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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I love this little diatribe against animal rights activists because it shows how little has changed in the last 50 odd years. If this guy is still alive I’ll bet he’s working for Fox News. He uses the exact same techniques they do. People who don’t strongly support vivisection “hate humans”, much like liberals “hate America”. He sets up straw men and creates fictional arguments to knock down, for example stating that anti-vivisectionists are against counting a cat’s heartbeats. Really? Because his title for them seems to imply that their primary objection is to cutting open and dissecting live animals.
The other truly modern part of this letter comes in the first to last paragraph. There the author explains that if you speak out against the animal-rights movement you will be tortured just like those people in the Nazi death camps. It looks like Godwin’s Law was alive and well long before the Internet. This article was written just 4 years after the holocaust and already liberals are Nazis.
The Truth About “Experimental Animals”
DO you like dogs? Then you should read the article, “Science Tries You Out On the Dog,” on page 151. Not only does it tell you some things about dogs nobody knew before; it will also give you an idea of what animal experimentation is all about.
You should know that your liking for dogs is lending silent support to an organized campaign against the use of experimental animals. Your sense of human decency is being used by a few willful people to threaten anyone who questions their motives. These people are crazy about dogs. Literally crazy in some extreme cases, where it isn’t that they love dogs—but that they hate humans.
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TYPE BY GOUDY
FREDERIC W. GOUDY, Greatest American Type Designer, Has Left His Imprint on the World by Creating More Than 100 Beautiful Faces to Give Dignity and Simplicity to the Pages on Which Man Records His Dreams
By ANDREW R. BOONE
FUTURE generations will know Frederic W. Goudy as the man who left a greater imprint upon the recorded story of his time than any historian or craftsman living today.
At 40, this short, plump, pinkish, and puckish gentleman kept books for a Chicago realtor, and considered himself a failure. During the next 36 years, starting almost from scratch at an age when most men are permanently set in their chosen vocations, he cut 113 fonts of type, thereby creating more usable faces than did the seven greatest inventors of type and books, from Gutenberg to Garamond. Now 76, he is the dean of twentieth-century designers.
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The Camera Queen
Margaret Bourke-White, who saw beauty in the lines of a steel girder and the blackness of a coal mine, pioneers a new era of photography.
by Richard H. Parke
WHEN I called on Margaret Bourke-White in her spacious penthouse studio in a Fifth Avenue office building, she had just returned to New York from photographing a new textile mill in the South. Piled high in the center of the vast room was the equipment she had carried with her: A couple of cameras, a box of flashlight bulbs, a folded tripod and three or four travel-scarred suitcases.
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Edison’s Own Secret Spirit Experiments
Edison, though materialist-minded, was yet willing to accept spiritual beliefs if they could be proven by scientific tests. Here is described one of his amazing secret experiments whereby he sought to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with super-sensitive instruments.
ONE black, howling wintry night in 1920 —just such a night when superstitious people would bar their doors and windows against marauding ghosts—Thomas Edison, the famous inventive wizard, gathered a small group of scientists in his laboratory to witness his secret attempts to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with instruments of incredible sensitivity.
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What Lindbergh Found in His Mail Bag
Offers of Millions, Offers of Marriage and 14,000 Gifts in Packages Sent to Atlantic Flyer
By FITZHUGH GREEN
THROUGH the crowded events that followed the great flight to Paris, the author of this article was one of Col. Lindbergh’s chief aides. And in the swift preparation of Lindbergh’s book “We,” he wrote several chapters describing the welcoming receptions which the modest aviator did not wish to write himself. Commander Green also aided in handling Lindbergh’s huge mail.
“Dear Lindy—”
Those two words, with variations, have been written more than three and a half million times in the last four months by people of all races, colors and climes.
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Entertaining article that explains why the core of any military force will always be made up of men and horses.
“Machines of war can only be adjuncts to their superior flexibility.”
Do we still have any mounted cavalry? I’ve seen pictures of those Special Forces guys in Afghanistan, but that’s about it.
Why Modern Armies Still Cling to the Cavalry
by M. W. MEIER
The tank is a powerful weapon, but the faithful horse can still outfight it in many situations encountered on modern battlefields.
Here is told the cavalry’s side of the story.
YOU may not know it but Uncle Sam has the finest cavalry on earth—pitifully small though it is.
It may lack the swank, color and picturesqueness of that of other nations but what it may lack in fancy-drilling ability it more than makes up for in equipment, firing-power and maneuverability—the things that really count in war.
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Burton Holmes was apparently quite the Extraordinary Traveler.
The Senic WONDERS of the WORLD
By BURTON HOLMES
THE nine most interesting places in the world? I should not dare to try to name them. But I can give you a list of those which to me have seemed to offer more of interest than any other nine that I have known. First—The Grand Canyon of Arizona. Why? Because I love beauty and it is the biggest beautiful thing in the world. It is unique because the earth can show nothing to equal it in beauty, gorgeous-ness of color, grandeur, impressive weirdness and immensity.
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