, Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, was just being built. Note how the buildings at that time seemed to crouch low on the island, only here and there an occasional church, spire throwing itself defiantly skyward.

In the upper view the buildings have fairly freed themselves from the land and apparently have become decidedly air-minded. In the immediate foreground is the office building at 120 Wall Street. Looming gigantic behind it is the Bank of Manhattan Company building, and far to the right of it appears the famous Woolworth Tower.

Still farther to the right, and beyond the Manhattan end of Brooklyn Bridge, is the Municipal Building. Note how the present height of the buildings almost completely obscures the distant west shore of the Hudson River, which in the lower picture is plainly visible across Manhattan.

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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.

During the ride, his recent mishap drew Waters’ attention to the taxi driver’s badly wrinkled necktie. That started him thinking about the possibility of a wrinkleproof tie. Meanwhile, the driver, missing the correct street, had started to turn around in the middle of Delmar Avenue. Then came a more serious accident. A streetcar rammed into the cab and Waters was severely injured.

The final accident occurred as Waters lay on the operating table in the emergency room of the hospital. As he began breathing the anesthetic, the rubber respirator bag on the tank caught his eye. With each breath the bag alternately wrinkled up tight and straightened out again. Just before he lost consciousness, that accidental glance at the breathing bag made him think: “Why, that bag is wrinkleproof!”

That was it—his idea for keeping ties from wrinkling. You’ve probably worn one of the wrinkleproof neckties with rubber-impregnated linings that soon remedied Waters’ lack of money.

The name for this faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident is “serendipity.” The word comes from an old fairy tale about three princes of Serendip (Ceylon) who were constantly making lucky discoveries of this sort. Serendipity pays well.

As an example, fifteen-year-old John Alby Spencer had a job in a Maine lumber camp firing an old steam boiler. It burned up wood so quickly that he scarcely had time to take care of other duties before it was necessary to dodge back and look at the fire. Then one day Spencer noticed that whenever the fire started to burn very hot there would be a sharp, metallic sound. And whenever the fire started to cool off he would hear the same noise. That was the accident. Admittedly it didn’t seem very significant—but it made Spencer more than a million dollars.

Spencer was curious. He investigated and discovered that expansion and contraction of the metal as it heated and cooled was causing the clean-out door on the firebox to belly out and snap back.

Did he think that this phenomenon would make him wealthy? As a matter of fact, he wasn’t thinking of money at all—just of a way to save himself trouble. He placed a log against the clean-out door before leaving the stove. When the fire died down, the door snapped back into shape and kicked the log to the floor. This made a loud noise, which signaled him to come back.

A number of years later Spencer applied that accidental discovery in an invention that made his fortune. Using a little disc made of two metals with different rates of thermal expansion, he made a thermostatic switch. Normally a metal point on the disc rests against a stationary terminal, completing an electrical contact. When the temperature rises beyond a certain point, however, the disc flicks over and the electrical contact is broken.

First used in an automatic, temperature-controlled flatiron, the Spencer thermostatic switch today is included in electrical appliances of all kinds, motors, water heaters, toasters, etc. Millions of them have been sold.

As for the Spencer company, its financial rating is tops. And all because an alert boy happened to hear a little noise, tracked it down and applied his discovery.

Then, too, there was Elihu Thomson, a young teacher who was demonstrating the various forms of electricity during a routine physics lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Thousands of other teachers had rigged Leyden jars for the discharge of static. But there was a hitch in Thomson’s demonstration. During the discharge of electricity the ends of the two primary wires came into contact. Thomson gave them a flick to separate them, but they stuck together.

Do you see a possible million in this? Well, Thomson looked more closely. What he saw was really worth his attention. The metal of the wires was fused together. Thomson had discovered electrical welding, today widely used in industry.

Accidents happen to all of us. We don’t all see the same things in them, however. In at least one case, the same accident led two men to two entirely different inventions. These two men happened to spill bottles of collodion, or liquid court plaster, which consists of nitrated cellulose in solution with alcohol and ether. One of these bottles was spilled in Albany, New York, by a young printer, John Wesley Hyatt. The other was spilled in Lyons, France, by another young man, Hilaire de Chardonnet, an assistant to the famous Louis Pasteur.

Hyatt did not notice anything unusual when that bottle of collodion spilled in Albany. But a few days later he cut his finger and hunted for his liquid court plaster. The bottle was empty. On the shelf around it, though, a tough, hard sheet of strange material had dried.

At that time the game of billiards was at its peak of popularity. But ivory for balls was so scarce that a manufacturer had offered a $10,000 prize for a substitute. Hyatt thought he had one. He found a way to mold the nitrocellulose together with camphor and alcohol, forming a clear, hard substance which be called “celluloid.” Direct consequences of Hyatt’s discovery include not only the celluloid collar of former jokebook fame but the mammoth photography and motion-picture industries.

Now, what about that other bottle of collodion, spilled in Lyons? The young Frenchman, de Chardonnet, left the sticky mess for a while. Later, when he returned to clean it up, it was partly dry. Accidentally his fingers slipped into the slimy stuff. As he raised his hands, long filaments strung out from them.

De Chardonnet, a trained observer, examined them carefully. His mind clicked. Starting from collodion, his experiments yielded the first artificial silk. This became the basis of the rayon industry which today has a volume of more than a billion dollars a year in the United States alone.

Though celluloid made possible the tremendous expansion of the photographic industry, the story of photography goes back farther than that. About a hundred years ago scientists all over the world were conducting experiments to perfect the art. Men had found ways of producing photographic images, but they were still dim and faint. The problem was to develop them more clearly.

One of the experimenters was a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, who worked with his partner, Claude Niepce. One morning Daguerre entered the laboratory, went to the chemical cabinet, and took out a plate which Niepce had exposed and left the night before. Daguerre nearly dropped the plate in his surprise. It already was developed—developed as no other plate had ever been. On it was a clear, sharp image.

Daguerre rushed excitedly to the cabinet and looked inside but found no new chemical there. There were many chemicals in the cabinet. One of them must be the developing agent—but which? That evening he removed one chemical from the cabinet and put in another exposed plate. In the morning he found that plate developed, too. One chemical was eliminated. The investigation went on night after night, and morning after morning the story was the same: The plate was always developed.

Finally only one chemical remained. “This must be the one,” Daguerre told Niepce. Sure enough, the next morning the plate was developed.

Jubilant, both experimenters tried the chemical on another exposed plate. Unfortunately, the chemical had absolutely no effect.

Puzzled, Daguerre and Niepce decided to try the empty cabinet on an exposed plate. Surprisingly, in the morning the plate was developed. They examined the cabinet carefully. There, on one of the shelves was a little loose mercury, spilled from a bottle. Mercury was the developing agent.

In this accidental fashion the first practical photographic method was discovered. Long since obsolete, it was nevertheless the beginning of the photographic industry. For years, all photographs were known as Daguerreotypes—after Louis Daguerre, who accidentally stumbled on the secret.

In turn, the development of photography was responsible for another accidental discovery. Professor Wilhelm von Roentgen, teacher of physics at Wurzburg, Germany, and an enthusiastic amateur photographer, was experimenting with cathode rays. Called to lunch during one of his experiments, he left the tube on his desk and forgot to turn off the electricity. That same day he happened to take some photographs. When he developed them, he was startled to see, in the center of one picture, the silhouette of a key.

After a search, he found his office key inside of a book on his desk, where it had been used as a bookmark. Sitting down, he carefully thought over the whole strange group of circumstances. The key had been in the book. The book had been on the desk. And, come to think of it, one of his photographic plate-holders also had been on the desk and under the book. The cathode-ray tube had ‘ been left burning on the desk and also on the book. The tube must have given off rays of some sort that had penetrated the book and plate-holder to affect the photographic plate and leave the picture of the key. He tried duplicating the experiment. It worked. Before long he made a photograph of the bones of his hand.

Von Roentgen called this new, strange ray the X-ray, because it was unknown. As everyone knows, the X-ray plays an important part in modern life, being used in both medicine and industry.

Daguerre accidentally discovered exactly what he was looking for. Von Roentgen accidentally discovered something entirely unexpected. So did Dr. Waldo Semon, a research man for the B. F. Goodrich Company. Dr. Semon was trying to develop an adhesive which would bond rubber to metal. He carried out numerous experiments in which simple molecules were caused to polymerize or join together like links in a chain. These linked molecules formed products which he hoped would do the job.

In one of these experiments vinyl chloride, ordinarily a gas, was polymerized to give a tough, resinous product. When he heated this substance, Semon found that he had prepared something strange. It was much too thick to be an adhesive. In fact, he was having trouble getting it out of the test tube. As he struggled to remove the contents, the test tube slipped from his grasp and shattered on the floor. Semon was amazed by what he saw then. The contents bounced. Retrieving it from the floor and kneading it between his fingers, he formed a small ball. Then, as his colleagues gaped in surprise, he proceeded to bounce the ball down the hallway.

Further investigation revealed that the new substance, though something like rubber, had other astonishing qualities. Unlike natural rubber it was noninflammable. It was practically impervious to oil or gasoline and its surface sealed tight against the corrosive effect of almost every known acid. Because of this last quality, it was called Koroseal, a substance discovered by pure chance. Millions of dollars worth of this remarkable product now . are being used every year in industry, garden hose, backyard play ponds, curtains, bedspreads, baby pants and other products.

E. Howard Armstrong’s father thought he was too young to have bumped into a million-dollar idea. Howard, who was still in college was a pioneer radio bug. His equipment littered the entire attic of the family home in Yonkers, New York.

One day Howard had just rewired his homemade set, as was the periodic custom of every real ham. Tuning in on some signals, he was amazed to hear them without even taking the earphones from the table. Young Armstrong examined his circuit painstakingly. The only significant thing he found was that he had rearranged the plate coil and grid coil of the tube so that they were close.

Apparently part of the energy from the plate circuit was feeding back into the grid circuit of the same tube, and thus building up the signals. After checking for two months he knew that he had made a big discovery. When he asked his father for money to get a patent, his father scoffed: “Why, you’re still just a kid! You’d better pay more attention to your studies and stop fooling around with that wireless thing.”

Howard, however, still tried to protect his invention. Making up a detailed wiring diagram, he had this notarized. It was this document which later upheld Armstrong’s claim to discovery of the regenerative circuit, widely used in commercial radio.

Everyone has accidents but only a few make them pay off. The accidents described above have been worth millions. You, too, can stumble into a fortune.

If you want to be an inventor, you may be lucky even when you appear to be “unlucky.” For accidents are always happening to unlucky people. Just be sure, when that next accident happens to you, you’re alert enough to recognize that million dollars when it pops up and hits you right in the face.

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.

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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.” Professor Miller has testified on the subject before the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. On page 58, Bob and Ray show what can happen if the safeguards fail.

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.

The benefits to be derived from the new technology are many. In one medical center, doctors are already using computers to monitor heart patients in an attempt to isolate the changes in body chemistry that precede a heart attack. The search is for an “early warning system” so that treatment is not delayed until after the heart attack has struck. Elsewhere, plans are being made to establish a data bank in which vast amounts of medical information will be accessible through remote terminals to doctors thousands of miles away. A doctor will then be able to determine the antidote for various poisons or get the latest literature on a disease by dialing a telephone or typing an inquiry on a computer console.

A committee of the Bureau of the Budget has proposed that the federal government set up a National Data Center to compile statistical information on various facets of our society. Certainly the computer can help us simplify record-keeping by assigning everyone a “birth” number that will identify him for tax returns, banking, education, social security, the draft, and other purposes. This number could also serve as a telephone number, which, when used on modern communication mechanisms, would make it possible to reach its holder directly no matter where he might be.

But such a Data Center poses a grave threat to individual freedom and privacy. With its insatiable appetite for information, its inability to forget anything that has been put into it, a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers. Computer technology is moving so rapidly that a sharp line between statistical and intelligence systems is bound to be obliterated. Even the most innocuous of centers could provide the “foot in the door” for the development of an individualized computer-based federal snooping system.

Since a National Data Center would be augmented by numerous subsystems or satellites operated by state and local governments or by private organizations, comprehensive national regulation of computer communications, whether of federal or nonfederal origin, ultimately will become imperative.

Moreover, deliberations should not be conducted in terms of computer capability as it exists today. New computer hardware is constantly being spawned, machine storage capacity and speed are increasing geometrically, and costs are declining. Thus at present we cannot imagine what the dimensions, the sophistication, or the snooping ability of the National Data Center will turn out to be ten or twenty years from now. Nor can we predict what new techniques will be developed to pierce any safeguards that Congress may set up in order to protect people against those who manipulate or falsify information they extract from or put into the center.

Of course, it would be foolish to prohibit the use of data-processing technology to carry out important governmental operations simply because it might be abused. However, it is necessary to fashion an adequate legal structure to protect the public against misuse of information handling.

IN the past, privacy has been relatively easy to protect for a number of reasons. Large quantities of information about individuals have not been available. Generally decentralized, uncollected, and uncollated, the available information has been relatively superficial, access to it has been difficult to secure, and most people are unable to interpret it. During the hearings held recently by two of the congressional subcommittees investigating invasions of privacy, however, revelations concerning the widespread use of modern electronic and optical snooping devices shocked us.

In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy, Edgar S. Dunn, Jr., a research analyst for Resources for the Future, Incorporated, pointed out that information in the center would not be intelligible to the snooper as are the contents of a manila folder. Computerized data require a machine, a code book, a set of instructions, and a technician in order to be comprehended. Presumably Mr. Dunn’s thesis is that if it is difficult or expensive to gain access to and interpret the data in the center, there is little likelihood of anyone’s trying to pry; if the snooper’s cost for unearthing a unit of dirt increases sufficiently, it will become too expensive for him to try to violate the center’s integrity.

Mr. Dunn’s logic fails to take into account other factors. First, if all the information gathered about an individual is in one place, the payoff for snooping is sharply enhanced. Thus, although the cost or difficulty of gaining access may be great, the amount of dirt available once access is gained is also great. Second, there is every reason to believe that the art of electronic surveillance will continue to become more efficient and economical. Third, governmental snooping is rarely deterred by cost.

Mr. Dunn also ignores a number of special dangers posed by a computerized National Data Center. Ever since the federal government’s entry into the taxation and social welfare spheres, increasing quantities of information have been recorded. Moreover, as recording processes have become mechanized and less cumbersome, there also has been centralization and collation of information. In something akin to Parkinson’s Law, the increase in information-handling capacity has created a tendency toward more extensive manipulation and analysis of recorded data, which, in turn, has required the collection of more and more data. The creation of the Data Center with electronic storage and retrieval capacity will accelerate this pattern.

Any increase in the amount of recorded information is certain to increase the risk of errors in reporting and recording and indexing. Information distortion also will be caused by machine malfunctioning. Moreover, people working with the data in Washington or at a distance through remote terminals can misuse the information. As information accumulates, the contents of an individual’s computerized dossier will appear more and more impressive and will impart a heightened sense of reliability to the user, which, coupled with the myth of computer infallibility, will make it less likely that the user will try to verify the recorded data. This will be true despite the “softness” or “imprecision” of much of the data. Our success or failure in life ultimately may turn on what other people decide to put into our files and on the programmer’s ability, or inability, to evaluate, process, and interrelate information. The great bulk of the information likely to find its way into the center will be gathered and processed by relatively unskilled and unimaginative people who lack discrimination and sensitivity. Furthermore, a computerized file has a certain indelible quality — adversities cannot be overcome simply by the passage of time.

There are further dangers. The very existence of a National Data Center may encourage certain federal officials to engage in questionable surveillance tactics. For example, optical scanners — devices with the capacity to read a variety of type fonts or handwriting at fantastic rates of speed — could be used to monitor our mail. By linking scanners with a computer system, the information drawn in by the scanner would be converted into machine-readable form and transferred into the subject’s file in the National Data Center.

