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Behind the Split Screens of TV

By Jan and Bob Jensen

IF MR. KIPLING had been sitting in the gilt-edged Hollywood audience that March evening in 1954 when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented the Oscars in their 26th annual awards ceremony, he would have had to eat his words that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” They not only met, they talked to each other. On the large television-projection screen at the back of the golden bronze-draped stage, Donald O’Connor, master of ceremonies on the West Coast, was brought face to face with Fredric March on the East Coast, and the many thousands of miles lying between their respective noses had been eradicated by the magic of the communications era in which they live, so that the two were presented in one picture not only to the select audience of 2800 in the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, but to millions of TV viewers throughout the nation.

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Willkie or Roosevelt?
HOW SCIENCE SPEEDS THE COUNTING OF 40,000,000 VOTES

HUMMING over wires from every corner of the nation, election returns in a few days will bring the answer to the question of America’s 40,000,000 voters: Who’s elected ?

Years ago, many days would pass before positive results of a Presidential election were known. Today it is a matter of hours and minutes. To make this possible, a scientific network of communication machines—teletypes, telephones, telegraph, and radio—manned by an army of workers, has been recruited and promises the earliest election returns in history. But nothing will aid the vote gatherers more than the voting machines that this year number 35,000 in twenty-two states.

First used around the turn of the century, the voting machine, by reason of its speed, accuracy, and honesty, has come up in popularity until this year it will tabulate nearly a third of the votes cast.

So you may see how modern high-speed machines count the votes, Popular Science selected a typical Mr. and Mrs. America and, in the series of pictures that follows, starts you around the clock with them on Election Day and shows you how they may well know on the same night “who’s elected!”

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Learn to Dive Like an Expert

SIMPLE RULES, OUTLINED BY A CHAMPION, WILL HELP YOU TO BE A BETTER DIVER

By ALF PHILLIPS
FAMOUS OLYMPIC DIVER AND STAR IN BILLY ROSE’S AQUACADE

GLIDING along the springboard in easy strides, you bounce down onto the tip and feel the springy plank catapult you skyward. High over the water, your body under perfect control, you suddenly whirl in mid-air and knife down into the blue water below. Knowing you’ve made a perfect dive, you bob to the surface, your ears ringing to the applause of the crowd. That’s the thrill of diving.

But if your experience is limited to occasional bellyflops from the rim of a pool or swimming hole, you probably feel that springboard diving is a difficult sport to learn. Well, it is— and it isn’t. I’ve been at the game for sixteen years, and I know I still have plenty to learn. But picking up the fundamentals of basic dives such as the swan or the graceful back dive, is far from an impossible task even for a rank beginner. And once you’ve mastered the simpler dives, the more complicated ones are only a matter of determination and practice.

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The Amazing Story of Stainless Steel

RUST which, it is estimated, causes a loss of about one billion dollars a year in this age of steel, today is in full retreat before an advance that began about a generation ago. Strangely enough, the big guns of war played a key part in the early stages of the battle.

The history of man’s attempt to conquer rust goes back almost to the time when the first iron tool was fashioned. The most important chapters, however, have been written since the beginning of the present century.

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How Your Automatic Toaster Works

YOU push down the handle, wait . . . and the bread pops up all by itself, toasted to a turn. Ever stop to wonder how the toaster knows enough to brown your slice without burning it?

Automatic toasters are mostly of two types—both ingenious. One has a thermostat that cooks with the toast and switches off the current after the right amount of heat. The other kind is timed by clockwork, but uses a thermostat to speed up the machinery when full heat is reached. Here is what goes on inside both types, shown in Toastmaster toasters through the courtesy of A. Lockyer of Toaster Appliance Sales
and Service Co., New York City.

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Box and Crate Engineering

That may be a recognized course of study some of these days

By WM. J. DUCHAINE

UNIVERSITIES and engineering schools, now that the war is over, quite likely will offer courses in “box-and-crate engineering.” Industrial concerns, who employ safety engineers, chemical engineers, and others with specialized training, will add experts on container construction to their staffs. Packing and shipping of postwar industrial products will become an exact science, and for no small number of college graduates it will become a profession.

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Making of a Funny

By EDWARD W. MURTFELDT

RESEARCH workers studying the reading habits of newspaper buyers have found out that more people look at the “funny” pages than at any other single section of a newspaper. Yet few cartoon enthusiasts realize how elaborate is the process that brings a comic from the brain and drawing board of a cartoonist through the involved stages of coloring, engraving, mat making, stereotyping, and printing to its final form as
part of a published paper.

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From Goggle Balls to Sun Glasses

THE craze for gayly colored sun glasses that swept the country last year and is booming again with even greater fervor as summer comes on again, has revived to full capacity one of the most remarkable and least - known branches of the glass-making industry. Although tens of thousands of the familiar “smoked” and amber glasses, for beach and sporting wear, had been made and sold regularly each year, the new fad sent the demand skyrocketing to millions, while lens glass of half a dozen new tints and colors had to be created almost overnight.

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Look Out for SWINDLERS Who Turn “SCIENTIFIC”

New scientific discoveries — splitting the atom, cosmic rays, etc.—give the scientific swindler new tools to work with in luring dollars from the unwary. Some of the most famous mechanical swindles of today and of a generation ago are described in this article.

by ORVILLE H. KNEEN

PADLOCK your purses and hoard your gold — the “scientific” swindlers are coining! A flood of such schemes is in the making, ready to be released when the next boom gets under way- Even now we can “get in on the ground floor” of such recent scientific advances as television and radio, or rise to the heights of independence in weird aircraft. Promoters’ promises were never more glowing.

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Uncle Sam’s Stamp Factory

By Wayne Whittaker

THE THIN FELLOW you saw in the post office the other day with that worried look might well have been one of the millions of stamp collectors in this country. He has had a harrowing year—1948— trying to keep track of the special stamps that have rolled from the presses in the U. S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Washington, D. C.

The last Congress may go down in history as the “Stamp Act” Congress. By congressional authorization, its members sponsored a new stamp on the average of every other week in 1948. Stamp dealers groaned. Stamp collectors groaned. Officials of the bureau groaned loudest of all, but Congress went happily on its way paying tribute to everything from the poultry industry to the Gettysburg Address.

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Fast Ice

The cold facts about the smooth sheet of ice that gives wings to the feet off the skaters in Icecapades, biggest of Ice shows.

BY Margot Patterson and Allan Gould

IF THE millions of people who witness the big ice-travaganzas yearly ever stop to think about the sheet of ice on which the skaters pirouette, it is probably only to wonder idly how the red, white and blue pattern gets inside the ice.

Yet the manufacture and maintenance of that thin sheet of frozen water is more important than the stars of any show. A featured performer could break a leg and the show would continue, but without the ice there could be no performance. So in each of the arenas where an ice revue plays during a season, the ice is pampered and babied, sweated and scraped, barrelled, planed, sprayed—all in all. treated with more care than a connoisseur gives the patina on a treasured antique.

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Interesting quote:
“After being cut, the dough is carried on a canvas belt to the asbestos conveyor of the first oven.”

I wonder how many other food products used to be cooked on asbestos conveyor belts.

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Tortillas Meet The Machine Age

By Jack B. Kemmerer

THE INDIANS of Mexico first made tortillas between 2000 and 1000 B.C., when most historians agree that corn originated in Guatemala and southern Mexico.

The ancient method of making tortillas by hand had never changed until recently. Now, the tortilla has met the machine age.

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