I wish I could clean my house this way…
Giant Cleaner Sucks Out Bus
A Chicago company cleans out 110 buses every 24 hours with a king-size vacuum cleaner that attaches to the front door’ and inhales all the debris in each vehicle. Two 28-inch vacuum fans “create air pressure behind a huge bellows that does the job. A man helps remove stubborn particles with an air hose.
Interesting article on the history and development of the lowly tin can. Also, if you have not yet been introduced to the techie crack that is the National Association of Manufacturers Blog, by all means, check it out. Every Saturday they post a video tour of a different factory or manufacturing process. One of my dreams has always been to make a Factory Tour tv show (without John Ratzenberger and all the promotional sound bites). Anyway, they have an excellent video showing the entire manufacturing process for tin cans here and it is very, very cool.
ROMANCE Of The TIN CAN
CUT all the tin plate used annually to make the tin cans of America into a strip one foot wide and you can wind that strip around the earth fourteen times.Or, to visualize it another way, take the five billion odd square feet of tin plate into which we put our fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, beer, paint, oil. candy, cheese and tobacco each year and it would be a simple matter to can the moon. You’d have the biggest cheese can ever made, and still have a lot of tin plate left over.
The vastness of tin can production has brought this familiar article into the lives of nearly every American family, for it is in this country that the greatest volume of tin cans is produced. A good year will find between eight and nine billion cans for the food racks of this country and this is the business that accounts for the major percentage of cans.
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Odd article written by Lee deForest the inventor of the Audion, a vacuum tube amplifier that ushered in the radio and electronics age. He discusses the origins and growth of electronics and what the future may bring, including dissing the transistor and living room walls that keep one warm by microwaves. He also has some firm opinions regarding the uses to which his invention has been put:
The microphone-amplifier-loudspeaker combination is having an enormous effect on our civilization. Not all of it is good! Consider to what heights of impudence and tyranny, and to what depths of moral depravity, has radio broadcasting and the loudspeaker attained in that recent monstrosity, Transit Radio, Inc. Almost incredible is the loathsome fact that already in 21 cities bus riders must listen to never-ending, blatant advertising and unwelcome jitterbug and bop music, “viciously repugnant to the spiritual and intellectual assumptions of American life,” as Prof. Charles Black of Columbia University wrote. This outrage is unquestionably the all-time low to which radio broadcasting can sink.
Dawn of the Electronic Age
By Lee deForest (“Father of Radio”)WHEN VOCAL SOUND first became articulate the ancestor of man leaped suddenly from the dumb shackles of the brute. The first crude sign writing, whereby thoughts might be recorded, helped to bring scattered men and tribes into social units and establish contact with future generations through the permanency of the written word. For ages, ecclesiastics maintained a monopoly of reading and writing. Then came movable type and the printing press of Gutenberg. Reading and writing became common heritage. The postal service followed, fostering a moderate exchange of thought between people. Ancient Greeks developed a crude method of heliograph for military signaling. Then flags by day and fires by night conveyed information over wide distances. Later, the system of signaling by semaphore devised by Claude Choppe during the French Revolution blazed the path leading to the electric telegraph of Morse. Scarcely more than a century ago came the first telegraph, an instantaneous means for communicating over great land distances, followed by the submarine cable for spanning the oceans. Bell, experimenting with a new form of telegraphy, came upon the telephone, and as a result business and social life were; immeasurably increased in tempo. Late in the 19th century, wireless telegraphy entered the communications field, first as a means of spinning threads between ships and shores, and robbing the sea of its sinister silence; later as a practical means of transoceanic communication. Inspired by the classical formulas of Maxwell in England, Hertz in Germany in the 1880s discovered electromagnetic waves, proving them akin to light waves but of vastly longer wavelengths and lower frequencies.
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Interesting article from just before WWII pointing out that the U.S. air force sucks ass, has slow planes, is disorganized and hobbled by politics.
Our Air Force – A Farce!
“We are five years behind England and Germany in planes, engines and equipment and a full 10 years behind in the development of our air force as a third arm of defense”
by Major Al Williams
AMERICA is not an airpower! We have, instead, two flying services— one with the Army and the other with the Navy—and they are not adequate for the defense of the nation.