Then, with sophisticated programming, the dossiers of all of the surveillance subject’s correspondents could be produced at the touch of a button, and an appropriate entry — perhaps “associates with known criminals” — could be added to all of them. As a result, someone who simply exchanges Christmas cards with a person whose mail is being monitored might find himself under surveillance or might be turned down when he applies for a job with the government or requests a government grant or applies for some other governmental benefit. An untested, impersonal, and erroneous computer entry such as “associates with known criminals” has marked him, and he is helpless to rectify the situation. Indeed, it is likely that he would not even be aware that the entry existed.

These tactics, as well as the possibility of coupling wiretapping and computer processing, undoubtedly will be extremely attractive to overzealous law-enforcement officers. Similarly, the ability to transfer into the National Data Center quantities of information maintained in nonfederal files — credit ratings, educational information from schools and universities, local and state tax information, and medical records — will enable governmental snoopers to obtain data that they have no authority to secure on their own.

The compilation of information by unskilled personnel also creates serious problems of accuracy. It is not simply a matter of the truth or falsity of what is recorded. Information can be entirely accurate and sufficient in one context and wholly incomplete and misleading in another. For example, the bare statement of an individual’s marital status has entirely different connotations to the selective service, a credit bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, and the social security administration. Consider a computer entry of “divorced” and the different embellishment that would be necessary in each of those contexts to portray an accurate picture of an individual’s situation.

The question of context is most graphically illustrated by the unexplained and incomplete arrest record. It is unlikely that a citizen whose file contains an entry “arrested, 6/1/42; convicted felony, 1/6/43; three years, federal penitentiary” would be given federal employment or be accorded the governmental courtesies accorded other citizens. Yet the subject may simply have been a conscientious objector. And what about the entry “arrested, disorderly conduct; sentenced six months Gotham City jail.” Without further explanation, who – would know that the person involved was a civil rights demonstrator whose conviction was reversed on appeal?

Finally, the risks to privacy created by a National Data Center lie not only in the misuse of the system by those who desire to injure others or who can obtain some personal advantage by doing so. There also is a legitimate concern that government employees in routine clerical positions will have the capacity to inflict damage through negligence, sloppiness, thoughtlessness, or sheer stupidity, by unintentionally rendering a record inaccurate, or losing it, or disseminating its contents to people not authorized to see it.

To ensure freedom from governmental intrusion, Congress must legislate reasonably precise standards regarding the information that can be recorded in the National Data Center. Certain types of information should not be recorded even if it is technically feasible to do so and a legitimate administrative objective exists. For example, it has long been “feasible,” and from some vantage points “desirable,” to require citizens to carry and display passports when traveling in this country, or to require universal fingerprinting. But we have not done so because these encroachments on our liberties are deemed inconsistent with the philosophical fiber of our society. Likewise, highly personal information, especially medical and psychiatric information, should not be permitted in the center unless human life depends upon recording it.

Legislation sharply limiting the information which federal agencies and officials can extract from private citizens is absolutely essential. To reinforce these limitations, the statute creating the Data Center should prohibit recording any information collected without specific congressional authorization. Until the quality of the center’s operations and the nature of its impact on individual privacy can be better perceived, the center’s activities should be restricted to the preservation of factual data.

The necessary procedural and technical safeguards seem to fall into two categories: those needed to guarantee the accuracy and integrity of the stored information, and those needed to control its dissemination.

To ensure the accuracy of the center’s files, an individual should have an opportunity to correct errors in information concerning him. Perhaps a print-out of his computer file should be sent to him once a year. Admittedly, this process would be expensive; some agencies will argue that the value of certain information will be lost if it is known that the government has it; and there might be squabbles between citizens and the Data Center concerning the accuracy of the file that would entail costly administrative proceedings. Nonetheless, the right of a citizen to be protected against governmental dissemination of misinformation is so important that we must be willing to pay some price to preserve it. Instead of an annual mailing, citizens could be given access to their files on request, perhaps through a network of remote computer terminals situated in government buildings throughout the country. What is necessary is a procedure for periodically determining when data are outmoded or should be removed from the file.

Turning to the question of access, the center’s computer hardware and software must be designed to limit access to the information. A medical history given to a government doctor in connection with an application for veteran’s benefits should not be available to federal employees not legitimately involved in processing the application. One solution may be to store information according to its sensitivity or its accessibility, or both. Then, governmental officials can be assigned access keys that will let them reach only those portions of the center’s files that are relevant to their particular governmental function.

Everyone directing an inquiry to the center or seeking to deposit information in it should be required to identify himself. Finger- or voice-prints ultimately may be the best form of identification. As snooping techniques become more sophisticated, systems may even be needed to counter the possibility of forgery or duplication; perhaps an answerback system or a combination of finger- and voice-prints will be necessary. In addition, the center should be equipped with protector files to record the identity of inquirers, and these files should be audited to unearth misuse of the system. It probably will also be necessary to audit the programs controlling the manipulation of the files and access to the system to make sure that no one has inserted a secret “door” or a password permitting entry to the data by unauthorized personnel. It is frightening to realize that at present there apparently is no foolproof way to prevent occasional “monitor intrusion” in large data-processing systems. Additional protection against these risks can be achieved by exercising great care in selecting programming personnel.

In the future, sophisticated connections between the center and federal offices throughout the country and between the federal center and numerous state, local, and private centers probably will exist. As a result, information will move into and out of the center over substantial distances by telephone lines or microwave relays. The center’s “network” character will require information to be protected against wiretapping and other forms of electronic eavesdropping. Transmission in the clear undoubtedly will have to be proscribed, and data in machine-readable form will have to be scrambled or further encoded so that they can be rendered intelligible only by a decoding process built into the system’s authorized terminals. Although it may not be worth the effort or expense to develop completely breakproof codes, sufficient scrambling or coding to make it expensive for an eavesdropper to intercept the center’s transmission will be necessary. If information in the center is arranged according to sensitivity or accessibility, the most efficient procedure may be to use codes of different degrees of complexity.

At a minimum, congressional action is necessary to establish the appropriate balance between the needs of the national government in accumulating, processing, and disseminating information and the right of individual privacy. This legislation must be reinforced by statutory civil remedies and penal sanctions.

Testimony before Congress concerning the intrusive activities of the Post Office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service gives us cause to balk at delegating authority over the Data Center to any of the agencies that have a stake in the content of data collected by the government. Some federal personnel are already involved in mail-cover operations, electronic bugging, wiretapping, and other invasions of privacy, and undoubtedly they would try to crack the security of any Data Center that maintains information on an individual basis. Thus it would be folly to leave the center in the hands of any agency whose employees are known to engage in antiprivacy activities. Similarly, the center must be kept away from government officials who are likely to become so entranced with operating sophisticated machinery and manipulating large masses of data that they will not respect an individual’s right to privacy.

The conclusion seems inescapable: control over the center must be lodged outside existing channels. A new, completely independent agency, bureau, or office should be established — perhaps as an adjunct to the Census Bureau or the National Archives — to formulate policy under whatever legislative guidelines are enacted to ensure the privacy of all citizens. The organization would operate the center, regulate the nature of the information that can be recorded and stored, ensure its accuracy, and protect the center against breaches of security.

The new agency’s ability to avoid becoming a captive of the governmental units using the center would be crucial. Perhaps with proper staffing and well-delineated lines of authority to Congress or the President, the center could achieve the degree of independence needed to protect individuals against governmental or private misuse of information in the center. At the other end of the spectrum, the center cannot become an island unto itself, populated by technocrats whose conduct is shielded by the alleged omniscience of the machines they manage and who are neither responsive nor responsible to anyone.

The proposed agency should be established before the center is planned. To date, there has been virtually no meaningful exchange among scientists, technicians, legal experts, and government people on the implications of the center. The center also might consider supporting some of the planned nonfederal computer networks, such as the Inter-university Communications Council’s (EDUCOM) plan to link the major universities together, using them as models or operating laboratories to test procedures and hardware for the federal center.

To satisfy those who argue for the early establishment of a purely statistical Data Center, it might be possible for the proposed agency to set up a modest center in which information which does not invade privacy could be made available to government officials, educators, and private researchers. Other federal agencies might establish satellite centers that would contain information too sensitive to be recorded in the statistical center during that institution’s formative period, although the data in satellites ultimately might be transferred to the national center.

The threat to individual privacy posed by the computer comes from the private sector as well as the proposed federal Data Center. Each year state and local governments, educational institutions, trade associations, and industrial firms establish data centers that collect and store quantities of information about individuals. Because the high cost of computer installation forces many organizations to operate on a time-share basis, the nonfederal centers pose a special danger to privacy. Without effective screening and built-in security devices, one participant, accidentally or deliberately, may invade and extract or alter the computer files of another participant. Moreover, because many time-share systems operate over large geographic areas, their transmissions will be vulnerable to tapping or malicious destruction unless they are scrambled or encoded. Right now, a mailing list containing 150 to 170 million names, accompanied by addresses and financial data, is being compiled. The list is so structured that it yields sublists of people in various vocational and avocational categories. Where the necessary in- formation to produce this monster came from and how one gets off the list are mysteries.

Currently there are more than two thousand independent credit bureaus in the United States, many of whose files are being computerized. Eventually, these bureaus will make a network of their computers, creating a ready source of detailed information about an individual’s finances. The accuracy of these records will become increasingly crucial; an honest dispute between a consumer and a retailer over a bill may produce an unexplained and unexpungeable “no pay” evaluation in the computer and result in considerable damage to the buyer’s credit rating.

In testimony before the House subcommittee, the director of the New York State Identification and Intelligence System described a data bank containing files on “known” criminals that ultimately will contain millions of entries. He expressed a willingness to exchange information with police officials in other states as soon as the state systems could be meshed. If this system is tied into the National Data Center or New York’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles or welfare agencies, it would permit someone to direct an inquiry to the computer file of “known” criminals, find an entry under the name of his subject, and rely on that entry to the subject’s detriment without attempting to verify its accuracy.

Congress should consider the need for legislation setting standards to be met by nonfederal computer organizations in providing information about private persons and restraining federal officers from access to certain types of information from nonfederal data centers. Nonfederal systems should be required to install some protective devices and procedures. This is not to suggest that Congress should necessarily impose the same controls on nonfederal systems that it may choose to impose on the federal center. But a protector file to record the source of inquiries and modest encoding would probably prevent wide-scale abuse, although security needs vary from system to system. Since security may be facilitated by installing protective devices in the computer hardware itself, the possible need for regulation of certain aspects of computer manufacturing also should be taken into account.

The possibility of regulating transmission between federal and nonfederal centers and the interaction among nonfederal centers also should be considered. The specter of a federal agency, such as the Veterans’ Administration, reaching into a citizen’s medical file in a data center operated by a network of hospitals to augment the federal center’s file is a disturbing one. Regulating the security of the transmissions and imposing sanctions for noncompliance and eavesdropping would preserve individual privacy against governmental snooping and bureaucratic spinelessness or perfidy.

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• THE COMPUTER DATA BANK: WILL IT KILL YOUR FREEDOM? (Nov, 1967)

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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.

Naturally, finds of such magnitude are quite rare. But smaller autograph discoveries are constantly being made. For America’s thousands of autograph collectors make it their business to find out all they can about autographs and thus spot valuable signatures, documents and letters. And even if they don’t come up with a $100,000 find, this rapidly growing hobby brings them vast enjoyment and mental stimulation.

Autograph prices range from 40 cents for a Betty Grable signature to $260,000 for a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps you never thought of that document as an autograph but among real collectors an autograph may refer to a handwritten letter, a signed manuscript or document, a signed photograph or just a signature.

Let’s start with low-priced autographs. Among signatures and signed photographs the following values are listed by a leading autograph dealer: General Douglas Mac-Arthur, $3.50; Ingrid Bergman, $1.50; Fred M. Vinson, $3.00; Enrico Caruso, $.50; Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, $1.50.

The above prices are partially determined by the nature of the autograph— whether it’s a plain signature, a greeting or a signed photograph. Other factors that determine the value are the popularity of the person who wrote it, the contents, the rarity, condition, time and circumstance of the writing.

What are the big-money autographs? Back in 1927 a Mamaroneck, N. Y., family cleaning out the barn, came across a letter signed by Button Gwinnett and two other signers of the Declaration of Independence. The lucky family received $51,000 for that piece of paper.

Why? Because Button Gwinnett’s signature is the second rarest among the signers of the Declaration. The rarest of all is Thomas Lynch, Jr.’s. Current prices for Lynch, Jr. or Gwinnett range from $2,000 to $10,000. If you have a complete set of signatures of the signers of the Declaration, count yourself fortunate. There are only 36 complete sets, valued at up to $200,000. So, count yourself wealthy, too.

Uncover any of the following autographs and you’ll be able to take it easy for a while: a letter written by William Henry Harrison during the 30 days that he was President of the United States; any writing of Captain John Smith; original manuscripts of Herman Melville or Edgar Allan Poe.

Skipping across to Europe, if you can dig up autographs of Moliere, Michelangelo, Luther or Beethoven you’re a lucky collector. Currently the National Arts Foundation of New York City is searching for Mozart manuscripts that were stolen during World War II from caskets stored near Salzburg, Austria. The Foundation is offering a reward for any information leading to their recovery and stands ready to purchase any of the missing material and to return the manuscripts to the Mozarteum, a museum. The chances of your discovering an original letter written by Shakespeare are slim, but if you do, you’ll be able to name your price and retire. So far his signature has been found only on legal documents.

If you come across something that looks as if it might really be valuable, what should you do? Well, contact any autograph dealer who specializes in the field. When there is big money at stake, consult with one of these experts rather than a dealer who handles other items such as antiques, as well. You can check the reliability of an autograph firm by consulting a university librarian or the head of your nearest historical society. If they cannot advise you, write to the Librarian of Congress in Washington. Then, when you have chosen your dealer, send your find to him by registered mail. Usually it isn’t too helpful to describe the autograph in a letter since a dealer can’t judge accurately without examining the original.

The National Society of Autograph Collectors at 285 Madison Ave., New York 17, N. Y., can also help you with your autographs. Annual membership in the Society is $5, which includes quarterly issues of the Autograph Collectors’ Journal. You may write to the Society concerning your finds and they will refer you to the dealer or collector whom they believe would be interested.

Sometimes letters of unknowns have considerable value simply because they shed light on certain periods of history. A baker from Atlanta, Ga., found some letters recently which had been written by his grandfather, a Confederate soldier. His ancestor was not a famous man but the letters painted a vivid, authentic picture of life at the front during the Civil War. They brought a tidy sum.

There is always a demand for new source material that sheds light on some phase of our country’s history. Perhaps one of your ancestors took part in a famous Indian fight or helped to explore western territory. If you have letters that describe such adventures and the territory in which they took place, you have material that may bring you handy cash. Since the N.S.A.C. keeps a record of the specialization of each member, it’s easy to contact fellow collectors if you want to sell or trade your finds.

Holographs-letters written entirely by hand—are usually worth more than typewritten ones or letters written by secretaries and signed by the individual. Ordinary holographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and President Truman might bring from $100 to $500 each, whereas signed, typed letters by these presidents may not be worth more than $10. President Truman’s letter calling the Marines “the Navy’s police force” with “a propaganda machine comparable to Stalin’s” was recently bought by a Chicago insurance man and enriched the Marine Corps League to the tune of $2,500. An equally high price was paid by a Connecticut man for President Truman’s letter to Paul Hume, the Washington music critic.

A George Washington letter of routine content is worth about $100 but one written while he was encamped at Valley Forge may bring between $200 and $1,000. If you can dig up some of his writing pertaining to either his inaugural or farewell address, you might ask between $2,500 and $5,000 for it In your search for valuable documents and letters, you should also be on the lookout for handwritten material that bears no signature. Before Washington decided on the inaugural address which he delivered, he wrote a much longer version of it in longhand. That draft of his planned address had 62 pages and so far only 16 pages and four fragments have been discovered. The manuscript was handed out, page by page, by historian Jared Sparks in answer to requests he received. So, if you should come across a 9-by-6-1/2 inch page in the handwriting of the first president, it might well be part of that valuable manuscript.

A signed photograph of Joseph Stalin was recently sold for $85. There are a great many Hitler autographs but they are worth little at present because of their abundance. Generally, a hero’s autograph is much more de- sirable than a villain’s although a letter of Benedict Arnold in which he gave a truthful account of his treason brought $2,850.

