SLEEPY-TIME GAL!
Been having trouble getting your shut-eye lately? Meet Martha Alden, of Pequot Mills, whose job is to find out exactly what it is that keeps you awake.
by Kip Blair
EVERY year hundreds of eye shades, thousands of ear plugs, and countless numbers of other sleep-producing gadgets—from weak tea to strong drink—are sold to insomniacs all over the country. Yet sheep are still counted over fences, dull books still are used to induce slumber, and Mrs. Jones still leans over the back hedge to tell Mrs. Smith that, so help her, she didn’t shut an eye all last night.
For sleep—a natural and normal process for babies and savages—has become a highly involved and complicated science for most of our adult civilization, so complicated, in fact.
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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.
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Master These Strength Tests - OUTDO Mightier Opponents
DO YOU want to compare your strength with that of your friends? If you do, here are eight different methods, all simply executed, that will bring into play every muscle of the body. Master these feats and you can hold your own with men of much greater bulk, because they will have failed to develop the distinct muscles brought into use in each of eight separate tests.
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BEWARE The Gasoline DOPE Racket
“FIVE More Miles per Gallon!” “Removes Carbon!” “Stops Oil Pumping!” “More Power with Pep Tablets!”
When you see signs like these, stop, look and beware! Magic fuel elixirs and cure-all compounds that are sold in tablet, powder, pill or capsule form to motorists comprise a wide-spread highway racket. There are hundreds of such preparations on the market that you can buy for a dime or a dollar, but few of them are any good. Some are actually harmful to motors.
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Watering the World’s Crops
HOW the world has advanced in machinery for drawing water for farms and gardens is told here in pictures from many lands.
It’s a far cry from the electric pumping machines on modern farms to this primitive pump worked by a revolving camel at a desert water hole in Egypt. Note the crude gearing. Projecting wooden- pins in one wheel engage rods in the other.
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Looking at an operation like this you can really understand why people were so afraid of computers stealing everyone’s job. Most of those women could be replaced by one computer and a few terminals.
Your Credit at a Glance
Do you know just what happens when you “charge” a purchase in a large department store? You see the sales clerk write your name and address, with the amount of the purchase, on a charge slip, then pack the slip into a cylindrical box and start it on its way through a pneumatic tube to some unknown destination. A minute later the slip returns by the same route, approved or otherwise, to the sales clerk.
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How Engineers Crowned World’s Tallest Building
A SLENDER spire of rustless steel tops the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building, in New York City, which officially opened a few weeks ago. Many of those who see the shaft gleaming in the sunlight wonder how it was placed at the summit of the world’s tallest building. On this page our artist shows how this task, one of the greatest of the many engineering feats in the erection of the building, was accomplished.
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Time zones are of those interesting things that didn’t really matter to anyone before the invention of near instantaneous world wide communication.
What’s Your Time?
DO YOU KNOW?
Where there is no Sunday in the week?
Where there are two Sundays in the week?
That there are 25 different kinds of Standard Time in the world?
SINCE radio made it possible to listen to people on the other side of the earth, we are becoming more “time-conscious”. To set the clock backward, or forward, for daylight time, or to set a watch on a train or bus journey might be mysterious, but it is not complicated.
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FILMING TABLE TOP EARTHQUAKES
by EARL THEISEN - Honorary Curator of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles Museum.
When the director calls for floods, train wrecks, and volcanoes, the miniature men create the scenes. Read how they produce these effects.
BEHIND the studio walls tucked off in a corner may be found the miniature department. It is hidden away where persons will not interfere with its work or find out its secrets.
To the miniature man everything is possible from the fabrication of airplane crashes, train wrecks, explosions, floods, to the bringing to life on the screen of prehistoric monsters. In this department of the studios is filmed those things that cannot be photographed or are too dangerous to be photographed in full size. The miniature men are specialists in reproducing literally on a table top practically anything that occurs in real life.
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The Miracle of ICE from HEAT
Ingenious application of simple principle of physics turns the flame of a gas jet into ice cubes in the non-mechanical refrigerator.
By ROBERT JOHN BAYER
TO THE average man there is nothing mysterious in mechanical refrigeration.
He knows that gases and vapors lose heat in expansion and that by a repeated cycle of compressions and expansions, confined gases can be cooled to an extent where they will operate as refrigerants. He knows that, in his domestic mechanical refrigerator, there is a motor and a pump which compress the refrigerant and that its repeated expansion in the coils in his box produces the cold that freezes his ice cubes and preserves his foodstuffs.
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Maker Of The Maestro’s Wand
It started as a joke, but Isaac Cary turned it into a business. Whether it’s symphony or swing, the odds are heavy that the leader of the band is using one of Gary’s custom-made batons.
by Lester David
APPLAUSE beats in waves through vast Carnegie Hall as the spotlight picks out the frail little man advancing to the conductor’s stand. He bows deeply and faces the orchestra, arms outstretched. In his hand he holds a slender, white, beautifully proportioned baton. A hush settles on the auditorium … he taps his stand twice, sweeps his baton upward and music flows into the hall. Arturo Toscanini is interpreting a master.
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How Photographic Film Is Made
“Mustard” plants and chemical “noodles” contain the elements that must be put into film base and emulsion before your camera can do its work.
PHOTOGRAPHY has wedged its way into our daily lives so securely that we do not view it with the alarm and mysicism people did when Daguerre announced the first successful photographic process one hundred years ago, in 1839. We have come to expect and accept the seemingly impossible with little exhibition of surprise or enthusiasm. This is, in many ways, unfortunate, for the real joy of science comes from knowing her intimately—knowing how she can make so few characters play so many parts, disguised outwardly but working inwardly to the same objective.
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