This is a hardware packet switched network, kinda like IP circa 1951.

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Dial Switches Message Tubes
By Dialing a number, workers in a Connecticut factory can send written messages and even metal samples to various parts of the plant in about a minute’s time. They are using the familiar old pneumatic tube, the hissing clanging gadget used to make change in many department stores.

This pneumatic tube is different. Wehere older systems required separate tubes to each station, this one has an automatic dial exchange, just like a modern telephone central office, making a few tubes do the work of many. Each carrier has numbers that can be set to guide it automatically to any one of the nine stations that make up the first American installation at the Housatonic plant of the Bridgeport Brass Co. Eventually there will be 20 stations.

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Endless Chain Conveyor Moves Cars Thu Auto Laundry

Borrowing an idea from the assembly lines of large automobiele factories, an inventive garage man has devised an endless chain conveyor system which moves cars through his auto laundry to permit a complete cleaning and polishing job in nine minutes.

The patron merely drives his car onto a guide track and steps out. A coupling chain is then attached to the front bumper and the main chain running alond the floor. A button is pressed and the car begins to move. As it passes each section of the track streams of water play on whells and body. A revoloving brush drops from a hinged support in the ceiling and cleans the top of the car as jets of water pour from the brush.

Powerful blowers then dry the car and a giant vacuum system removes the grit and dirt from both the inside and outside of the car.

This is pretty amazing. It’s a Scientific American Article from 1939 describing the splitting of the atom. It was written just after Einstien had written his famous letter to F.D.R and before the initiation of the Manhattan Project, yet it is obvious that scientists were well aware of the potential uses of atomic fission:

It may or may not be significant that, since early spring, no accounts of research on nuclear fission have been heard from Germany — not even from discoverer Hahn. It is not unlikely that the German government, spotting a potentially powerful weapon of war, has imposed military secrecy on all recent German investigations. A large concentration of isotope 235, subjected to neutron bombardment, might conceivably blow up all London or Paris.

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Two Elements For One

The Most Important Scientific Discovery of the Present Year is also the Biggest Explosion in Atomic History … Splitting the Uranium Atom

THE Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics was sitting in solemn conclave when the news broke. Professor Nils Bohr of Princeton and Professor Enrico Fermi of Columbia rose to open the meeting with an account of some research going on in a Berlin laboratory.
Professors Bohr and Fermi are Nobel Prize winners both, and their names are as well known to scientists as Toscaninni’s is to music lovers. The Conference therefore expected something extra special. They weren’t disappointed.

It was January 26, 1939. A few wees before, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, Dr. Otto Hahn, a distinguished German physicist, had obtained an utterly unexpected result from some more or less routine experiments. Following the original example of Professor Fermi, Dr. Hahn and his co-worker, F. Strassmann, had for many months been bombarding uranium with neutrons and studying the debris left by this atomic warfare.

It would not have surprised them at all to find radium as one of the products. In fact, they had done so before, or thought they had. Radium and uranium are near neighbors in the table of elements, and it is nothing new for scientists to transform one element into another close to it in weight and electric charge.

But it was news, and big news, to discover barium among the debris — barium, which is only a little more than half as heavy as uranium. It meant that the neutron bullets had succeeded not merely in knocking a few chips off the old block, but in blowing the whole atom asunder with a terrific explosion.

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Electricity Records Fencing Hits

Even the ancient sport of fencing has been “wired for sound!’ Contestants in a recent match in England were equipped with trailing wires connected to an electrical apparatus that rang a bell and flashed lights when one fencer’s foil made contact with a vulnerable spot on his opponent. The idea was first tried out at the match between Oxford and Cambridge Universities and made a great hit with fencers and spectators alike.

Here is Putty with a Bounce

Research in silicone rubber yields a strange by-product that may have its own uses.

Exceptional resistance to heat characterizes silicone rubber, an entirely new synthetic product developed by General Electric research engineers. Rings of the material now replace asbestos to cushion the glass of naval searchlights and blinker signal lamps against the terrific shock of gunfire, materially reducing breakage. Gaskets of the same composition serve in super-chargers for the B-29 Superfortresses that bomb Japan. These two war uses currently consume the entire output, but future household and industrial applications may include tires that will outlast a car, garden hose that can be left outdoors in heat or cold without damage, rubber gloves, and mountings for radio tubes.

Known for 50 years, chemicals called silicones have only recently been put to work. Hybrids between organic an inorganic substances, their ingredients are similar to sand and natural gas. A molecule of ordinary rubber has a “backbone” of carbon atoms, but a molecule of silicone rubber contains a more nearly indestructible spine of silicon and oxygen.

Besides silicone rubber, newly useful members of this chemical family include silicone oil, for hydraulic systems such as car brakes, and silicon plastics. A use remains to be found for the most curious silicone product discovered which has been nicknamed “bouncing putty.” The white substance can be pulled like taffy - but roll it into a sphere, and it bounces like rubber.