How do you go about acquiring a collection if you have no large amount of money to spend? Well, there’s a man in Baltimore, Md., who has an unusual and widespread collection, geographically speaking. For years he has been writing to kings and queens, statesmen and scientists all over the globe in an effort to acquire their autographs. He doesn’t just ask for their signatures—he compliments them for some achievement and asks their opinions on matters of political or scientific significance. And he has a very high percentage of replies. Because these celebrities often answer his comments or questions in detail, their autographs are of considerably more value than mere signatures.

It’s not a recommended practice, but some autographs can be acquired by trickery. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, used to ignore all requests for autographs. One fan didn’t give up so easily. Taking advantage of F. D. R.’s weakness for bargains in postage stamps, he wrote to the late president, offering him a choice collection for a nominal fee. Roosevelt promptly responded with a check for the stamps and the autograph fiend was able to cash the check for considerably more than its face value.

Sometimes city, state and federal government bureaus are seized with spring cleaning fever and rashly destroy papers and documents which would be priceless to posterity. Walter Fetter, a Philadelphia business man, attended the disposal sale of 40 tons of miscellaneous papers taken from the Philadelphia custom house. The papers had supposedly been examined for possible valuable material. But, though Fetter was only a neophyte collector, he knew that there might be real valuables lurking in the mass of doomed papers. So he bought a load of them cheaply and sure enough, after careful scrutiny, he came upon several letters and documents whose value was about ten times the purchase price of the whole lot.

How much should you pay for collector’s items? Well, you can familiarize yourself with current prices by asking some of the dealers for copies of their catalogs. Usually they are free or else there is only a nominal charge for them. Another source which you may find helpful is a yearly publication called American Book-Prices Current which lists the auction prices of books and autographs that were traded in the U. S. during the year. You can probably locate this book in your public library.

And watch out for forgeries. If someone offered you letters written by Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, by Lazarus to Saint Peter, by Alexander the Great to Aristotle, what would you think? In the middle of the nineteenth century a forger by name of Vrain Lucas produced more than 25,000 of such autographs and managed to sell many of them. Lucas took the trouble to mix special inks and to make the letters look very ancient but the paper he used came from local French mills and most surprising of all, they were written in modern French!

Experts give this advice: Don’t deal with strangers where big values are involved but do business with dealers whose reputations are established. Good forgeries can usually be spotted only by the experts but you may be able to detect facsimiles made by rubber stamps. A quick test is the application of one of the standard liquid ink eradicators to the tail of the signature. Usually you can also tell a rubber stamp from a good signature because the stamp leaves a uniformity of ink not left by a pen.

It sometimes happens that collectors have authentic articles and don’t realize it. A Virginia college boy recently bought an address by Thomas Jefferson, supposedly copied by a contemporary. After careful scrutiny, the boy discovered that the speech was actually in Jefferson’s own handwriting and thus worth considerably more than the original purchase price.

Not an autograph collector, but a shrewd student of the field was the late Bernard Shaw. Like all great and wealthy men, Shaw was constantly being bothered by requests for handouts from people whom he knew only slightly or not at all. Shaw was not noted for his philanthropy and managed to disregard these letters completely without a twinge of conscience. But he was far from hard-hearted.

For instance, one real friend, whom Shaw knew to be destitute, would never stoop to the level of begging for money from his friend. Shaw realized this and periodically, would drop him a simple innocuous note, asking after his health.

The shrewd Shaw, having checked on the market value of his letters, knew that his friend could sell them for a substantial sum of money. And best of all, it only cost Bernard Shaw a postage stamp!

So, don’t despair because you can’t afford to buy the Declaration of Independence or the British Magna Carta. There are other autograph treasures to be found. They may be filed away in your attic, in a trash pile or in some office cabinet. But rest assured that astute autograph collectors are already out hunting for these golden signatures. •

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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.

The gold that has lain idle in the country’s 3,000 monasteries will be used to purchase the necessary equipment. Gordon B. Enders, American, and the only foreigner ever appointed to a high position in the Tibetan Government, has been commissioned to perform an extraordinary task in connection with this modernization program. His main job this year is to collect and transport as much gold as he can possibly carry from the rock-bound interior of Tibet to safekeeping in China.

This is the gold which sooner or later will find its way to the United States, as payment for purchases of all sorts of machinery and special equipment, such as the Panchen Lama wants for his country.

“Unknown to most of the world,” said Enders, interviewed during a brief stay in New York, “the monasteries of Tibet have been collecting gold dust for at least six or seven centuries. This gold belongs to the ruling power because the Church and the Government are the same in Tibet. How much gold has thus been accumulated, it is hard to say, but it has been estimated to be about $100,000,000.”

One hundred million dollars will certainly buy a great deal of American machinery. The Panchen Lama does not, however, plan to spend all his gold at once, for the country cannot be modernized rapidly.

The high altitudes, blizzards, and winds prevailing during most of the year will prevent Enders from flying in all but three summer months. He plans to fly out about $3,000,000 worth of gold dust during the first season of operations. At the rate of even $3,000,000 per flying season, Enders will have his hands full for some years to come.

The first commercial shipment of radios and automobiles ever to enter the Forbidden Land recently accompanied the Panchen Lama on his triumphal entry into Tibet, with a great caravan of priests, pilgrims, and pack animals. The automobiles and radios were knocked down and loaded on the backs of animals. They were purchased for the Panchen Lama by Enders.

China claims sovereignty over Tibet, and she has built a new capital for the Panchen Lama at a place called Kokonor, overlooking a great salt lake perched at an altitude of 10,600 feet, and having a circumference of 230 miles. Surrounded by a trained garrison of 3,000 men, the Panchen Lama rules over 3,000,000 people scattered over an area of about 500,000 square miles.

From the capital at Kokonor it is 180 miles to the Lufthansa Air Terminal at Lanchowfu, in Kansuh Province, China. The German all-metal planes make trips to the outside world twice each week.

But reaching the Lufthansa station will not be so easy as it appears, for the Tibetan capital is separated from it by a range of blizzard-swept, snow-covered mountains in which the lowest pass is 16,000 feet.

Enders’ first task on reaching Tibet, he said, would be to survey all the possible airplane landing sites. He must also prepare maps of various regions which are still practically unknown. The existing maps of Tibet are at best only approximations of the actual conditions.

Enders’ choice is American flying equipment for the gold collection work. He has two low-wing cabin monoplanes for the first year’s operations. Each ship can carry a 1,500-pound payload at a 25,000-foot ceiling. With special fuel tanks, it can remain in the air for 16 to 20 hours at a time.

One ship is intended solely for carrying fuel between Tibet and the railheads in either China or India. The British Indian railhead is 200 miles from Tashilhunpo, the religious capital of Tibet. On the Chinese side, the nearest railhead is Taiyuanfu, 600 miles from the Tibetan border and 1,200 miles from the political capital at Kokonor.

Practically all the required gasoline supplies in the land of the lama are brought in by the most laborious methods. Gas cans are transported either on the backs of coolies or the backs of beasts. The cost is proportionately high, so high in fact, that for the present only the Panchen Lama and a few high government officials can afford to buy the fuel.

While one of Enders’ planes is transporting gas from the nearest outside supply depots, the other plane, commanded by Enders himself, is flying from monastery to monastery and picking up bags of gold for export to the outside world.

The roadless condition of the Forbidden Land makes it almost impossible to employ any other safe form of transport. The airplane finds its own road in the sky. ‘ Another good reason for employing the airplane is that it can successfully evade roving bands of robbers.

“One of the odd beliefs in Tibet is that gold is a plant,” said Enders, “and the natives often bury nuggets in the ground, just as any farmer buries a seed.” Within the country itself, gold has little real value. The Panchen Lama has declared that it is “worth nothing, for you cannot eat it. It is only good for what it can buy.” Hence his decision to export quantities of gold to the outside world, where it is highly esteemed.

The Tibetan monasteries are financial institutions and commercial markets, in addition to temples of worship. They lend money to the people at the rate of 2 per cent per month. In this way the wealth of the government has increased over a long period of years, and today the Panchen Lama finds * himself in a position to do business with his white neighbors.

Gold is not the only real wealth in Tibet. The monasteries have salvaged considerable collections of semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli, sapphires, garnets, aqua-marines, topazes and moonstones.

One of the Panchen Lama’s earliest importations will be American road-building machinery. He plans to construct and to patrol modern highways that will bear commercial traffic between his country and the commercial centers of neighboring lands. He will work through an American syndicate, which will be empowered to do all the buying and selling for the Government.

After years of acquaintance with American methods and machinery in China, the Panchen Lama holds them in the highest esteem, and for that reason he has decided to modernize with American equipment exclusively. But he does not plan to open the country generally to foreigners. Tibet will remain for the Tibetans.

There are other natural resources which might be exploited. There is a possibility of finding oil. Modern machinery will certainly increase the production of semi-precious gems and gold. All mining is now done by hand. There is a great future for air transport in the Forbidden Land.

So far as invention is concerned, Tibet is one place that the machine age forgot. No nation in the world is so little touched by modern appliances and methods. Enders, after four years of travel in the country, recalls seeing only one machine, and that was a water wheel used to turn a prayer wheel during religious services.

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.

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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 the public,” he once told me, “knew how much I really flirt with death in some of my stunts, I would never be accused of getting advertising free.”

Frequently Houdini permitted himself to be locked in a regulation steel safe. There was only one way for him to free himself— with the aid of a small screwdriver with which he invariably was armed for this feat. It seems comparatively easy for one possessed of his uncanny knowledge of locks to unscrew the plate covering of tumblers which control the bolt of a safe. But when one remembers that in most instances the prisoner was so closely wedged into the vault that he could barely move his hands, that he was forced to operate in pitch darkness, guided only by his sense of touch, the feat becomes quite complicated. Once he had pressed the tumblers in the proper order, of course the door would swing open. But if by some misadventure in the darkness, he had disarranged the mechanism, those on the outside would have been unable to shoot the bolts with the aid of the combination knob. The prospect of being enclosed in a vault with only sufficient air to sustain life for a few minutes and being dependent upon a professional safecracker for rescue in case you happen to jam the mechanism of the lock is not a very inviting one.

For years Houdini’s best avenue to the front page of the newspaper was by escaping from prison cells. Although he was often forced to strip naked before being locked up and was subjected to the most minute search, he was never without a picklock. Sometimes he secreted it in the cell while he was inspecting it prior to incarceration. A bit of wax and it could instantly be fastened on the lower side of a bar. Sometimes the pick was taped in the armpit or on the sole of his foot. And Houdini, with one glance at the lock of the cell he was inspecting, knew whether the pick he would have available would do the work desired of it.

In recounting to me some of his narrow escapes, Houdini once told of an experience with his trunk trick. At that time he was permitting committees to handcuff him, place him in a trunk, rope it securely and toss him into a river or lake, while thousands, including reporters and news photographers looked on.

The escape was made in the same manner of the familiar stage trick in which the magician is locked inside a trunk and within a few seconds after it is slipped behind a screen, changes places with a lady assistant—with the aid of a sliding panel.

Immediately Houdini got into the trunk for his stunt he went to work on his handcuffs and other shackles, and was free of them by the time the roping had been done. On one occasion the trunk sank rapidly and stuck on a muddy bottom, panel side down. It was only by the most desperate efforts, Houdini was able to force the panel through the sticky mud and escape drowning.

“That gave me a lesson,” he said. “Thereafter I made it a point to have the panel part way open before the bottom was reached. Sometimes I would be out and have the panel shifted back in place without reaching the bottom.”

Of course, one of the essential points in this performance was to have an assistant who saw to it that all the roping done would not make it impossible to move the panel.

Houdini’s famed “disappearance through a brick wall” was one of his most widely applauded stunts. That it mystified the public is putting it mildly. Just a short time ago a leading scientific journal announced that the magician made his disappearance by means of a trapdoor on one side of the wall and came up through a similar channel on the other. That was wholly impossible. A trapdoor, regardless of how cleverly it had been constructed, would have been detected by the investigating committee. And besides to mystify his audience still further and demonstrate that a trapdoor was not used, a large sheet of paper and sometimes a sheet of plate glass was placed upon the floor of the stage and the brick wall built upon it. Passing through glass into trapdoors and vice versa was not possible even for the great man of mystery.

Here is how Houdini operated: A dozen or more bricklayers in overalls appeared before the audience and built a bona fide brick wall seven or eight feet high extending from the footlights to almost the rear of the stage. When it was completed, Houdini was ready to “disappear”. After a few appropriate remarks, he stepped behind a small screen, something like a prompter’s box, which the bricklayers pushed slowly to the center of the wall. The bricklayers moved over to the other side and adjusted a similar screen there opposite the first one. “Here I am, here I am,” Houdini would shout and waving arms thrust through holes in the screen gave evidence of the fact.

Then the arms would disappear and Houdini would step forth from the screen on the other side of the wall.

Houdini disappeared through the wall only in the minds of the exceedingly gullible. As a matter of fact while the first screen, behind which he had stepped, was being pushed back against the wall, he leaped into a pair of blue jumpers and pulled a workman’s cap down far over his face. When the screen touched the wall, he was one of the bricklayers as far as the audience was concerned. He got behind the second screen disguised as a bricklayer. From this point he did his calling to the audience. Mechanical arms and hands, operated by a hidden rope leading to the wings, furnished the gestures which convinces Houdini was behind screen No. 1 instead of No. 2 completing the illusion.

Houdini probably possessed more information about magic and conjuring than all other artists combined. He had a library of hundreds of volumes dealing with this subject and occasionally he would completely mystify his friends with a stunt that was generations old. He once told me of a private performance he put on to entertain a small group of friends and completely mystified them. The trick itself was an ancient one. Calling for three of the ladies to hand him their handkerchiefs, he knotted them together and announced that he would have them appear anywhere the audience suggested, the suggestions to be made on slips deposited in a hat. A child drew one of the slips out of a hat, suggesting that the handkerchiefs reappear on the steps of a public institution three miles away. And they were found there a half hour later soldered in a tin box that had to be cut open.

Here were the steps in the deception. When Houdini knotted the handkerchiefs, he substituted three others for the ones in question and placed them under the dish cover. When he collected the slips of paper, he dropped in a few slips on top which he himself had written, each one designated the steps of the institution as the place the handkerchiefs were to be whisked. And while fumbling with the dish cover, he accidentally broke it. It was necessary to step to one side and obtain another of the same kind from his assistant who, during the process, was presented with the original handkerchiefs Houdini had palmed.

By stalling long enough to give time for another confederate to seal the handkerchiefs in the box and get a good start of the committee, it was perfectly simple to have the missing articles found as requested.

Having convinced most of the credulous that no shackles or bolts could imprison him, Houdini set out to prove it was impossible to entomb him—even in the grave.

In scores of cities he invited workmen to fashion a packing box that would hold him prisoner and various artisans, jealous of their craftsmanship, spent much time trying to devise boxes that the man of mystery could not escape from. The boxes made by the determined workmen would be brought upon the stage, Houdini would step inside and with a mighty pounding and at the expenditure of an unusual supply of nails, the lid would be hammered down with unusual tightness and solidity.

Sometimes a full half hour would elapse before Houdini, who of course worked surrounded by the usual screen, would liberate himself. And invariably the orchestra would play loudly while he was making his escape in order that no nails would emit a screech as they were being forced out of the wood into which they had been driven.

The secret of the escape was this: Houdini, upon entering the box, invariably had concealed under his clothing a device weighing two or three pounds which worked something on the order of an automobile jack. It consisted of two steel pipes one an inch and the other three fourths of an inch in diameter which telescoped together. At the top and the bottom of this “Open Sesame” was a T shaped bar four or five inches long and an inch wide. The pipes, threaded on the outside were held together in the center by a turn-buckle which when twisted by Houdini’s muscular hands exerted a pressure no nails could withstand. Having once forced off a board large enough to permit his escape, all Houdini had to do was to replace the board and press the nails back into the original holes while the orchestra drowned his carpentering.

