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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.

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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.

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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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This article sounds like it could have been written today, except the authors seem more accepting of evolution.

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The Conflict Between Science and Religion

A Discussion by Leaders in American Life, with an Introduction By BRUCE BARTON

Author of “The Man Nobody Knows” and “The Book Nobody Knows”

THE printing of these statements is a public service. It ought to bring us closer to the day when the absurd phrase “the conflict between science and religion” will be permanently in the discard.

When theologians presume to prescribe the boundaries of truth they put themselves in the impossible position of most of their predecessors through the Middle Ages. When scientists presume to announce that man is merely material, coming from nothing and bound nowhere, and that the universe is a meaningless riddle, they are equally out of their depth.
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THE TRANSISTOR’S 20th ANNIVERSARY:
How Germanium and a Bit of Wire Changed the World

The nuts and bolts of modern electronics, transistors lie at the heart of our rockets, computers, radar, radio, TV, and a thousand other devices

By W. STEVENSON BACON

The time: December, 1947. The place: Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, N.J. The event: the invention of a new kind of electronic “valve” that can amplify signals—an invention so basic that it will virtually remold all science and technology.

Unlike the vacuum tube, it will not need a power-consuming hot filament, nor will it require a vacuum. Is it an impractical dream? Many skeptics think so.

After years of experimenting, Bell scientists, faced with repeated failures, have turned back to basic research.
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Grandpa of Electronic Computers Built 125 Years Ago
TODAY’S GENIACs and MANIACs might be called babbages if an Englishman named Charles Babbage hadn’t had money problems.

Babbage, who lived in the mid-1800s, conceived of mechanical “brains” which would perform calculations ambitious even for today’s gigantic electronic computers (Fig. 1).

His Difference Engine (Fig. 2) was built between 1823 and 1842, when the British government withdrew its financial support. His Analytical Engine was still more ambitious but never amounted to more than 239 detailed drawings. It would have had a storage capacity of 1,000 50-digit numbers and built-in logarithms and other tables.

But again—no money. Today, Babbage’s plans are kept in the Burndy Library, Norwalk, Conn.

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MODERN MIRACLE

SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY: WEALTH FROM WASTE

by John E. Pfeiffer

This is the first of a series of articles on the romance of synthetic chemistry in which science has solved the mystery for turning waste into wealth.

“Don’t throw that away!” This is the battle cry of the great synthetic chemical industry which makes everything from hair-brush handles to T.N.T. from stuff that was once just waste. If you want to buy some perfume, the odds are that the bottle will contain odors extracted from coal tar, once a nightmare to factories who paid people to get rid of it.

But today, whether it’s waste gas, tar, or peanut shells, the chemists want it to sell back to you again in the form of motor fuel, photographic film, or pipe stems. What men do with rubbish would turn the most efficient housewife green with envy and the whole thing only started late last century.
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Uncle Sam’s School for Sailors

WHEN you march through the main gate of the Naval Training Station at San Diego, Calif., as a raw recruit you leave the land behind. You will spend two months learning to be a sailor before you are assigned to the battle fleet but even though you are still on dry land, things are a lot like they are at sea.

In a couple of days you will know that a floor is really a deck and you’ll not make the mistake of calling a bulkhead a wall. You will ask whether the smoking lamp is lit instead of whether you may smoke and you will be telling time by ship’s bells instead of by hours.
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Gee, things sure have changed a whole lot since then.

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OIL – Modern WAR GOD Threatens the World

Black gold, precious underground liquid, is food for the modern war machine. Deprived of it, a nation’s military campaign is threatened with failure. Will oil become an instrument to enforce peace or to cause war?

WITHIN the last few decades, oil has changed from an almost unknown and unnecessary commodity to one of the world’s most vitally needed materials. Oil, unlike nitroglycerin, has always been an innocent, viscous fluid used for lubrication and fuel. But harmless petroleum, like Dr. Jekyll, has undergone a startling transformation. Oil may yet be the means whereby the flaming torch of war is carried across the world.
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With Edison’s Insomnia Squad
by Richard G. Berger

IT WAS during the summer of 1916 just after my graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that I read an article in Munsey’s Magazine concerning Thomas A. Edison and his “Insomnia Squad.” I immediately wrote to Mr. Edison requesting employment in his laboratory.

He was away on one of his annual Firestone-Burroughs vacation trips. Upon his return I received a letter stating that Mr. Edison offered me two weeks’ trial employment in his laboratory at fifteen dollars per week. I accepted—in fact I would have taken the position without salary—and reported to the laboratory at West Orange, fully expecting to be back home at the end of the two weeks.

The sight of Mr. Edison with several days growth of beard and dressed in baggy clothes, vigorously chewing tobacco, set me at ease. He assigned me to work on various problems of phonograph record composition and the manufacture of phenol (carbolic acid) which was then much in demand for both records and explosives.
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SCIENCE IS KING
“Men who made civilization what it is today were not famous statesmen, conquerors or philosophers. They were—and are—men engaged in the mechanical sciences”

BY LOWELL THOMAS

OVER the airwaves comes a desperate appeal to the radio station at Nome. “For God’s sake, send help, if you can. We’re starving and dying. There’s an epidemic. Almost everybody is flat in bed.”

“What do you need? Food?”

“Food, yes, and milk. But above all, serum. This whole settlement will be wiped out if we don’t get serum.”

By dog-sled and man-power it would take two weeks and a lot of luck to carry the needed supplies to that stricken community. But there is Joe Crosson with his plane. Can he make it? The problem is put up to him.

“We’ll do our durndest,” he replies, speaking for himself and plane.

We won’t go in to the trouble and danger he goes through. For one thing, it’s an old story to Joe Crosson. He has done it before probably will have to do it again several times. The point at this moment is that he does it. An entire settlement in the frozen North is saved from extinction.
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