If the A-Bombs Burst
Here is what to expect, what you can do today to prepare yourself, what you can do then to survive
By Clifford B. Hicks
8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. A single plane flies over the city. The only warning is a blinding flash of light. A ball of fire explodes in the sky, hanging there for a moment as it grows in size and fury. Then in a crackling instant the world’s second atomic explosion races down to strike the earth at a spot called Hiroshima.
Sixty seconds later 70,000 Japanese are dead, caught above ground. The heart of the city has been blasted into rubble which still plummets down on the dead and dying.
10:15 a.m., January 2, 1950. A stenographer in Manhattan shrugs her shoulders over her mid-morning cup of coffee and says to her girl friend, “I’m tellin’ you, there’s nothing you can do to save yourself —just one bomb will wipe out New York. Me, I’m headin’ for the country if things get worse.”
At the same moment the sky above Chicago’s Loop is split by a bright flash of lightning from a sudden winter storm. A nervous executive freezes in terror for an instant, then smiles sheepishly as he returns to the morning mail. But he can’t help wondering whether the bomb would demolish his home and kill his family in a suburb 14 miles away.
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Auto Stealing Now $50,000,000-a-Year RACKET
By Edwin Teale
A BLUE roadster, traveling at high speed, rounded a curve outside a New Jersey town and apparently vanished into thin air.
Five minutes later, two motorcycle cops, flattened against whizzing machines, raced around the corner, flashed past a lumbering furniture van and headed after the stolen car. Without knowing it, they had already passed it. Snugly housed within the big van, the roadster was already the center of attention of a corps of experts. License plates were being shifted; wire wheels were being substituted for wooden ones; gray, quick-drying paint was being applied to hood and body.
A hundred miles away, across the state line, the van stopped, A light steel runway slid to the ground from the rear of the truck and a gray roadster, with wire wheels and Pennsylvania license plates, rolled to the pavement ready for sale to an unsuspecting buyer. The latest trick of a motor-stealing mob had worked and the police were baffld.
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Rare-Stamp Racketeers Thwarted by Black Light
By Edwin Teak
IN THE palm of his hand, not long ago, an eastern dealer held two carmine and blue postage stamps. One was worth 50,000 times its weight in gold. The other was worth no more than a scrap of paper. Yet, even under a high-powered magnifying glass, he could detect no difference. Only rays of black light, coming from a quartz lamp in his laboratory, had disclosed an amazingly delicate operation performed by stamp surgeons of the underworld.
The original was a rare 1918 twenty-four-cent airmail stamp with an inverted center. Less than one hundredth the size of this page, it was worth $3,300. An ordinary stamp of the issue, with center right-side-up, can be purchased for as little as a dollar and a quarter. Rare-stamp racketeers had bought two ordinary stamps and had combined them to produce a fake stamp with an inverted center.
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Turning Out Photographs by the Million
Great Plants in All Parts of the Country Are Developed to Supply Quick Service and Assistance for Army of Amateurs
DEVOTED exclusively to developing films and printing pictures for an army of amateur camera enthusiasts, great plants have been built up in all parts of the country. During the “busy” months of June, July, August and September, when the weather is best suited to taking pictures, the seven largest finishing plants in Chicago handle more than 114,000 pictures daily. Several have an output of 8,000 to 12,000 every twenty-four hours, and many print more than 5,000,000 as an annual average.
In Cincinnati, a single company serves almost a hundred drug stores, employing a fleet of automobiles to collect the film and deliver the pictures to the proprietors who have found that the “side line” in film service is a profitable advertisement and brings in potential customers. In one week, one of the collectors for this company brought in 20,000 spools of film and as many as 17,500 prints have been distributed in a single day.
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How Your Home Locks Work
PSM photos by W. W. MORRIS
1. The simplest, most common door lock is the single-tumbler type, the workings of which are exposed here in an oversized model. The slots in its key are called wards. They are mated with projections inside the lock to permit the key to turn. This type of lock gives little protection since an ordinary skeleton key will usually open it.
2. Inside a one-tumbler lock. The semicircular projection (arrow) just inside the keyhole fits a notch in the rear edge of the key and prevents a strange key from turning.
3. As the key turns, the notch or bitting in its bottom edge permits it to pass along the back of the irregular tumbler (arrow) fixed to the bolt. Without this notch the key would be stopped.
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HOW CAMERA SHUTTERS WORK
CAMERAS are constructed to be light-tight, and yet in order to make an exposure it is necessary to let light into the camera and onto the film. This requires a special mechanism called the camera shutter. It is so designed that when a release is pressed, it will move, let light into the camera for a moment or so, and then close and protect the film again from the light. As films have been made more sensitive and shorter exposures made possible, the design and construction of camera shutters has been improved until today there are shutters that split seconds into almost unbelievably small fractions and let light into the camera for just that fractional part of a second. Most of the smaller hand cameras with which we are familiar are fitted with one, or even both, of two types of shutters.
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Beer Making Is Marvel of Industrial Chemistry
With the removal of national restrictions against the manufacture and sale of beer, American brewers are again in action. Their operations represent one of the most extensive applications of modern industrial chemistry. More than 2,000,000,000 pounds of malt, 650,000,000 pounds of corn and corn products, and 41,000,000 pounds of hops are a part of the vast consignment of raw materials that experts will turn each year into beer. On these pages, our artist shows how the transformation is accomplished in one big, and now active, American brewery.
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Engineering the Magic Carpet’s Flight
Problems in Mechanics that Make the “Movie” Engineer’s Profession Recall the Magician’s Miracles
BUILD me a magic carpet on which I can ride; a flying horse like Pegasus and arrange a set so that I can disappear in a whirlwind.”
The “boss” of the moving-picture lot, without more ado, walked out of his chief engineer’s office, leaving that hard-working individual the three problems which he mentally added to the score or more of similar commands he had executed since the actual “shooting” of the scenes in the huge spectacle had begun months ago. For the engineering staff of the larger moving-picture producers is used to facing and conquering problems that for sheer unusual-ness are perhaps unrivaled.
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MM’S Cover from Painting to Magazine
Three photo negatives are made of 21″x30″ oil painting (below). At same time screen of 133 dots to inch is placed between plate and lens. On one negative all but blue color is filtered out, second all but red, and third yellow. Proof of type for the cover is photographed. Type on negative is masked for drawing.
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Drawing Animated Cartoons for the Movies
MAKING laugh-creating animated cartoons for the movie screen in which grotesque clowns, misshapen animals, and caricatured people with funny faces and funnier habits go through their pen-and-ink performances requires not only skilled drawing by artists who “cast” the parts but careful work by the camera operator as well, to insure each scene its proper sequence on the reel. Unlike the studios where the dramatic plays are acted out, the animated cartoon is made up on an ordinary drawing board amid the familiar implements of the ink craftsman. And at times the creator of the characters is called upon to take
part in the play, performing with a group of the queer figures that seem to be balancing on pencils or bobbing about on top of a desk or table. When such human characters are combined in an animated cartoon with “sketched” characters, the exposures are made in two sections.
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