As a variance of this trick, Houdini permitted glaziers to place him in a glass box and seal the cracks with putty. As soon as he was behind the screen, he would exert enough pressure to break the putty, carefully holding the glass to prevent it from crashing, step out, reach into his cabinet of many secret compartments for his own glazing tools and replace the glass. If in the process of his operations, he broke the glass, he had other sheets of the same size hidden in the cabinet with which to replace the shattered one.

I have spoken before of Houdini’s great lung capacity. But by diligent practice he also brought himself to a point where he could exist for a long period on an unbelievably small amount of air. This stood him in good stead during his experiences in packing boxes and glass cases. It also enabled him to stage a great publicity feat in California where he permitted himself to be placed in a casket and be buried some feet under ground. It was noticeable that he chose for the scene of the demonstration a spot where the soil was extremely light in weight, else his task might have been impossible even with the aid of his jack which had enabled him to break out of so many packing boxes. I did not witness this performance, but I very much suspect that the jack enabled him to force up the coffin lid to a position where he could bring his Herculean back and shoulder muscles into play effectively enough to break forth from the grave.

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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 . . .)

THE way to the prison library is along a huge balcony. One day I hear a shot and rush to the door as Anatol, a Russian prisoner, collapses against the balcony. Blood is streaming from his heart, the pistol drops from his hand. It is a primitive weapon he has made himself; the explosive is from the lab. I take my coat off, roll it up and place it under his head. Then I run to the Chief Engineer whose office is close by. Meanwhile a few people have already gathered around. Dobroschanski only shakes his head. A secretary chatters away uninterruptedly and giggles.

Two men fetch a stretcher and take Anatol to an infirmary, where he dies that evening. A few days later the chemist Aronow poisons himself. He drinks hydrochloric acid and dies after horrible agony. Suicides are not rare here; mostly they use poisons from the chemical laboratories.

But there are also happier experiences. Hans B. builds a magnetophone device. In his laboratory are tape recordings of the former National Broadcasting, Berlin. At his work he manages to install a loudspeaker in the window— for “testing.” Then Wagner operas or the Unfinished Symphony reverberate through the yard. Sounds from another world!

In the evening we swap experiences, play chess or have news items translated from Pravda. Horst has very cozily built himself a short wave receiver. He listens regularly to the BBC broadcasts. When the weather is good we go out in the yard to play games. Anyone who wishes may go to the general room to watch TV. The Russians sit night after night before the screen; they roar with laughter at the programs.

One rainy Sunday afternoon I watch a soccer game between Dynamo and Spartak, top Soviet teams. I notice that the crowd is clearly on the side of Spartak; every little error on the part of Dynamo is wildly hissed. Aljoscha tells me that Dynamo is practically the secret police staff and on such occasions the people can air their feelings for once.

Meanwhile Major Schdanow has new plans for me. He wants to form a border protection group of which I am to be leader. He has at the moment no specific assignment; he is waiting for some good suggestions, something like the mirror-testing device. As I remain silent, he tries to help a little. He leans toward devices with which one can observe or catch men over the landscape. For example, in a neighboring laboratory an electric fence has been developed whose frequency and current are supposedly so adjusted that anyone who touches the fence remains stuck there, without being killed. At the moment they are trying it on dogs, and every day one hears the howling of the tortured animals.

In the course of the conversation, Schdanow asks me whether photographs can be taken without lenses. I have never heard of it. He blares out that with the electron-microscope, photography is done without lenses. Schdanow’s ignorance finally exhausts my patience. “If you want to take landscape photographs with it you would have to heat the trees so that they produce electrons.” This convinces him that he can’t make a big thing out of that.

After a few days the following plan is evolved: An ultra-red projector throws a concentrated ray on a photo element at a distance of one hundred meters. If a man runs through the ray there is a tone signal. In foreign literature there are numerous patterns for this and all we need do is build one according to the nearest pattern.

Always the same thing; always copying. Very rarely is any really independent research attempted. But the Soviets excel in their espionage set-up. Almost every day, here in Kutschino, microfilm comes in from all over the world. A staff of experts is engaged in appraising and recording the secret information. On the other hand Soviet security is virtually impenetrable.

Malutin brings up a captured German Zeiss optical-phone device. It is based on the principle that the ray path is made by two prisms, of which one moves very delicately and in this way produces a modulation. When I suggest to Malutin that it is easy to copy, he answers that that is not possible here. I must find something simpler, even if it does not work so efficiently as the Zeiss device.

I distribute the assignments among the group and we make a simple model. The modulation is then produced by sending the lamp current through a chopper (vibrator) as is done in automobile radios. This cannot go very far, and the lamp is thermically much too slow to go out a hundred times a second. But at the moment we can do no better. I ask all the Chiefs to obtain a Kerr cell from the sound film industry, but that is quite impossible. Since we have a quartz laboratory in the camp, I decide to undertake ultrasonic modulation.

Meanwhile, the situation in the medical laboratory begins to come to a head. Mayronowski has nothing to show and is being hounded by the control-commissioner who gives him the devil in front of us. One day soldiers come and take George away and take possession of the contents of all the desks.

- During the mid-day break George is brought before the whole staff. An officer reads the sentence: The prisoner George N. has misrepresented himself as a specialist. On his suggestion experiments have been undertaken which led to no results. He has sabotaged the social structure and will be removed to a camp in the far north. We know of this camp; it is called Workuta. We are sorry about George because he was a good comrade.

A doctor takes George’s place, and he seems to know more about bis field. The encephalo graph is abandoned, and a new program started: Observation of living cells in nutrient juices under ultrasonic action, ultrasonic anesthesis and preparation of better emulsions by ultrasonic action.

Meanwhile, we have earned our first rubles and we may buy things in the prison store. Our salaries range from thirty to four hundred rubles. As the most urgent items we buy shaving kits, tooth brushes, soap; then some sausage, cheese, butter, caviar, tea and cakes. If one saves up one can get a football, a guitar or a pullover. Everything is available but one has to save for a long time.

Progress According to Plan My work in the border-protection section progresses; a few parts for the model are ready to be finished off. We run into difficulties, however, because our section is crowded. The second laboratory has developed an unusual foot-pivot of which 3,000 pieces have to be manufactured. The production shops in the camp cannot fit this order into their plans so the small workshops must carry it out. I suggest that the order be given to the factory. Of course the Chief refuses this. Like everything in the Soviet Union, research is subject to planned economy.

Our project still provides a chopper for the modulation, although this method is not satisfactory. But I must improve it as best I can. I use a Russian oscillograph, which is not powerful enough to indicate the voltage trace of a photo cell in direct connection.

“I need a Philips Oscillograph,” I tell the Chief. There are many wonderful devices here—R.C.A., Marconi and so on, with which the Russian instruments cannot compare. (The Russians know it too, and are often furious about it, but when it comes down to it, they use the best foreign material.) The Chief, however, suspects one of my usual attacks on Russian production.

The following week Malutin informs me that I am to go to Major Iwanow, the Policy Officer. I start on my way with mixed feelings. The Policy Officer has unlimited powers, he is the grand inquisitor of the camp, and neither free citizens nor prisoners want anything to do with him. He can have anyone locked up in the camp if he wants to. I appear before him and he commences in a frightful manner. He asks why I work so badly; whether I have no more interest and whether I knew that my behavior might be put down as sabotage.

Thereupon I request an immediate and searching examination of my work up to now under the supervision of the Chief Engineer.

I am relieved when he calms down again, puts a ticket in front of me to sign and finally lets me leave. I do not know what I have signed but Iwanow explains that I have promised not to speak of our conversation.

The 7th of November approaches and preparations start for this great holiday. All notices and notes must disappear from the writing tables, the floors have to be waxed, the arrangements for tests are surrounded with exhibition items, the paths in the yard are cleaned up and smoothed out. Great holes are dug in the yard and everything that is not needed at once in the laboratories is buried there.

The Commission expected on November 7th must see no surplus material. After the Commission departs everything can be dug up again. An enormous variety of expensive equipment is buried in the holes: countless electron tubes, relays, Gorier transformers, resistors and condensors. Our short wave radio apparatus, whose existence is not known to the Soviets, is assembled for the most part from this material.

A Ten Million Ruble Project Now Schdanow has a new project. Along the coast underwater sound microphones will be installed which will warn of approaching ships. They think that in this way the whole Soviet coast can be guarded. This is very similar to my former work.

All day discussions and conferences in Schdanow’s room follow, Dobroschanski, Arapoff, General Gillesow, the Chief in charge of all “intelligence stations” and some other officers take me in for cross-examination. I argue that as a prisoner I cannot discharge this task; I must have liberty to circulate, to visit other institutes and experts and to carry out countless tests on the coast myself. I would get all that, I am told. I present the objection that millions of rubles might be wasted on fruitless experiments. That did not matter; nothing is too costly for the defense of the fatherland. “And what will you do with me when the rubles are spent and you are not satisfied with the results?” I ask. “If you do what you can and you prove that, nothing can happen to you.” I say that I have no confidence in these promises. I am condemned to 25 years for espionage, although never in my life have I had anything to do with spying. But they have an answer for everything; either they talk to me kindly, saying that I might have my freedom again, or else they point out that in the Soviet Union there are camps for incorrigibles. Finally we agree that I am, first of all, to draw up a plan and to prepare an estimate of costs for a coastal strip 50 kilometers long.

I am assisted by a Russian expert who knows Soviet production like his hip pocket. For weeks we sit over piles of catalogues, calculating the cost of cables, amplifiers, magneto-striction-oscillators, buoys, personnel, experimental and diver ships. A large test tank with soundproof walls is also needed. Estimated cost: ten million rubles.

Soon afterwards Schdanow comes again: I must try to lower the costs from ten million to six million. “It cannot be done,” I say. “It must be done, I will help you,” he answers. He asks me about every detail, what it is needed for, if it cannot be done otherwise. When we have finished I have not given up one kopek. Schdanow will pare it down according to his views, until the amount is reduced to six million rubles. He is afraid that ten million would be too much for the government, and since he wants to handle the whole project in his laboratory, he must lower the costs. A few days later he gives me his new statement and asks me to sign it. I refuse. In the evening I hand a letter to Dobroschanski saying that under existing circumstances I cannot take responsibility for the project.

Then one day Malutin comes to me, tells me to empty my desk, to give up everything, drawing material, books, slide rule, and so forth, and then to come to the Policy Officer. You can hear a pin drop. I pack my things together, bow to Malutin and leave.

I am not the only one. In front of the Policy Officer’s room several other Germans are standing around waiting. Where are we going? To Workuta, where one does the heaviest bodily labor for from ten to 12 hours a day, at 40 below zero; where one can be killed for a piece of bread. When we get there we stand out because of our good clothing. All kinds of riff-raff, mostly criminal prisoners, surround us; anything that we do not hold tight in our hand, we lose in a flash. Someone tears Kurt’s jacket off. Someone tries to do the same to Willi but he resists; a hefty blow with a club from behind cracks his skull. When the guards come, no one dares point out the murderer; we are all terrorized.

In the guard room I meet Professor Aronow,a well-known specialist in hoisting machines. When he hears that I have been in Kutschino, he brightens up and inquires after his son. For a second I don’t know what to say. This slight hesitation is enough for Aronow. “Tell me what is wrong,” he asks quietly. I tell him his son has poisoned himself.

Two years later, ten per cent of the German prisoners at Workuta are put in a truck. When we arrive in a transit camp, we realize a long journey is ahead. We do not know the destination, but certain signs point toward Germany. There are only a few of those who made the journey from Bautzen to Russia in 1949. Most of them are no longer alive.

• Note: The Editors of MI were curious to know why the Reds released Dr. Maar so unexpectedly. Here is his explanation, as contained in a letter to this magazine: “I was sent to Workuta because of my anti-Soviet attitude and because I refused to work on the acoustic project. That I was released after serving five years of a 25-year sentence was tremendous luck. In December ‘53 about 400 Germans were released. After much thought we have come to the conclusion that it was a move to establish a friendly ‘climate’ for the impending four-power conference of Dulles, Eden, Bidault and Molotov in Berlin. It was noticeable that only prisoners in good health were released.”

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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!

It is two o’clock in the morning; although the cell is brightly lighted we are fast asleep. Suddenly a heavy key is turned in the lock, a noise that electrifies us. Before the cell door is opened we are wide awake and alert. We have had experience and we know that a visit from the Russian guard, especially at such an unusual hour, bodes no good. If something in our cell displeases him, we may all land in solitary. If he is making his customary search, we may lose valuable bits of our pitiful possessions. A multitude of unpleasant possibilities await us when the key turns in the lock.

The guard appears in the doorway and calls my name; as I answer he merely says, “Dress! Come along!” I roll out my bunk, jump into my uniform and walk out of the cell. My heart is beating in my throat and my whole body trembles.

On the way we are met by a guard and another prisoner, obviously on his way back to the cell. As the two come near us, I cough and whisper in front of me, “What is it?” “Scientists,” says the other. This little talk costs me a kick and a curse in Russian. But I am briefed on the picture. They are taking specialists for some work project. If you remain in Germany, very nice. But if you end up in Russia. . .

In a comfortless basement room sits a Russian in civilian clothes. In a toneless voice and in good German, he asks me to sit down. He takes up a folder, on the cover of which my name appears in Russian, and he turns the pages. After a while he asks me about my profession and my experience up to now. I don’t know how to answer. I try to discover what he knows about me. I describe my education and I throw in a little he or two to see how far I can go. The examination continues: “What did you do during the war?”

I do not like this question because I had worked on the development of an acoustic torpedo and later was technical advisor for acoustic-guided missiles. Naturally I don’t want to let that out here. So I answer, “I trained technical assistants.” The man sneers: “Were you so engaged for the whole war?” Naturally I cannot make that seem credible. “I took acoustical measurements in the Baltic. We had to do research on the transmission characteristics of sea water.” He raises his finger to show me that this answer pleases him better. It is clear that he knows something about me. I realize that the acoustic- controlled torpedo is known to the Reds and I determine to speak as much as possible about things that are already known, saying nothing of things about which they are ignorant. So I describe how, in Danzig Bay, we tested torpedoes which automatically run in the direction of the sounds of ships. In our experiments we had been unable to follow the path of an electric torpedo at a depth of 12 meters, so we had equipped it with reflectors and launched it by night. Then the light spots on the water enabled us to follow its course. At launching tests with predetermined convoy lines this torpedo rushed underneath the target ships, darting from one to the other; I was so busy measuring the sound range of the ships that I could not pay any attention to anything else that went on.

Again I inject a couple of lies: “I was present at a number of test launchings but I never saw the inside of a torpedo.” That is a smooth lie; my listener accepts it. He slaps the folder shut, rings for the guard and I am taken back to my cell. The next victim is brought in.

Weeks go by and I think less and less frequently of my night examination. Either the whole thing has been dropped or else I am of so little interest to the Soviets that they have given me up. It is now December and our thoughts turn to the outer world where Christmas preparations are beginning. The relatives of the countless prisoners will tearfully endeavor to prepare some Christmas cheer for their children. How many more Christmases like this are there to be? In Bautzen alone there are 6,000 prisoners and all are condemned to 25 years. We know that Bautzen is not the only disciplinary camp and we also know that many more prisoners are in the Soviet Union, living under more hopeless conditions behind barbed wire.

Then one day the key again turns in the lock. Again my name is called and this time it is “Pack everything together. Hurry! Hurry!” Again my heart starts beating in my throat. While I pack in great haste, there are parting words with my cellmates. “You know my address. I have yours in my head. If you have the chance to get news to my family, remember that perhaps I will go to Russia. Good luck.” The cell door clangs shut. I stand with the guard alone in the hall. The journey has begun.

On The Way East In the room into which I am taken there are about 20 prisoners with their bundles. We discover we are all scientists and technicians. Each of us receives a piece of bread and a spoonful of marmalade. We swallow the marmalade quickly and put the bread in our bundles. We are handcuffed, then loaded on an open truck and told to he on the floor. A canvas is thrown over us. At the last moment armed guards with dogs climb on the truck. So we travel through the streets of Bautzen.