As airpower goes, I estimate that we’re about five years behind Europe’s leaders in planes, engines, and equipment, and a full 10 years would be needed for the maturity of a brand new service. This goes in spite of a European demand for American fighting ships, in spite of “downhill” speeds of from 575 to 700 m.p.h. claimed for blunt-nosed radial engined planes, and in spite of a college-student civilian training program which portends to be a solution to the pilot problem.
Our air-cooled engines are good, and hold their own with foreign radials. Our ships came in handy in the scramble for planes after the Munich incident; they are fill-ins for building programs that weren’t geared to air war. But they are powered by engines which can’t approach the English Rolls-Royce streamlined power plants, for instance, and none of the planes is in the same speed bracket with standard fighting ships of the airpower nations.
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Article about an incredible clock designed and built by a Danish Locksmith that was supposed to be accurate for several millenia. In addition the clock was to provide a dozen different kinds of astronomical data such as the the phases of the moon, precession and the orbits of the planets (Pluto is absent, I don’t think it had been discovered when the design was started).
In 1991 it was noted that many of its measurements were wrong. An examination found that grime and corrosion had were the culprits and from 1995-97 the clock was dismantled and restored.
More information on the restoration here.
A very similar, but much more ambitious and technically complex project is currently being undertaken by the Long Now Foundation. Led by Danny Hillis (founder of Thinking Machines and general all round genius) they are attempting to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years. Check out the project page for more information.
A Clock for Eternity
Jens Olsen, a little Danish craftsman — you’d have taken him for Santa Claus -— died before he finished the incredible task he set for himself. His countrymen have completed his life’s work for him—
By Kai Norredam
LATE THIS YEAR a new clock will start ticking away in the old Town Hall at Copenhagen, Denmark. It is not an ordinary clock, for this is a timepiece built for eternity, a mechanism that will keep an accurate record of the time throughout the solar system, a clock we expect to tick away for three or four thousand years.
The maze of gears and shafts in our clock is so accurate that the pointer showing the eclipses of the sun and moon makes one revolution in precisely 6798.36152 days!
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This show looks like it was really cool. It’s basically American Inventor without the overt competition.
BBC Puts Inventors On TV
INVENTIONS ARE the stars of one of the most popular television shows in Britain.The Television Inventors’ Club of the British Broadcasting Corporation has been on the air for seven years. During this time more than 7000 inventions have been submitted to the club, of which 580 have been shown on the air. A quarter of these have caught the eyes of manufacturers and many are already in production.
The inventions range from a simple shirt stud which allows for the shrinkage of the collar, to a compressible ship’s fender which eases a 24,000-ton vessel against a dock.
A number of British inventors have hit the jackpot through the program. One of them actually did it with a better mousetrap, and the world has already beaten a path to his door to the tune of over a million sales. Years of patient observation taught the inventor that a mouse twists its head when approaching the bait and nibbles from below. His trap therefore springs when the bait is lifted—not pushed down. A tidy profit was also made by the inventor of a stair elevator for invalids. A moving step, carried on rails, is drawn up the staircase by a cable and winch. More than 500 inquiries poured into the BBC when this device was shown on TV.
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Really interesting article from the 40′s about combating VD. Both in terms of medical treatment (the new wonder drug penicillin) and in terms of health education (removing the taboo from talking about VD). It’s also really interesting to see the how little has changed in regards to the balance between curing illness and “promoting sexuality”. This quote from the article:
Not all experts see this as an unmixed blessing. Dr. John Stokes, syphilologist of the University of Pennsylvania, is worried about the effect on morals. “If extramarital sexual relations,” he has said, “lead neither to significant illness nor unwanted parenthood, only a few intangibles of the spirit remain to guide children of the new era from an outmoded past into an unbridled future.”
Is very similar to this one regarding the recent HPV vaccine
“Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV. Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” – Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council
The basic idea being that people should be punished for having sex outside of marriage.
The New Attack On Venereal Disease
Tent shows, hill-billies and a new drug are some of the weapons which may relegate syphilis and gonorrhea to the text-books in a few years
A carnival tent show in a Michigan State Fair (top photograph and opposite page) and a little bottle of creamy white liquid (above) are the new shock troops in a two-front war against venereal disease. Between them, they may wipe out this scourge of mankind within the next ten or twenty years.