Piped Light Aids Surgeons and Dentists

PIPED LIGHT, providing surgeons and dentists with powerful, sterile beams devoid of heat, glare, or the danger of electrical shock, is made possible by instuments molded from a transparent plastic which carries light around curves and bends (P.S.M March ‘37, p. 43). The molded hand-held rodlike instruments have electric bulbs at their bases, powered either through extension cords from transformers that cut down 110-volt current to six volts, or by flash-light cells in a special base. Among the new plastic instruments are a tongue depressor that throws a concentrated beam on the throat of a patient, a retractor which serves the double purpose of holding back the cheek and lighting the mouth, and a long curved rod which casts a brilliant beam on the teeth.

It’s Small But Smart, This “Suitcase Brain”

Not much larger than a suitcase, a new electonic “brain” can handle most of the intracate problems solved by huge automatic computers, some of them almost the size of a basketball court. The small computer, called the Madida for it’s initials (magnetic drum digital differential analyzer) was designed by 31-year-old Floyd G. Steele. It is only two feed wide, four feed long and three feet high, and weighs 750 pounds. When a difficult problem is fed into the Maddida it comes up with an answer accurate to within one part in a million.

Nifty but I’ll bet on partly cloudy days the awnings keep opening and closing every time a cloud passes by.

Magic HOUSE Makes Own WEATHER

Features at the Century of Progress it is a magic dwelling which literally makes it’s own weather.

The secret of the process lies in a remarkable air-conditioning system which cools the air when it is too warm and heats it when it is too cold, dries it when it is moist and humidifies it when itis too dry, cleans it of pollen, dust and odors and keeps the air conditioned at all times.

Sensitive recorders placed on window sills close the windows if a shower comes up; and awnings are lowered or raised automatically by action of the sun’s rays.

Caption 1: Photo shows house of tomorrow - the air-conditioned dwelling at the Century of Progress. Note position of awnings which are automatically lowered when sun shines upon them and raised when sun sets or disappears behind a bank of clouds.

Caption 2: Circle above - Children may play indoors in comfort on the hottest days in the air-conditioned house. Note aquarium filled with water extracted from air in one hour’s time and glass ball filled with dust in same period. Left above - Button panel regulates heat or cold through air conditioner, left; opens or closes doors and windows and raises or lowers bed to more confortable positions. Right - Demonstrating with an atomizer how windows close and the first hint of rain.

Low-cost viewer lets you see who’s calling

This phone-viewing system gives you a picture of any caller similarly equipped. It can be used on ordinary telephone lines. Push a button and within five seconds the picture appears. Developed by Toshiba Co., Japan, price is estimated at $250 although it’s not yet ready for sale.

Crisp Bacon in 90 Seconds
with INTERNATIONAL’S MICROWAVE OVEN

People on the go will welcome an oven that makes cooking chores a pleasure. Imagine a “piping hot” TV dinner (frozen) in 3 and 1/2 minutes* instead of 20 to 50 minutes. Bake a potato in 5 minutes* instead of 60 minutes. Fry crisp bacon in 90 seconds on a paper plate. Great for those left overs. Countertop designed. Works on 115 vac house circuit. Write for folder. $545.00

CRYSTAL MFG. CO., INC
10 NO. LEE - OKLA CITY, OKLA 73102

I personally prefer those machines that shred your cans, but none the less, an origination.

Machine Speeds Bottle Returns

At least one waiting line might be shortened if a supermarket installed this bottle-return machine in its parking lot. You’d slip bottles into sized openings. The machine would calculate the refund, issue a slip, and move the bottles inside on a belt.

Spinning Head Tapes TV at Home
Is this the year you mate a home TV tape recorder to your TV set? Two European electronics firms - Philips (Netherlands) and Loewe-Opta (West Germany) are now selling TV recorders specially designed for home use. Both will be available here in a few months.

To capture the details of a TV picture, the recorder must have a three-megacycle recording bandwidth. Earlier prototype home TV recorders were essentially scaled-up audio recorders: They achieved wide bandwidth by moving 1/4-inch-wide audio-type tape past a stationary recording head at high speed (usually 120 inches per second). High tape speed leads to excessive head and tape wear, and gobbles up tape at an uneconomical rate.
Both the Philips and Loewe-Opta recorders use one-inch-wide video-recording tape and a rotating recording head. The tape is threaded in a single spiral around a slotted drum that contains a spinning recording head rotating at about 3,000 r.p.m. Tape speed around the drum is about six inches a second. The rotating head records the TV picture signal on adjacent diagonal bands on the tape. The audio is recorded along the edge of the tape.
Both units are expensive-over $2,000 with accessories-but cost should drop as sales rise.