Our prison wagon is coupled to a passenger train to Berlin. The truck is unheated and we freeze; it is December 14, 1949. In Oberschonhausen we are taken into a prison overnight.

Next day we go back to our truck. After many hours we are coupled to a freight train and start away; our train rolls on and on. Suddenly there is a halt. A train goes by us, stops in the station and the loudspeaker announces: “Frankfurt.” As we start off again we know from the noises of the train that we are passing over the Oder Bridge. No one says a word. Our homeland is behind us. Before us lie 25 years of imprisonment in a foreign land.

We go in chains through Brest-Litowski, accompanied by heavily armed Red guards with dogs. Far ahead there are a few guards who make the crowds stand with their backs to the streets so that no one can see us. We are marched into a prison that surpasses in horror everything we have as yet run into. No artist could ever imagine anything more gruesome than this cheerless, window-less building. We are all locked together in one cell and notice that we have acquired some additions from Sachsenhausen. Now we are 34 men—engineers, mechanics and two glass blowers.

Our morale has sunk lower since we crossed the Russian frontier. Only young Horst L. from Sachsenhausen is optimistic and unaffected by the hopelessness of our situation. While talking with him I learn that he is an excellent high-frequency expert. He has some tobacco and a newspaper, a gift from Russian officers whose radio apparatus he had repaired in camp. For the first time in a year we smoked again. Although it is only Machorka we enjoy it and our morale improves at once.

I also like George N. from Er. He is the oldest of us and gives an impression of calm. He tells us how he had offered to develop an ultrasonic apparatus for fighting cancer for the Russians. His plans interest me and I tell him I am an ultrasonic expert. “Then you are certainly assigned to the project,” he says and I realize that my words at the examination at Bautzen have sealed my fate.

“How long in your opinion do we need to finish it?” I ask George N. I am no doctor but from my professional experiences I know that ultrasonic medicine is still in its infancy and there is nothing certain as to what will come from it. At least it is clear to me that the cancer project is a difficult and extensive task. George, on the contrary, calculates that we will finish it in two years. As I express doubts, he refers to his horoscope which forecasts a two-year stay in a foreign country and then freedom. From this moment onward I cannot believe that he is a scientist.

At The End Of The Journey We spend three weeks on the journey, experiencing all the joys of such transportation. But finally we arrive at Kutschino, a veritable land of sunshine compared with what we had experienced so far. Kutschino is an outer suburb on the eastern border of Moscow, surrounded by forests and very little built up. There is a suburban railway station there and the trains run directly past our camp.

The first thing that strikes us is the courtesy of the guards. The search of our possessions is a mere formality here; the guard merely puts his hands in our bundles and rummages around a little.

Then we are taken to our lodgings. There are no cells but actual rooms; the doors are not locked and we can circulate freely. In the corridors there are prisoners standing around and gazing at us, full of curiosity; our arrival is obviously a welcome break for them. From some rooms comes the sound of music and singing. There are real beds here, a luxury we can hardly believe. The prison houses about 500 prisoners, mostly Russians but also Letts, Esthonians and Poles. We are so worn out with Bautzen and the journey that we make a pitiable impression. So they come to us from all sides and bring white bread, butter, sausage, sugar and cigarettes. Many speak English, others German and so we manage to understand each other.

From our German comrades we learn that Kutschino is a model camp in which only scientists and technical men are housed. But we learn also that one can very quickly find oneself back in one of the ordinary camps. The fact that we are in the Soviet Union weighs on our spirit a little but for the time being, at least, it is only Moscow and not Siberia.

Next morning, when the other prisoners go off to work, they tell us to stay in the prison; someone will fetch us. For half the morning we loaf around; we eat, smoke and shave with borrowed kits. Finally a guard comes and takes us to the Chief Engineer, Colonel Dobroschanski. When my turn comes he asks me very politely how I am. I tell him that he could not expect me to be well, that I have been through a trial and have come from a prison where the bread basket hung extremely high. The interpreter informs me that we shall have time to recuperate. Have I any wishes? My first concern is to write home. But no luck.

“You will not see your home again, reconcile yourself to that. You are only burdening yourself unnecessarily. Why do you want to write? You cannot do anything else except work well here; that is the only possible way to improve your situation. Furthermore, you will not find things bad here.”

These are the words with which the Chief Engineer prepares me for the future. I ask him whether he believes that under such conditions one can work scientifically. Condemned to such a fate, life would have no further meaning. Then, what incentive would one have?

“You have still 25 years to get through,” he answers, “and when that time is past you will have neither the desire nor ability to return to Germany.” His tone is compassionate, almost paternal. “I cannot help you. You are being punished and I have nothing to do with that; I cannot change Soviet laws. No one wants to change them. I can only warn you. If you do not work well here you will pass your 25 years in Workuta. And believe me, you are better off here.”

Other interviews run along the same lines. When we are all through, the guard leads us to the yard. A valuable planing machine is upside down in the mud and we are to get it out. It must have been there a long time as the mud is now frozen and the heavy machine is embedded in it as firmly as if covered with concrete.

While the cross-pickaxes are being fetched, I go over to Karl H., a prominent Communist prisoner. I say to him, “See, this machine belongs to everyone who passes by, that is why no one cares about it. If it had been paid for out of some individual pocket, it would not be lying here.”

It is astounding, all the stuff that is lying around this yard and being ruined. Film projection apparatus, telephones, refrigerators and so forth.

In The Laboratories After a few days we are assigned to workshops. Here are all kinds of laboratories, small and large production shops and a very well-kept library. In the laboratories quartzes are cut, as they are used for stabilizing frequencies; projectors (reflectors) are made; synthetics, ceramics, and insulation materials are developed. A whole section works on apparatus for so-called “border protection.” In the production shops telescopic receivers and magnet phones are built. Everything possible is experimented with here but there is no uniform organization.

The whole camp is barely one kilometer, long and about 500 meters wide. Around it runs a wall, and five meters away from it is a low barbed wire fence. At certain places along the wall are observation towers. Not only prisoners work here but also many “free” persons, including women and girls. Most of them live in Moscow and come to work on the suburban train.

I go to work in two laboratories concurrently. One is a medical laboratory apparently only just opened, as there is practically nothing there except the rooms and furniture. The top man of the section is the prisoner George N. who promises the blue skies above and is laden with grand new plans. His ultrasonic cancer project has been forgotten. Now George has another big idea—encephalography. He will detect the minute electromagnetic impulses of the brain and make them visible on a screen. Something like that was done in Germany and George has doubtless read about it.

Mayronowski, the Russian Colonel in charge of the section, is all fire and flame; he believes that with such a device thoughts could be read. George encourages this belief. I try to caution George to be careful but he does not want to hear any warnings.

We are a wonderful group, understand each other splendidly and we have a Chief who cannot check us. Horst L., the high-frequency expert, begins to build a huge amplifier; that is all he has undertaken to do so nothing can happen to him. I begin to design ultrasonic transmitters of various frequencies and powers. The scope of their tasks is clearly outlined for Werner and Gunter. We are all assured for the time being. Only George keeps us anxious; he is maneuvering himself into a fatal position. He thrusts our warnings aside. “Leave me alone, I shall get along beautifully.” He cannot be shown, we can’t shake his faith in his horoscope.

In the forenoon I work in the boundary “line-projector” section where devices are developed for guarding Soviet frontiers. It consists of three laboratories. The Chief is Major Schdanow, who regards prisoners as the scum of humanity, is basically suspicious and is one of the most dreaded officers in the camp. The technical brains of the section is Major Arapoff, a prominent authority, very polite when contact with the prisoners is limited to technical questions. The chief of my laboratory is Major Malutin, a good-humored moron who has a little technical knowledge and tries on the whole to live on good terms with the prisoners.

After a few days I get an individual interpreter, a splendid fellow. His name is Aljoscha and he is serving a 15-year sentence; he has been a major in the Red army. His first words are: “Don’t trust anyone here—not even your best friend. The only one you can trust here is your mother.”

My first job in the boundary “line-protector” section is a mirror-testing device with which parabolic hollow mirrors in production can be tested by unskilled personnel. For a few days I juggle with a small case, an indicator, a little red lamp and a bell. The mirror to be tested is placed on the case and a crank is turned until a short bell tone is heard. If the mirror has no defect, nothing more happens; otherwise the indicator moves and a little red lamp lights up. The chiefs are enraptured; they take turns playing with it several times a day.

The device needs some improvements; it is at the stage of a good laboratory sample but is still too unhandy for practical use. I tell the chief this but he doesn’t understand me at all. He says that it is too late for changes and improvements as the apparatus is already sold. I protest that a * reputable firm would not sell it. Malutin shakes with laughter, slaps me on the shoulder and tells me that I apparently want to get a prize. A young lieutenant takes the apparatus to its testing place and returns two days later. The factory has found a production fault in it. The acting Minister has said he would like to see the builder of the apparatus but changed his mind when he heard that I was a prisoner.

In the medical lab it is so comfortable that we volunteer for evening work. Each of us has his own table and a desk lamp and no one disturbs us. Gunter can draw very well and he finishes a pack of cards.

He is in love with Nina, a young laboratory worker who is supposed to superintend us on these evenings, and as she is not unresponsive she pays no attention to our activities.

Meanwhile I obtain permission to use the library. It is unusually well arranged. Hardly one of the German standard works in physics, mathematics and technology is missing. Many books have the names of former German owners; among them are acquaintances and high school companions of mine. In the Russian language I discover Robert Pohl’s volumes on experimental physics. I recognize the illustrations and formulas; it seems to be a verbatim translation under the name of a Russian author. An unabashed plagiarism but in time I shall grow used to that.

All the more important science periodicals and books from England, America, France, Italy and Switzerland are here. I learn from the American periodicals how synthetic quartz is manufactured, I find precise descriptions of the newest types of aircraft, detailed articles on military problems, rocket technology, and armored combat arms, and I am surprised at the public manner in which Americans appraise everything. The high point of my discoveries is the 26-volume work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which the development of radar during World War II is described. I had been introduced during the war to the development of this enormously important technique but I had never been able to obtain any deep insight into this field. For that I had to come to Moscow!

(Editor’s Note: In the second part of Dr. Maar’s remarkable account of his imprisonment in Russia, to be published in the October issue of MI, he describes the Top Secret “border protection” device he is forced to develop for the Soviets . . . numerous suicides amongst the enslaved German scientists … how the prisoners outwit their Red captors . . . the state of scientific research at Kutschino . .. how Russian engineers cover up their mistakes . . . his transfer to the dreaded prison camp at Workuta and his eventual return to Germany .)

Here is part two.

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.

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.

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SCIENCE ON THE MARCH
By Dr. Karl T. Compton

Chairman 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.

During the last five years of the preceding century, three epoch-making scientific discoveries had been made in Europe: X rays, radioactivity and electrons. As we shall see, these underlie much of the enormous scientific progress since that time. But first look at some of the general indices of scientific progress.

Fifty years ago the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with which are affiliated practically all the professional scientific groups, had a total membership of about 1900; today this membership has grown to 46,000. The first edition of American Men of Science, in 1906, contained the biographies of 4000 scientists; the latest edition, in 1949, contained 50,000.

In 1901 in an old barn in Schenectady, the General Electric Company established the first modern industrial-research laboratory. Its staff consisted of Dr. Willis R. Whitney and one assistant. Today there are some 2800 industrial-research laboratories, with aggregate staffs of at least 70,000.

I have been unable to locate any estimate of the national expenditure for research in the United States at the beginning of the century. The amount was probably too small to induce any agency to go to the trouble of assembling\the figures. In 1920 it was about $60,000,000. In 1930 it was $166,000,000; in 1940, $355,000,000; at present, certainly over $2,000,000,000.

What are some of the influences which have contributed to this remarkable increase in America’s, scientific activity? Basically, it is part and parcel of the similar worldwide trend. Every investigator who starts out to study one problem finds a half dozen new ones. Every scientist who publishes the results of his research stimulates critical and constructive thinking about his subject by thousands of fellow scientists all over the world, and many of them make his work as their starting point for new discoveries. Every development of a new scientific instrument or method opens the way for its application in new areas by the entire scientific fraternity. Thus scientific activity proceeds in compounded geometric progression. But there have been several stimulating influences which have been particularly effective in the progress of science in America during the past 50 years.

The first of these influences was the departure from almost total dependence on the old European universities for post-graduate training in research. When I did my postgraduate work in Princeton University in 1910-1913, I was one of the first substantial group of ambitious young scientists who sought their higher education in America, instead of going for it to Germany, England or France. To be sure, most of our professors had themselves been trained in, or imported from, Europe. But from about that date it became increasingly possible to secure in this country a quality of postgraduate education and indoctrination into the spirit and methods of research which was on a par with what had previously been available only to those few who had been able to seek them in Europe. A second influence was the stimulus provided by the exigencies of war. We were then faced with the necessity of mobilizing every resource to meet and overpower a highly skillful and technically competent adversary. Scientists and engineers were mobilized in teams and their abilities were extended to the limit to develop methods for handling chemical warfare, control of Artillery fire, the submarine menace, air combat, communications, new explosives and new materials for war production.

To do these things, every resource of science and technology was drawn upon and further developed. The results were so strikingly important that, for the first time in our history, the public became convinced that science was a resource worth exploiting for the national welfare as well as for the intellectual joy of discovery. The result was a significant increase in the prestige of science, and its financial support by government, industry and educational institutions. By and large, it can be stated that the great development of American chemical industry dates from the World War I period.

This type of stimulation of systematic group attack on technological problems was even more pronounced during World War II, with complete mobilization of the nation’s scientific resources under the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the military departments. Guided missiles, radar, bombsights and fire-control instruments, penicillin and hundreds of other developments culminating in the atomic bomb, are too freshly in mind to need comment. But the result of these successes is reflected in the great postwar movement to amplify still further the development of science and its applications for defense, industrial, agricultural and medical research. Recent evidences of this trend are the formation of the National Science Foundation and the doubling of the military appropriations for research and development. Other evidence is found in the strong support which many industrial corporations are now giving to scientific research and the training of research workers in our educational institutions.

One further important influence is the support given by the great foundations to the development of science through the education of outstanding young scientists. No small part of America’s progress in aviation is due to the opportunities created by the Guggenheim laboratories for aeronautical engineering at a selected group of universities and engineering schools. The Guggenheim fellowships and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation and others have been very helpful. Most significant of all was the establishment in the early 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation of a great program of postgraduate fellowships, on a nationwide scale, in the physical, biological and medical sciences. This kind of program was undertaken for the purpose of building up the strength of the country in pure science, since World War I had interrupted the normal educational program and had diverted many scientists from their fundamental scientific fields into the work of practical applications. One proof of the effectiveness of this fellowship program is the very large proportion of the present heads of research organizations and university science departments, as well as the predominant leadership in World War II scientific work, supplied by former holders of these National Research Fellowships financed by Rockefeller.

With this background of the general progress of scientific activity during the past half century, especially in the United States, and of some of the contributing factors, we pass to the more specific consideration of major achievements. Whole libraries could be written, and have been written, on this subject. The story is told of a distinguished physicist of Oxford University whose large study is lined on all four walls with scientific books from floor to ceiling. A lady visitor, on being shown his study exclaimed, “Professor, how do you ever find time to read all these books?” He replied, “Madam, I don’t read them. I write them.” How can I hope to do justice to this subject in my few remaining remarks?

In August 1912, Popular Mechanics polled nearly a thousand scientists from all over the world to select The Seven Wonders of the Modern World. In the order of votes cast, these were selected as wireless telegraphy, telephone, airplane, radium, antiseptics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis and X ray. In 40 years’ retrospect, we can applaud the insight which then led to these selections, for much of scientific progress since those days has been by amplification of these scientific wonders.

Take, for example, the wireless telegraph and the telephone. Whereas in 1912 we could send dot-dash messages by wireless. we can now send voice conversation and pictures. In other words, we now have radio and television. By further development of wireless we now have radar, by which we can locate otherwise-unseen objects, do blind navigation, measure the distance to the ionosphere or the moon and do many other things. Similarly, the telephone of today is a far more powerful and flexible instrument than was the telephone of 1912. These developments have come principally from the tremendous advances in the art mathematical computers and countless other devices. Today I should group all such things together in a modern wonder of the world—electronics.

