Compare this ad from WWII with the message our government is sending now. Then it was “save, don’t spend”, “don’t allow profiteering”, “buck up and pay higher taxes”. Now it’s “The best way to defeat the terrorists is for you to go shopping and support lower taxes for rich people!”
Mister-you’re getting paid in DYNAMITE!
Our pay envelope today is dynamite.
The wrong way to handle it is for us to wink at prices that look too steep . . . telling ourselves we can afford to splurge.
We can’t afford to—whether we’re business men, farmers, or workers. And here’s why:
Splurging will boost prices. First on one thing then all along the line.
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I DROVE THROUGH RUSSIA
By David Scott
PART II
WE HAD BEEN two days in Russia, two days of driving down a broad, virtually empty highway. After a stopover at Smolensk we headed once more for our goal, that city of paradoxes, Moscow. In the back seat, as always, was Vladimir, the 22-year-old interpreter assigned to us by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency.
Midafternoon of this third day brings a change of scenery. About 30 miles from Moscow we start seeing clusters of houses. Most of them are wooden shanties, but every one sprouts a TV antenna. Occasionally we pass a factory. At the city outskirts, huge apartment houses stand amid a forest of building cranes. Then the traffic really starts—few cars, but an endless stream of green trucks, like an army on the move.
New impressions tumble in. The road is being sprinkled by water tankers, then swept by mechanical brushes to clean up the muddy tracks deposited by trucks from adjacent building sites. Vladimir tells us you can be fined for driving a dirty car in Moscow. It’s also an offense to blow your horn or drop a cigarette butt in the street.
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Lewis Carroll: Mathematician
Many people who have read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” are aware that the author was a mathematician. Exactly what was his work in mathematics?
by Warren Weaver
Lewis Carroll—wasn’t he a first-class mathematician too?” This is a typical remark when the name of the author of Alice in Wonderland comes up. That Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that his main lifelong interest was mathematics is fairly common knowledge. In fact, among his literary admirers there has long been current a completely false but unstoppable story that Queen Victoria read Alice, liked it, asked for another book by the same author and was sent Dodgson’s very special and dry little book on algebraic determinants.
Lewis Carroll was so great a literary genius that we are naturally curious to know the caliber of his work in mathematics. There is a common tendency to consider mathematics so strange, subtle, rigorous, difficult and deep a subject that if a person is a mathematician he is of course a “great mathematician”—there being, so to speak, no small giants. This is very complimentary, but unfortunately not necessarily true. Carroll produced a considerable volume of writing on many mathematical subjects, from which we may judge the quality of his contributions. What sort of a mathematician, in fact, was he?
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MOBILIZING MATERIALS
By ARTHUR GRAHAME
A TELEPHONE bell rang in the office of Edward R. Stettinius Jr., chief of the National Defense Advisory Commission’s materials division. It was the Chinese Embassy calling.
A sizable quantity of tungsten had just become available in Indo-China. Would the “United States be interested?
It most certainly would. Three calls by Stettinius brought quick results. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation would supply funds for the purchase. The Procurement Division of the Treasury would instruct one of its agents to do the buying. The Maritime Commission would arrange shipment. Next day, the tungsten was aboard an American ship, on its way to the U. S. A.
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Edison’s Magnificent Fumble
By ROBERT D. POTTER
AMERICA’S No. 1 inventor just missed one of the greatest inventions of all time. But he discovered the clue that enabled others to perfect it.
Most of those who currently celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Alva Edison at Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847, remember him for his electric light, talking machine, and moving pictures.
Many recall, too, his stock ticker, multiplex telegraph, storage battery, fluorescent lighting, and Portland cement.
Perhaps few, in contrast, ever heard of the Edison effect, to which we owe the vacuum tube and the marvels built around it—radio, television, radar, electron microscopes, atom smashers, and unknown wonders still to come.
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THE BOEING PLANES
An interest in aviation as a hobby led to the building of the world’s largest bombing planes.
TO ANYONE familiar with aviation, the name Boeing calls to mind the engineering of a variety of aircraft from small fast pursuit ships to big four-engined “flying fortress” bombers and commercial transports. A two-decked flying boat with a wing span of 152 feet, which will be capable of carrying as many as sixty passengers and a 107-foot span low-wing monoplane, designed for high altitude and sub-stratosphere flying, are being developed by Boeing at this time.
It is interesting to note that the founding of the Boeing organization and the eventual engineering of these super transports is the result of an accident. Back in 1916, William E. Boeing, who had become interested in aviation as a hobby, and had learned to fly in California, had a crack-up with his plane. In contemplating the possibility that the damaged craft might be repaired in Seattle, he finally decided that an entire new plane should be built. Gathering a small group of interested men, he formed the Pacific Aero Products Company and in a small one room plant production was begun on the first Boeing ship, the B & W seaplane trainer of 1916. An unequal span twin-float biplane fitted with a 125 h.p. Hall-Scott motor, it had a cruising speed of some 60 m.p.h.
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Science in 1872
By Hal Borland
Its Growing Importance Brought About the Publication of Popular Science Monthly
IN 1872, the year Popular Science Monthly was founded, Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were 25 years old. Edison had already improved the telegraph and was experimenting, in his Newark laboratory, with other uses for electricity. Bell was teaching phonetics for deaf pupils in Boston. Samuel F. B. Morse died that year, and in the first issue of The Popular Science Monthly an editorial note said that “his name and work will help to save our age from oblivion in the distant future.”
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Lost: A Generation of Scientists
By LEON SHLOSS
Fundamental scientific research is at a standstill in America. That is the harsh fact of a matter that has been hushed and avoided too long. The cause is a literal interpretation of democracy that has yanked 150,000 men out of scientific studies to make a scant two percent of the total armed forces.
More than 15,000 of these drafted science students by now would be working toward their doctorates if they were British or Russian. But being Americans they were drafted. Also kidnapped by the armed forces were many brilliant practicing scientists who happened to be young and healthy. And unless Congress has been unusually alert in the few weeks it has taken to print this magazine, our present and future scientists are still being drafted, although trolley cars are running again in the ruins of Nagasaki.
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Remember when nylon meant wartime queues lined up for scarce hosiery? Nylon means many things today—brushes and gears and egg beaters. Let’s look at this amazing plastic once more as
NYLON REACHES SWEET SIXTEEN
By Robert E. Paquin
NYLON, A COMMONPLACE WORD today, is just 16 years old, yet to many it seems as if it has always been here. For only 14 years it has adorned feminine legs, but today this tough, durable chemical has invaded a variety of industries. Molded-nylon components now go into everything from egg beaters to motorcars. Nylon’s amazing toughness and resistance to wear, even when lubrication is nonexistent, have made it a first-class engineering material. New uses for the versatile plastic are being found daily.
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