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Things You Never Knew About Your Fountain PenA leaky 1884 pen let loose the flood tide of American ingenuity that has kept the world writing.
By Richard Match
FROM Murmansk to Timbuktu the American fountain pen, streamlined, durable and leakproof, is a symbol of U.S. technological excellence. After World War II our trim Parkers, Sheaffers, Watermans, Eversharps brought $400 each on the black market overseas. Today Japanese and Italian street vendors hawk shoddy counterfeits; the Russians turn out imitation Parker 51′s which cost more than the real thing. But American manufacturers make 75 percent of the world’s output—some 200 million pens a year.
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LEONARDO DA VINCI —Edison of Yesterday!
TODAY, just four and a half centuries after he lived, Leonardo da Vinci is receiving belated acclamation as one of the greatest inventive minds the world has ever known!
Famous as a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer and anatomist, it has not been until the last decade that his genius as an inventor has been truly appreciated. To understand just why this side of history’s most versatile man has been so neglected, we must go back to the latter part of the 15th century, about ten years before Columbus discovered America, for it was then that Leonardo da Vinci was at the height of his all-embracing career.
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This is a really odd article. The basic proposition seems to be, “Wow those stupid, plodding Chinese sure are smart. How is that possible?”
It is rather fascinating to conjecture on some of these things, to realize that plodding John Chinaman, who seems thick and slow and dense to modern Western culture, should have sought out these truths of nature, these mechanics that we today are using in the iron men of our machine age. And to realize that we haven’t yet extracted all of the value from their applications as in some instances John Chinaman has done with his science.
John Chinaman – His Science
WHERE there ain’t no ten commandments and a man can raise a thirst, there’s an ancient science extant that looks like the very first. We think we’re the only ones who know smelting and hydraulics and ceramics and printing and electricity. But old John Chinaman had a civilized working knowledge of them all so long ago that our ancestors appear to have been dumbells at the time. They were living in total ignorance of a civilization so advanced and so fundamental that even to this day John Chinaman is ahead of us in the application of many things mechanical he has known since Noah built the ark.
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Should you ever need one, here are detailed instructions on how to make your own
iron wooden lung.
Amazingly, in a later issue they have a little notice saying that due to the huge response the magazine got about this article they were offering a large set of blue prints and templates. I guess a lot of people actually built these.
Emergency Wooden Respirator
Could a life have been saved in your community if a mechanical respirator had been at hand for immediate use? Often just a matter of minutes means the difference between life or death for a little child stricken with polio, or a victim of drowning or a paralyzing accident. Here’s a chance for every community to be ready at little expense for such emergencies. Members of clubs and civic organizations can do a great service by making one of these respirators and placing it in competent hands. Save a life — maybe your own.
Needless to say, many of the predictions in this article didn’t pan out.
Is Aerial Warfare Doomed?
Original Editor’s Note – Statements by aviation enthusiasts that airplanes will wipe out cities, destroy fleets and armies, and win the next war prompted this article by Lieut. Hogg, noted writer on military topics. In it he makes startling revelations about the effectiveness of the airplane as a military weapon. The observations and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and should not be construed as reflecting the official views or opinions of the United States Navy Department.
Startling Statements About Aerial Warfare
During the World War airplanes sank no battleships, destroyed no city, and failed in every attempt to bomb or gas an enemy out of a military position.
The first 30 days of any major war will see the complete elimination of air forces of belligerent powers.
No aviator entertains the thought that he is going to fly over the enemy anti-aircraft battery in time of war – and live to tell the tale.
Air raids over London and Paris during the four years of the World War destroyed less than $5,000,000 worth of property and killed fewer than 700 enemy civilians.
It would take 75,000 bombers to carry the load of bombs equivalent to the weight of shells carried by the 15 battleships of the U. S. Navy. The cruising radius of those bombers would be only 500 miles. A battleship can travel 15,000 miles, regardless of weather.
A shell will drill through heavy armor plate, or through concrete walls. It explodes inside to produce a shattering, internal explosion. A aerial bomb, having no such power of penetration pops off like a paper firecracker against whatever it hits.
It would take 28,000,000 pounds of phosgene to “wipe out” an area the size of New York City. To accomplish this the enemy would have to have 14,000 large bombing planes and 280 naval airplane carriers to bring the planes within striking distance of New York.
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