Similar is the story of radium. For 50 years after the discovery of radioactivity, its interest was purely scientific, except for a few practical uses like cancer therapy and luminous watch dials. It was the phenomenon whose study threw the most light on the inner constitution of atoms, just as spectrum analysis and X rays gave us our knowledge of their outer structure. But studies of radioactive substances led scientists to try various methods of prodding into the innermost secrets of the nuclei of atoms, and for this purpose were devised the various types of atom-smashing machines— high-voltage generators, cyclotrons, linear accelerators, betatrons and synchrotrons. With these it was found possible at will to realize the old dream of the alchemists: To transform atoms into different types of atoms. This has been the most fundamental scientific discovery of our generation.

But, out of this work with radioactivity, and guided by Einstein’s deduction from his famous theory of relativity that mass and energy were equivalent and interchangeable (if only means to effect the interchange could be found), came the atom bomb and the prospect of atomic power. Once the clue to the release of atomic energy through nuclear fission was given by the observations of Hahn and Strassman in 1939, the developments came with dazzling speed. Knowledge of this German discovery was brought to the United States promptly by the Danish scientist, Niels Bohr. Within a month after the original discovery, it had been verified and extended in several laboratories in this country and in at least three European countries. Within a year, more than a hundred scientific papers had been published on the subject, and there had been conferences on nuclear fission in Washington and, we are told, in Moscow. A few months later some possible military applications had been envisaged, secrecy was clamped down, thousands of Allied scientists were mobilized on the project, and on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped to devastate Hiroshima and bring the war to a speedy end in the Pacific.

Now our Atomic Energy Commission supervises the greatest scientific and engineering project of all time, and the governments of all nations of any significance have similar agencies, in some proportion to their means. Undoubtedly, we have as yet only a glimmering of the potentialities of this new science of nucleonics. Certainly, as of this date, atomic energy must be accorded a high place among the modern wonders of the world.

Space permits only mention of several other significant wonders. I have chosen to enlarge on those above, in order to illustrate the way in which such things come about. Equally interesting stories could be told about modern scientific wonders in other fields. I think of plastics and synthetic textile fibers; of antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin, aureomycin and the others of this fast-growing group; of the sulfa drugs and others which fool a germ or virus into feeding on them to its destruction; of the discoveries in genetics which have led to the breeding of agricultural products of greater yield, food value and resistance to disease; of the role of enzymes in life processes; of the regulation of the endocrine glands by chemical agents (hormones) like insulin and cortisone; of our knowledge of the internal constitution of the stars and of the atomic fuel which keeps them hot; of the identification of new fundamental constituents of matter such as neutrons, positrons, mesons and photons; of the widening use of radioactive isotopes to study and control a great variety of scientific and industrial and medical phenomena; of catalysts and chemical-engineering techniques which permit mass production of essential chemicals.

If one were to evaluate new developments in terms of their impact on our ways of living rather than on the elegance and fundamental character of scientific discovery, then other wonders should be added to the list. The modern automobile—about which the Encyclopedia Britannica says: “Until 1909-1912 the automotive industry was in general chiefly concerned with developing a product that at least would operate”—has revolutionized our pattern of living and doing business outside of the home. Within the home, probably any housewife would say that the modern ways of preserving, packaging and distributing food have similarly revolutionized the feeding of the family.

All of these things, and more, are products of scientific research within the span of the 50 years during which Popular Mechanics has played its useful role of spreading information and creating interest and ambition in those things which are so significant in this rapidly expanding technological age. Many of these things are only the early stages of still more significant developments in the future.

What will these future developments be? If we could reverse our sights from 50 years of past achievement to the next 50 years of scientific progress, what would we see in the year 2002?

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. But let me close with mention of one great threat which hovers over the uncertain future.

Certain to be critical, sooner or later, is the problem of overpopulation in a world of limited and diminishing natural resources. The conquest of disease, the elimination of famine, the hoped-for abolition of war all result in increasing the population and the demands for production of food and goods. Can technological progress in production and in discovery of substitutes for exhaustible natural resources keep ahead of these increasing demands? On the answer to this question, or, alternatively, to some intelligently applied social control of population growth, depends the fate of civilization on this planet.

Thus far technology has done pretty well in the race. Improved agricultural production and distribution now support a vastly larger world population than could have been fed by the techniques of a century ago. But without rapidly continued progress both in food production and in the arts of living together in crowded communities, population increase may have forced on our citizen of 2002 the beginnings of some terrific social upheavals.

Let me describe just one of several directions in which science may help us to keep ahead of overpopulation disaster. I refer to cultivation of the sea for food; not by stocking it with little fish, but by far more fundamental chemical and biological methods. Why should ways not be found to “farm the sea” with the same scientific skill with which we farm the land?

The bases of all sea life are the algae, vegetable organisms which provide the food for the small fish. The fish population is limited by the amount of this algae food, which in turn appears to be limited by the amount of nitrate salts in sea water illuminated by the sun. Hence one project for increasing the supply of fish is by fertilizing the sea with nitrates. This may produce useful results in restricted sea areas, but the sea is very big, and perhaps this proposal is too gigantic to be practical.

Another approach, which can probably be made practical, is to grow algae in transparent pipes or channels through which sea water is slowly pumped. These channels may cover any area exposed to the sun, and nitrates or other enriching chemicals may be added to the circulating sea water. The algae would be of strains specially selected to produce fats or proteins which can be extracted and processed.

What the economics of this type of farming may prove to be remains to be discovered as the method is developed and tested. All that can be said now is that sooner or later something radically new must be developed in the food-production line to keep ahead of population growth, and this scheme seems worth working on. In any case it illustrates the sort of new and unexpected technological development which may be stimulated by the problems of living 50 or more years hence.

Whether we look backward or forward, or examine the present situation we see that it is the continual concern with things yet to come which is the inspiration and motive power of the scientist.

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.

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“Did Thomas Edison Die a Poor Man?

By Remsen Crawford

The will of Thomas A. Edison, the world’s greatest inventor, who died in mid-October, disposes of property estimated to be worth $12,000,000. It would seem impossible, then, that he could have died a comparatively poor man—yet this is the amazing conclusion of Remsen Crawford, Edison biographer and close friend of the inventor, who here presents proof in Edison’s own handwriting which indicates the inventor was “property poor.”

AS THE last man in this world to have had a personal interview with Thomas A. Edison, I am going to set down here exclusively in Modern Mechanics and Inventions the reasons why that great wizard died a poor man. It seems most incredible that a man whose work was valued by Congress in 1928, when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, at $15,599,000,000 should pass on from this earth as a poor man, comparatively speaking.

I am not writing for any dramatic flourish. I am stating plain facts, the same kind of facts which formed the basis of Mr. Edison’s experiments. In my possession I have kept the handwriting of the genius of Menlo Park to substantiate what I am jotting down here.

The proof is reproduced herewith from those originals.

Mr. Edison secretly expressed to me the hope that some day I would write just this kind of a story so that it might form a sort of guidance to inventors who would pick up the threads of science where he left off.

During our last meeting I distinctly remember how he placed his arm around my shoulder and said, “I have told you all. Be discreet. Do not tell everything until after I am gone. Then, after I have departed, you can do inventors and scientists a great duty by telling the rest.”

I knew what he meant. That was the last time Mr. Edison ever spoke for publication. He never granted interviews. Mine was a rare good fortune. I had known him for many, many years.

And here is the story that I can now tell: For many years I had been let into the secret that Thomas Edison was not enriching himself by his wondrous inventions. Some day he would die a relatively poor man. The pay-check of genius unhappily is seldom commensurate with service to humanity. Trite the tale, but in Mr. Edison’s case it had always seemed to me like a deplorable, tragic calamity. This man should have been the Croesus of the modern world if rewarded in rightful ratio to the uses mankind had made of his incomparable wisdom.

Some months prior to his death, when a controversy arose over the question, “What did Edison ever really do for the making of moving pictures, etc?” and I saw an undercurrent of challenge to his greatness, I sought an interview: My acquaintance with Mr. Edison had until then never been more than what a newspaper reporter sometimes develops with a celebrity in the day’s work of chronicling the news. But thirty years ago, when I first went to interview him, he put aside his drafting board, and with it, all reserve and answered my questions about the expiration of some of his patents with such frankness and cordiality that a bond of sympathy arose between us.

Sitting there in his laboratory in West Orange, N. J., at nearly midnight on a Saturday night, clad in a shabby old linen duster and with a big floppy old straw hat pulled down over his eyes, the world’s greatest inventor told me that he had never had exclusive use of any of his great inventions.

He related to me that while a government is supposed to protect a patent for seventeen years, the expiration of a patent means but little to an inventor because in the case of an epoch-making invention, nine times out of ten somebody has bobbed up and challenged the real inventor’s right to his patent, and the real inventor always gets the worst of it in court, even though he may hold in his hand the patent of the United States Government.

“Take that little incandescent lamp hanging over my head, for instance,” declared Mr. Edison in that interview years ago and which I am now releasing in its entirety for the first time. “I fought for that in the courts of this country fourteen years, and my associates and I spent $1,000,000 trying to establish my claims to it which had been vouched by the Patent Office.

“At the expiration of the fourteen years there were but three years left for the patent to live.

“Thus, my opponents were able to keep me out of the profits of that particular patent until the rights to it were well-nigh useless.

“I am not saying this in a mood of complaint, for I can make money, anyhow. But it is a miserable system we have in this country that menaces a poor man starting out to invent something. I know of several inventors who are poor. Their ideas would have made them millionaires. But they were kept poor by the pirates who were allowed to usurp their rights in courts.

“The usurpation is particularly apt to result in the case of some extraordinary patent. I could invent a new monkey wrench which might go without infringement, but the moment I take certain forces and work out a moving picture for the first time in the history of the world, like that produced by the kinetoscope, mark you how the pirates rise up and call it their own.

“The seven patents expiring at midnight tonight are not fundamental patents. They were improvements rather than originations. The monopoly of their use will not be destroyed for the reason that there is no such thing in this country as the monopoly of any inventor’s creation.

“We have never had a monopoly of anything I have ever invented.”

With this old interview in my mind, I wondered how Mr. Edison had been faring all these years with “the pirates” whom he had so vividly, so forcefully depicted to me long before.

On my last visit to Mr. Edison not so long ago, I found him in his laboratory peering through a queer new camera. He chuckled good-humoredly as he hailed me with this: “Yes, we’ll take up where we left off thirty years ago, and we’ll complete the interview about the fellows I call ‘pirates’. Maybe it will help those young inventors who are coming after me.”

He spoke very frankly to me about his financial status when I asked him if he would take me into his confidence and tell me why he was not the richest man in the world.

Here is the first question I typed out for Mr. Edison, for this was the form our interview took: “In our interview Friday you answered one of my questions by saying that you had never made much money from your inventions and patents but your earnings had come from manufacturing and selling your products.

“You went further and said that you believe you have spent more defending your patents in court than you had ever derived from them on a royalty basis, excepting perhaps the moving picture rights. This is by far the outstanding point in this interview, since Henry Ford has corroborated these facts about you.

“Now, I would like for you to enlarge upon this. I have always thought you were never duly paid in money commensurate with your great service to the world. Millionaires have sprung up like mushrooms on your inventions, when to any normal mind it would appear that you should have been enriched more than you have been.

“How great is your fortune?

“What is your total annual income, roughly estimated?

“I don’t want to pry into your business, but what you have already said makes this the big point in this interview. Please go as far as you can on this.”

To which Mr. Edison replied, in his own handwriting: “Would not like to do this for many reasons. At present my income has nearly disappeared on account of the depression in business.”

There you have it—the last statement Edison made concerning the profits made from his inventions.

NEW YORK’S “FIRST LADY” RUNS FURNITURE FACTORY

The “first lady” of New York State, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wife of the Governor, runs a furniture factory of her own, when she is not busy presiding as hostess at official parties. Unlike many hobbies, this one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s is said to be a paying business. The factory, an attractive three-story frame structure, is hidden behind trees and shrubbery on Mrs. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, N. Y., estate. Here a corps of competent craftsmen execute designs under Mrs. Roosevelt’s supervision. Her home is furnished with some of the products of the factory, and others find a ready public market. Mrs. Roosevelt visits the factory when possible.

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Ancient Seer of Modern Marvels

Nylon and air-conditioning wouldn’t have surprised Sir Francis Bacon. He predicted them, along with most of our other present scientific wonders, over 300 years ago!

by Tyche Ayres

WILL we soon be broadcasting smells? Three centuries ago, when the Earl of Essex was flirting with Good Queen Bess of England, a genius sat down and wrote an amazing prediction of the wonders of science which were to be realized in our day.

Writing in an era of intellectual darkness, when alchemists and wizards practiced their black arts, this astounding man foresaw the airplane, television, movies, submarines, automobiles—almost the whole range of modern discoveries.

Recently a research scientist, digging through the latin script of this ancient work checked off the list of these three hundred-year-old predictions and found that every one of them had come true—except one!

The only scientific marvel foreseen in this work which has not yet been realized is the broadcasting of smells!

The author of this unbelievably clairvoyant treatise was Sir Francis Bacon. He. himself, led a life almost as fantastic as the scientific predictions he made. Today, Bacon is revered as the “father” of modern science. He was the first expounder and advocate of the experimental method in physical science.

But, besides his immense philosophical works, Bacon also found time to be Attorney General for Great Britain, Keeper of the Royal Seal, Lord Chancellor, and one of the prosecutors of the famous Earl of Essex, whose love affair with Queen Elizabeth was portrayed not long ago in the motion picture, “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.” Bacon became the storm center of a dispute over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare—an argument which still rages to this day, in which many students maintain that Bacon truly wrote the masterpieces attributed to the Bard of Avon.

And, just to add spice to his varied career, Bacon wound up his public life locked in the Tower of London, guilty of accepting $200,000 in bribes!

Bacon’s amazing prophecy of modern inventions was made in an essay called “The New Atlantis,” published in the year 1620. Writing in a recent issue of the General Electric Company’s magazine, Mr. L. A. Hawkins called this work of Bacon’s “the world’s first experiment in the popularization of science.” “The New Atlantis,” in other words, was the direct progenitor of Mechanix Illustrated!

In order to appreciate fully the magnitude of Bacon’s intellectual accomplishment in “The New Atlantis,” one must remember that at the time he wrote this essay, there was no such thing as science. People of those dark days believed that serpents, worms, frogs and similar forms of life were magically “generated”‘ from mud and slime. All phenomena which they could not explain they ascribed to wizards and witchcraft. The dreaded Inquisition was still in existence, torturing and killing those brave souls for heresy who dared to expound new ideas.

Living in this morass of ignorance, then, Bacon wrote his essay. In it, he pictured a magic island, cut off from the rest of the world, where he found a race of people who had progressed beyond his times. He then proceeded to outline some of the wonders which this perfect people had created. It was his view of the future.

In New Atlantis, Bacon wrote, “Science is the civilizer which binds man to man.” Here was the first conception of the scientific state —the “new” dream of such modern philosophers as H. G. Wells.

Bacon wrote in stilted, academic Latin, and when his words are translated they sound colorless and dull, in themselves. But read a few excerpts from this ancient book and grasp the vivid imagination at work behind the musty words. As you read this passage, ask yourself whether Bacon was not describing the generation of electricity, electric light, television, the talking movies, amplification, the loud speaker, and the radio:

“We have artificial thunder and lightning. We have instruments which generate heat only by motion” (the dynamo?), “and we find, also, divers means, as yet unknown to you, of producing light, originally, from divers bodies.

“We have high towers, the highest about a half a mile, and some of them set upon mountains. We have houses where we make demonstrations of all light and radiations, and out of things uncolored and transparent we can represent to you all several colors and multiplications of light, which we carry to great distances, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. We procure means of seeing objects afar off, as in remote places.

“We have also houses of deceit of the senses, where we represent false apparitions and illusions. Also all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions and colors; all demonstrations of shadows.

“We also have sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have divers strange instruments of music. We represent small sounds as great and deep” (amplification?) “and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times and some that give back the voice louder than it came” (loudspeaker?).

“We have all means to convey sound in trunks and pipes, in strange lines, and distances.”

Although skeptics will argue that Bacon was having a pipe dream, certainly the fundamental conception of a great many of today’s marvels is contained in that passage.

In his next paragraph, Bacon speaks of “violent streams and cataracts which serve us for many motions, and likewise engines for multiplying and enforcing the winds to set also on divers motions.” Did he foresee hydro-electrics? Were the “engines for multiplying the winds” the first conception of aerodynamics. It seems incredible that even as great a genius as Bacon could have had, in his age, any means of envisioning such wonders. But it is difficult to interpret his words otherwise.

In rapid succession, as among the miracles of New Atlantis, Bacon mentions:

“Carriages without horses.”

“Ships without sails.”

“Boats for going under water and brooking seas.”

“Mechanically made silks, linens and tissues.” (Did he mean rayon and nylon?)

“Glass of divers kinds, among them some metals vitrificated.” (What are modern plastics but “metal vitrificated?”)

Bacon’s list of miracles-to-come grows more astounding as it continues. Centuries before Mendel disclosed the principles of plant heredity, or Burbank produced his varieties, or the modern methods of plant “forcing” were discovered, Bacon spoke of the grafting and inoculating of trees, fruits and flowers, “which produceth many effects. We make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers to come earlier or later than their seasons. We make them by art much greater than their nature, and of differing taste, smell, color and figure than their nature.”

Bacon was three hundred years ahead of Dr. Alexis Carrel and his chicken heart which he has kept alive in the laboratory by artificial means. Bacon wrote of “places for animal dissection, wherein we find many strange effects, as continuing life in them though divers parts, which you account vital be perished and taken forth; resuscitating some that seem dead, and the like.”

Recently, there has been much discussion of the experiments by which cancer sufferers are placed in ice for treatment; yet Bacon, three centuries ago, wrote of the “prolonging of life and the curing of some diseases by refrigeration.”

On the subject of medical science, in addition, Bacon described the microscope and added, “we have houses wherein we make observations otherwise unseen in the blood and urine.”

The Hayden Planetarium was built in New York—three hundred years after Bacon described it. For in New Atlantis, he says, “We have great and spacious houses where we imitate and demonstrate the meteors.”

Air conditioning? Our most modern industry? See New Atlantis: “We have certain chambers called chambers of health, wherein we qualify the air as we think good and proper.”

In New Atlantis, Bacon said, “We have learned to imitate birds, and have a degree of flying!”

Bacon described “engines which go with the speed of guns, even as from muskets.”

The army’s new food concentrates are close to Bacon’s “drinks brewed of flesh, where some are of the effect of meat and drink both.” Fittingly enough, Sir Francis Bacon died as a direct result of his fervor for the new conception of experimentation. He spent much of his time outdoors during the last winter of his life. He was intrigued with another new idea: the preservation of fresh meat and foods by freezing! He contracted pneumonia from exposure, while packing meat into a snowdrift one night. He died anticipating our modern science of refrigeration!

All of Bacon’s fabulous predictions for the future have now been realized—with one exception.

“We have,” Bacon said, in closing, “houses wherein we have means of multiplying and sending distances smells and tastes.”

Who will be the first to broadcast smells and tastes, to add the final touch of realism to television? When will the record of Sir Francis Bacon’s three-century-old clairvoyance be completed?

Motorized Scooter

IN the near future, we are told, no one will walk at all. As a further step-saver, here is Amelia Earhart with her new 15-mile-an-hour vehicle at Burbank, California.

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World’s Largest Strongbox

By John L. Kent

UNCLE Sam is storing priceless historical documents in the world’s largest strongbox—the National Archives Building in Washington, D. C.

As a precaution against loss or damage in case of war or other catastrophe, special committees in government bureaus are picking out important records which must be preserved because of their historical value. These are shipped to the strongbox—or to dispersed storage points outside the city.

The National Archives has accumulated more than 850,000 cubic feet of records during its 15 years of existence. Included in the collection are the German and Japanese World War II surrender documents, treaties of peace since the French and Indian wars, land grant papers and historical correspondence of State, War and other government departments.

Most of the records consist of paper documents, all of which require extensive preparation before they can be stored. They are first thoroughly fumigated, then dusted. To remove folds and wrinkles, a mechanical humidifier dampens them after which they are pressed.

After the documents are indexed and filed, they don’t remain hidden. Lists of the material are prepared by the Archives bibliographers and a trained reference staff is ready to aid searchers in finding and using documents on file.

Uncle Sam may have the world’s largest strongbox, but the key to it is yours for the asking.

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a radically new SEX LAW

Private sex acts of any nature between consenting adults, says Illinois. are no longer illegal. By Donald Webster Cory and John P. LeRoy

Mr. Cory is the well-known author of “The Homosexual in America” and editor of “Homosexuality: A Cross-Cultural Approach.”
Mr. LeRoy is a free-lance writer.

The laws under which American men and women are regulated in their sexual behavior and are punished for sexual transgressions are written in the 50 different state penal codes of the United States and are interpreted in the courts of 50 states.

These 50 different state penal codes often stand in sharp contrast to each other. What is legal in one state becomes illegal if you cross the border; what is mildly punished by a light fine in one community is severely punished by a heavy jail sentence just a few miles away. And almost all of these state codes are outmoded.

No wonder, then, that the American Law Institute has called for a revision of penal codes, particularly insofar as sexual behavior is concerned. The recommendations of the Institute have by and large been adopted, together with other reforms and changes, in a quiet manner in the state of Illinois. For in January 1961 the legislature of that state enacted into law a new penal code replacing completely an oat-dated and inconsistent one.

To bring the code into line with the needs of modern society, a committee was set up by the Illinois and Chicago Bar Associations, and was headed by Professor Charles H. Bowman of the Illinois University College of Law.

Why should sexual conduct be governed by law, the committee asked itself. The purpose of such law, it contends, is not to enforce standards of morality, but to protect the individual from violence, to protect the young from advances by adults against whom they are virtually helpless, to protect the public from open display of sexual behavior which disturbs the peace, and to protect marriage and the family so that it can function normally.

The code covers, in addition to other crimes, rape, deviate sexual conduct, contributing to the sexual delinquency of children, adultery, incest, bigamy, prostitution, soliciting, and obscenity. It is probably the most realistic and enforceable sex code that has been enacted into law in the United States.

In the section covering rape, one major change was effected. Rape no longer includes what has usually been termed “statutory” or “nonviolent” or “nonforcible” rape. In other words, it is not called rape unless the male uses force and violence against the female. If she gives her consent, but is under age, this is handled as “indecent liberties with a child” or “contributing to the sexual delinquency of a child.”

The male committing rape must be 14 years old or more; he must have intercourse by force and against the woman’s will, which may include her being unconscious or mentally deranged; and there must be penile-vaginal penetration. If the forcible act is noncoital, it involves deviate sexual assault, which is punishable, but is distinguished from rape itself.

In the sections of the code dealing with deviate sexual acts, only noncoital acts between humans come within the law.

Thus, the Illinois code removes from the books all punishment of sexual gratification in which one of the participants is an animal.

These acts, more widespread in the American rural communities, and particularly among adolescents, than any pre-Kinsey Americans had imagined, had been punished only on the rarest occasions. According to the committee, such acts are “usually brief, youthful ‘experiments’ rather than part of a pattern of conduct” and that to focus “public attention on the person who happens to be found in such an act serves no useful social purpose and may seriously impair the development of the accused to a normal life.”

The committee defined a deviant act as being “any act of sexual gratification involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another.” Such acts are illegal in Illinois only if they are committed by force and violence, or by the threat of force, by any person, male or female; or if they involve youth under age of consent, or if they offend public decency.

Thus, consenting adults committing such acts in private, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, are no longer violating the law.

A section entitled “Indecent Liberties with a Child” punishes anyone, 17 years or older, who has intercourse with, performs deviate conduct with, or lewdly fondles, arouses, or acts to arouse or to satisfy the sexuality of a child under the age of 18.

If the child has reached the age of 16 but is under the age of 18, this involves “Contributing to the Sexual Delinquency of a Child” and the punishment in the latter case is up to 1 year in jail (plus a fine) whereas in the former (the child being less than 16 years) the punishment is from 1 to 20 years in the penitentiary. A further category, punished less severely, is made, when a child under the age of 13 is solicited, but no act committed.

The traditional taboos against incestuous behavior are so strong that all societies reflect the prohibition in their criminal law. The Illinois code differentiates between the act when the male is the father, calling this aggravated incest, and applying penalties more severe than other types of incest.

Undoubtedly, this is because of the strong position of influence that the father can exert over the willing or unwilling daughter. Furthermore, if the daughter is not related by blood, but is a stepdaughter or foster-daughter, it is still aggravated incest, if she is under the age of 18.

Public indecency turned out to be an interesting catch-all for a variety of acts in public. These acts could involve actual intercourse, deviate sexual conduct (that is, noncoital sex acts), nudity or public exposure designed “to arouse or to satisfy the sexual desire of the person” or, finally, a lewd fondling or caress — but only if the other person is of the same sex. By public place, the code spells out its intent: “any place where the conduct may reasonably be expected to be viewed by others.”

But here the committee has made a very real differentiation between heterosexual and homosexual activities. It is quite all right for a boy to be engaged in mild petting with a girl on a park bench, but petting to the same degree, between a boy and a boy, would be considered indecent.

However, although two males cannot publicly engage in activities as intimate as those permissible between a male and a female, this

in no way punishes a male who might suggest to another male that they should engage in such acts in private.

Revision of the statutes against prostitutes covered not only female, but male, sex acts for cash. It is unlawful not only to be a prostitute, male or female, but to solicit for a prostitute, arrange for a person to practice prostitution, keep a place for it, patronize a prostitute, or be a pimp.

The acts of prostitution are clearly defined as those in which money is accepted in return for sexual intercourse or deviate sexual conduct. The law does not define the granting of sexual favors in return for non-monetary gifts, such as jewelry or furs, as acts of prostitution.

The new code in Illinois should go a long way toward reducing blackmail, reducing entrapment, reducing the fear in which many people live. In addition to numerous other changes, it radically affects the homosexual, for homosexual acts, committed in private, between two consenting adults, are now completely legal. Furthermore, even that widespread phenomenon, homosexual “cruising,” which results in so much blackmail and arrest, is now within the law.

Related posts

• WHY MARRIED MEN VISIT PROSTITUTES (Jan, 1964)
• PREMARITAL RELATIONS (Jan, 1964)
• Behind college doors… “The TRUTH about CAMPUS IMMORALITY” (Jan, 1964)
• What is your Sex Quotient? (Jan, 1964)
• What turns you on? (Jan, 1964)
• HOW MEN AND WOMEN LOOK AT SEX (Jan, 1964)

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How They Trailed a New Planet

Study of many photos of stars disclosed to a farm boy what may prove a new world where a famous astronomer said it would be. Old theories are upset by find.

By

ALDEN P. ARMAGNAC

A NEW planet has been announced. Out in space, four billion miles beyond the globe we live on, a yellowish object, a little larger than the earth, swings in a vast circle about the sun; a frigid little world, bathed in the dim light of perpetual dusk. Its discovery is called the most important event in astronomy in nearly a hundred years.

A new planet is not found every day. As many of us learned in school, a planet is one of the exclusive company of heavenly bodies that get their light and heat from the sun. They swing about it, as the earth does, in great circular paths, or orbits. These earthlike worlds are so few in number that they may be counted on the fingers.

Six, visible to the naked eye, were known to the ancients. In outward order from the sun they are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only two more, far-away Uranus and Neptune, were added comparatively recently when peering at the sky with telescopes came into fashion.

Now there is a ninth.

The ninth awaits positive confirmation.

It behaves differently from other planets. Its orbit is so far from a perfect circle, and tilted so askew, that astronomers hesitate to declare it a planet with certainty. Yet its actions are even less like any known comet, or anything else that might be mistaken for a planet.

There is one compelling reason to believe the newcomer is really the ninth planet. Astronomers of the Lowell Observatory, at Flagstaff, Ariz., found it remarkably near the spot where the late Doctor Percival Lowell, founder and director of the observatory, predicted it fifteen years ago. When Clyde Tombaugh, one-time Kansas farm boy who came to the observatory to study astronomy, spotted it as a flash of light on a photographic plate, the long search was believed ended.

Far away as the new planet is—so far that its light, racing through space at 186,000 miles a second, takes six hours to reach our telescopes—its discovery has practical significance for many besides the astronomers.

Even dictionary-makers and book publishers are upset by the discovery. At least two widely-used standard dictionaries felt safe in listing, to round out their definitions of “planet,” the names of the first eight, without such qualification as “so far known.” Now the dictionaries to be up to date must publish a new edition. Meanwhile, for a brief time, there are no complete books whatever on general astronomy. A New York publisher of school books told Popular Science Monthly that revised editions, probably available next fall, would describe the new planet.

Anyone who has ever had the curiosity to wonder where the earth itself came from is further concerned in the discovery of the new planet, for, astronomers say, it throws a new light on the way the earth was born. Its finding solves other long-standing mysteries of the heavens, too—for instance, wobbles in the motions of Uranus and Neptune, the two planets nearest to it, and strange delays of several days in the returns of Halley’s comet, a flashy periodic visitor to our sky.

Yet the planet itself is no easy object to see. Few Americans will ever see it except in photographs. It is far too faint to be seen in the night sky by the naked eye; or, for that matter, through anything short of a sixteen-inch telescope such as a large observatory would possess. Even that would require good “seeing weather.” Astronomers classify the planet as of the “fifteenth magnitude” in brightness, which would make it about a thousand times fainter than Neptune.

A concrete picture of this degree of brightness is suggested by Dr. Donald H. Menzel, of the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, Calif. If mountains, atmosphere, and the earth’s curvature did not intervene, astronomers at the Lick Observatory could see New York, 3,000 miles or so away, through their great telescope. Then, if someone stood on top of New York’s tallest building and held out a brick in his hand, the sunlight reflected from that single brick would appear about as bright as does the new planet in powerful telescopes. Another example of its brightness is that it corresponds to the light of a tallow candle seen at a distance of 430 miles, the approximate distance between New York and Cleveland, O.

When such an object must be picked out from among some 30,000,000,000 stars in the sky, many of them far brighter, it is no wonder that the world’s greatest observatories failed to notice it in the past.

It was picked up first at the Flagstaff observatory because Dr. Percival Lowell had built that lookout post and equipped the turreted dome for the sole purpose of finding it. This he did at his own private expense. He was sure of himself. Working with pencil, paper, and intricate equations, he had already “discovered” the planet, on paper, and predicted exactly where to look for it in the heavens.

How Dr. Lowell could locate so definitely a planet he had never seen is made easier to understand by the parallel case of Neptune’s discovery nearly a century ago. This was the second planet really to be “discovered” by astronomers. The first, Uranus, was a lucky find of Sir John Herschel’s, when in 1781 he swept the British skies with a homemade seven-inch reflecting telescope. But Neptune’s finding was a star-gazing feat backed by mathematics.

URANUS, once found, had failed to follow the eighty-four-year course around the sun that astronomers predicted for it. As if pulled by some invisible hand, it sped ahead of its expected itinerary until 1822; then it began to lag behind. The “invisible hand” was thought to be the pull, by gravity or tidal force, of some unknown planet beyond Uranus. “We see it,” Sir John Herschel remarked, “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.”

It may have been that sincere, if high-sounding, declaration that spurred two men, unknown to each other, to tackle the formidable mathematics necessary to locate the unseen planet — John Couch Adams, in England, and U. J. J. LeVerrier, in France. Adams finished first, but British astronomers who sought the planet at the spot he indicated were too slow. In the meantime, one day in September, 1846, the Frenchman had sent this rather cocky message to Johann Gottfried Galle, an astronomer of the Berlin Observatory :

“Direct your telescope to a point on the ecliptic (the single plane in which all planets revolve about the sun) in the constellation of Aquarius, in longitude 326 deg, and you will find within a degree of that place a new planet, looking like a star of about the ninth magnitude, and having a perceptible disk.”

On the night of September 23rd, Galle looked. In half an hour he had found Neptune. LeVerrier was not thrilled. He knew that he simply could not be wrong. He never bothered once during his lifetime to look at his planet through a telescope. But the world hailed the addition of a new planet to the solar system.

NOW Dr. Lowell stepped into the picture. He was one of the first to point out that the new planet Neptune did not, as astronomers had hoped, explain all of Uranus’ outlaw conduct. It helped, but minor irregularities still remained. As early as 1902, Dr. Lowell declared he believed that still another planet, beyond Neptune, was responsible for these. In 1915 he published his figures which definitely located, in one of two possible positions at opposite corners of the sky, the unknown planet that was causing Uranus’ trouble. Undoubtedly it was troubling Neptune, which was nearer to it, even more. Little information on this point was available, though, since Neptune had completed only a fraction of its circuit around the sun since its discovery. That had forced Lowell to base all his figures on distant Uranus, making his feat all the more remarkable.

The figures were completed just in time, for Lowell died in 1916, the plane still unfound. But he had left an observatory and the best of clues. The search continued, encouraged by the belief of others in a new planet, notably Prof. W. H. Pickering, observer in Jamaica (P.S.M., Aug. ‘28, p. 60).

Last year came another big aid—the most powerful photographic telescope of its kind in the world, which looks more like a huge camera than a conventional telescope. Its thirteen-inch lenses were ground to an accuracy of better than one millionth of an inch.

It remained for a former farm boy to finish what Dr. Lowell had started. When this nineteen-year-old lad, with a hobby for astronomy, Clyde Tombaugh, graduated from high school at Burdette, Kansas, five years ago, his sister read a class prophecy naming him as the future discoverer of a new world. That prophecy was to come true.

Tombaugh, having successfully applied for a job at the Flagstaff observatory, sat one day last January in front of a “blink microscope,” examining fourteen-by-seventeen-inch photographic plates he had just taken of the heavens. The instrument he was using is one of the most modern aids to astronomers. Put in it two plates taken at different times of the same sky region, adjust them until they match perfectly, look in an eyepiece, and operate a lever. A flopping shutter hides first one plate and then the other. Stars, which are fixed in the sky, appear to stand still. But any object that moves or flickers, such as a comet or a planet, stands out like a beacon in contrast to the rest.

THUS Tombaugh had already examined, perhaps, a thousand slides. But now his practiced eye caught a flicker of something new. He stared into the eyepiece. It couldn’t be, but it was, the new planet.

“Excited? I should say so!” Tombaugh says. “What did the others say when I called them in to see it? Well, you know how these astronomers are. They are used to thinking in terms of millions of years, and millions of miles. They weren’t excited. They said it might possibly be the Lowell planet, but they would have to watch it further to check it with data they had been gathering.”

Seven weeks later Dr. V. M. Slipher, the observatory’s director, telegraphed to Harvard College Observatory, official center for astronomical news, the epochal announcement:

“Systematic search begun years ago, supplementing Lowell’s investigation for a trans-Neptunian planet, has revealed an object which, for seven weeks, has in rate of motion and path consistently conformed to a trans-Neptunian body at the approximate distance he assigned. Fifteenth magnitude; position March 12th, at three hours Greenwich Civil Time, was seven seconds of time west from Delta Geminorum, agreeing with Lowell’s predicted longitude.”

NOTE, if you please, the commendable reservation of the Lowell telegram. The astronomers did not claim to have discovered the trans-Neptunian planet. They simply stated that the object they had watched for seven anxious weeks had moved as a trans-Neptunian planet should. It might still be a comet, as some British astronomers suggested. The Flagstaff astronomers explained that they had made their announcement “only” seven weeks after sighting the planet simply to give other astronomers a better chance to look at it since it soon would be too low in the evening sky for further observation this year.

As the news flashed from the Harvard center, the great telescopes of the world’s observatories swung on their massive trunnions to converge at the point in the sky where the new planet had been discovered — in the star group or constellation known as Gemini. It was no light matter to disrupt the twenty and thirty-year schedules of star study that many observatories are following, even to sight a new planet; but this time, studies of stars, for the moment, were set aside. First the twenty-four-inch reflector of the Yerkes Observatory, at Williams Bay, Wis., picked up and photographed the newly-found member of the solar system. Hardly were the plates developed when Harvard Observatory flashed the news that it had snapped the planet’s likeness through its sixteen-inch refractor, by a ninety-minute exposure.

“AS A small but devoted homage to American astronomy,” Prof. Emilio Bianchi, director of the Brera Observatory at Milan, Italy, interrupted the important work of its Merate substation to order its powerful Zeiss telescope trained on the new planet. It secured at once two excellent photographs.

Astronomers are clever fellows at learning things about a world visible only as a small speck on a photograph. One rather startling thing they have found out about the new planet is that it seems to resemble the earth more than its nearer neighbors; its faintness suggests that it is solid rather than gaseous or liquid.

No life as we know it could exist on this frigid planet, far removed from the sun’s heat. Even on its sunny side, unless it has internal heat such as the earth manifests through volcanoes, its temperature must be 382° F. below zero. If our earth were transported there, its air would liquefy and fall to the ground, where it would freeze. Only hydrogen and helium gases would remain gaseous, and thus would be left for an atmosphere, in such cold as that of the new planet.

If any creature, of some sort utterly unknown on earth, were able to stand the cold, it would not live in total darkness, but in a sort of pearly dusk, midway between day and night. The sun, 4,000,000,000 miles away, would be hardly more than a pin point of light. Yet its glow would still be more than 200 times brighter than the earth’s full moon.

The new planet may have moons of its own. But unless the new planet’s moons, if any, are big ones, no telescope yet built could see them.

EVEN in the short time that the planet has been known it has made notable contributions to the science of astronomy. At the outset, it is the first of the nine planets ever to be discovered by photography. The new planet’s discovery practically doubles the known area of the solar system, or planet-family’s, back yard. Its extreme distance from the sun, some astronomers say, kills the old idea that the planets were born by condensation from rings of gas, as raindrops condense from a cloud. No ring could exist of such size as would be required by the new planet, they say, and therefore this old “nebular” theory seems doomed.

Another remaining duty, as this issue goes to press, is to give the planet a name. Curiously, astronomers have already used up many of the most appropriate names in christening the hundreds of asteroids — those tiny bodies, believed to be fragments of a single planet, that revolve between Mars and Jupiter.

This seems to rule out one name, Minerva, suggested for the planet but already given an asteroid. One suggestion was to name the new planet after its prophet, Dr. Lowell. But astronomers believe, from past experience, that only the names of mythological deities, such as those that other planets bear, will stick. Some suggestions so far recorded are Atlas, Prometheus, and Pluto. Other names are pouring in on the astronomers at the Flagstaff observatory, who probably will be entitled to select a name for their planet.

The name may be chosen by the time you read this, thus officially welcoming the newest comer into our family of planets. Who can say whether the future will bring more?

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President Roosevelt’s White House Hobbies

When storms toss the Ship of State, the President finds diversion with his great collections. Modern Mechanix sent James N. Miller to the White House for this story of the nation’s great hobbyist.

by JAMES NEVIN MILLER

A SECRET service agent rapped on the door of the home of a retired minister in a suburb of Washington.

The clergyman opened the door. The government agent flashed his badge. Timidly, perhaps apprehensively, the minister asked the man to step into the living room.

Imagine his astonishment when the agent announced:

“Your Reverence, the President would like to have you drop in some day at the White House. He’d like to see you about your stamp collection. He says that you should bring it along so that he can take a look at it.”

The clergyman, noted for his stamp collection, relaxed and excitedly replied that he would be delighted to come “whenever convenient for Mr. Roosevelt.”

This anecdote is just a sidelight in the life of the nation’s chief executive, but it adds to an understanding of the character of the President of the United States.

To understand great men thoroughly one should know their avocations, their hobbies, the diversions that occupy them in their leisure time.

The Prince of Wales, in addition to golfing, horseback riding, and dancing, knits and crochets. He claims that knitting rests him when he is tired. Henry Ford is fond of collecting old buildings, furniture, and vehicles. Andrew Mellon is known as a collector of paintings and rare books.

Sits in Bed Pasting Stamps

President Roosevelt might be called the nation’s leading hobbyist. When the troubles of the country bear heavily upon him, the chief executive is able to forget his worries among his great collections. Sometimes far into the night he will sit in bed pasting stamps in albums.

Stamp collecting is only one of his hobbies. Love for the sea seems to dominate all his pastimes. His collection of naval books, engravings, paintings, pamphlets and ship models is considered the finest in existence in private hands.

Except for official reports and documents, it is possibly superior to that in the Congressional Library. It consists of between 6,000 to 7,000 books, approximately 10,000 pamphlets, 450 framed lithographs -and etchings and more than 60 paintings.

His stamp collection consists of 20,000 stamps and 30 volumes, one of the largest in the country.

While governor of New York, Mr. Roosevelt kept his favorite Navy collection in his Hyde Park, N. Y., and New York City homes. His study, the library, even the halls and part of the staircases were almost covered with some of the finest known paintings of American ships.

At his Hyde Park estate he kept most of his favorite ship models. All of these models were made by hand and in most cases each is a perfect reproduction of an original ship. These wonderful miniatures are worth thousands of dollars.

Together with the paintings and lithographs these models give a graphic and vivid history of exciting and heroic deeds of the American navy.

Upon becoming President, Mr. Roosevelt sent for only the best models and paintings. Yet there was a sufficient number to decorate three rooms of the White House: the President’s bedroom, study, and office.

None but Mr. Roosevelt’s most intimate friends are permitted to visit the bedroom. The study on rare occasions may be seen by authorized persons. The writer was given permission to visit the White House, and take along a photographer to view and photograph the President’s hobbies.

Incidentally, before describing these collections, it would be best to reveal another interesting angle concerning the President and his avocations. The President’s mother revealed that, not only does he collect models, but that he also enjoys supervising the designing and building of models of both ships and houses.

Every house in which Mr. Roosevelt has lived has been reproduced, under his supervision, in a miniature model. The President himself, his friends say, has built many models of houses.

Painting Saved “Old Ironsides”

Shortly after his election as governor of New York, he personally constructed an ingenious little model of the governor’s mansion in Albany. He has also ingeniously built tiny models of cottages at the Warm Springs, Ga., sanitarium.

Returning to the White House—just back of the President’s desk in his study is a remarkable group of paintings of early American ships, mostly men o’war. One is the famous original painting of the Constitution, by the noted American artist, Gordon Grant.

This is the painting that saved Old Ironsides, noted for her distinguished victories in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 from becoming a loss as a treasured historical ship. In 1925, it will be recalled, Congress authorized restoration of the Constitution, but appropriated no funds for the purpose.

To save the old ship it was decided to raise the money by private contributions through the sale of copies of the painting in Mr. Roosevelt’s possession. Approximately 4,500,000 school children contributed. In all $725,000 was raised and now the Constitution, completely restored, is paying her respects to cities on the Pacific coast.

Another famous painting in this group shows the loss of the Kearsarge, well known Union man o’war of the Civil War. She was one of the earliest of Uncle Sam’s steam war-sloops. The Kearsarge earned her place in American history by her victorious battle with the Confederate steamer, Alabama, off Cherbourg, France. The White House painting shows the famous ship some years later, sinking after being wrecked on Roncador Reef, in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the group of paintings and models above the fireplace in the President’s study, one painting in particular is outstanding, because it is understood to be his favorite. This is an original, a gift from the noted artist, Charles Ruttan, and shows the destroyer “U. S. S. Dyer,” as she looked fully camouflaged, arriving in the Azores. “The Dyer” was the vessel in which Mr. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, went to Europe during the World War, for an inspection tour.

On the mantelpiece of the fireplace is a model of the “Amberjack II.” This model was given to the President by a close friend and represents another favorite diversion of Mr. Roosevelt, sailing in the open sea.

Interesting Ship Models

The actual “Amberjack” is a 45 foot sea-going schooner, used by the President and his • sons, Franklin, Jr., and John, both under 20 years of age. Last summer after the strenuous campaign preceding his election and the first trying months of his administration, the President and his sons slipped away for a leisurely cruise up and down the New England coast. They did their own navigating and their own cooking. The President returned happy and cheerful, the picture of buoyant health and deeply tanned.

In a large glass case in the President’s study, next to a window overlooking the Washington monument, is an interesting assortment of eight models. Outstanding in the group are two models of the “Mayflower,” the historic ship that carried the Pilgrims to America. The models, it is said, are exact replicas of the seventeenth century sailing vessel.

President’s Stamp Specialties

Also in the case are models of a whale and a swordfish; “La Provence,” modern French liner; the “S. S. Olympic”; the “S. S.Mauretania”; and the “Malcolm L. Cropley,” an early American brig.

One of the latest additions to the President’s collection of paintings is an original showing the “Gertrude L. Thebaud,” the famous fishing smack that visited the World’s Fair in Chicago and won the North Atlantic supremacy in a thrilling race last summer. Ben Pine, noted Gloucester captain of the sailing vessel, presented the painting to the President.

Mr. Roosevelt stands well in the front rank of American stamp enthusiasts. He specializes in stamps of the West Indies, Central and South America. He has two volumes entirely dedicated to the Dominican Republic and a number of rare early Haiti stamps.

Actually, though, his interest in philately is general. He has a dozen volumes of general material as well as four volumes of miscellaneous “scrap items” of recent date. His United States stamps fill two volumes. Covers of different varieties and degrees of importance make up three volumes. In the last named group are envelopes from various celebrities, including high government officials, navy officers, diplomats and publicists.

Because of his association with the navy, Mr. Roosevelt is especially fond of naval postmarks and is constantly on the watch for Civil, Spanish, and World War cancellations of naval character. In 1918 the President was senior naval representative of the United States in Europe. This work brought him in touch with King George, the acknowledged dean of British philatelists, and the cares and troubles of the war were laid aside while conversation centered on their hobby.

Finds Rare Stamps in Trunk

The President began collecting stamps as a small boy. He said he might have dropped the hobby as he grew older, had it not been for an accidental find in an old trunk in the attic of his home where he discovered a package of letters written by his grandfather, Delano, while in the diplomatic service in China. The dates ranged from 1856 to 1870.

The find was a treasure. It included examples of the first stamps issued by Hongkong.

The President’s collection of lithographs is very treasured. Art authorities say that Mr. Roosevelt has some of the finest Currier and Ives lithographs in the United States today. These are quaint prints of ancient nautical scenes and clipper ships—prints that originally sold for not more than 50 cents apiece, but which now command hundreds of dollars each and sometimes a thousand dollars or more. The President was among the first to realize their historical value and started collecting them as a young man.

Hobby Delays Conference

The term lithograph simply means a printing picture originally engraved on a flat stone. Since no photographs are available of the vanished sailing ships of old, colored lithographs are of great historic value and are always in demand.

On more than one occasion Mr. Roosevelt has been late for an appointment because he was lured into a print shop or an auction room seeking these old lithographs. While Governor of New York he once had an engagement with a very important official at four o’clock. Time passed. The official grew restless. Mr. Roosevelt arrived finally at five-fifteen with a couple of prints under his arm. He explained that he had seen some likely items in a print shop window, entered the shop, browsed, talked and lost all track of time. But he had found a print or two that he wanted. Rumor has it that the personage has now taken up collecting himself and is also late to important appointments occasionally.

During the past six months there has been no time for auctions and none for browsing. But even in these busy days the President’s personal secretary goes through all auction catalogues and mentions items that may be desirable.

These are the President’s hobbies. Although one of the hardest working officials in the country, he finds rest and pleasure with these diversions. Through them all runs the salt tang, the rolling waves, the brisk wind and the adventure of the sea. They are the outgrowth of a thwarted ambition of the boy Roosevelt, who wanted to be a sailor, but instead was sent to Harvard by his father. His avocations have become many and now place him at the head of American hobbyists.

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