

PLASTICS - Modern Marvel of Science
by John E. Pfeiffer
Science has learned the secret of converting natural gas. milk, acetates, ammonia and waste materials into useful products that enrich our lives. This is the third article of a series revealing their laboratory magic.
THE plastics industry crept up on the United States during panicky depression years. New that things have calmed down, people have time to look around a bit—and everywhere they look, they see hundreds of plastic-made objects. The moldable rivals of metal, lumber, china, and such materials that go into the making of objects for your home and office, are all around you in various forms, including everything from combs to salt shakers. Jewelry using plastics is to be found in Tiffany’s as well as Woolworth’s. The old-fashioned bar with its wooden surface and brass rail is giving way to stylish bars made with a brilliant array of colored plastics. John D. Rockefeller has plastic-made panels for the bathrooms of one of his homes, and the great ocean liner the Queen Mary uses about $100,000 worth of the new industry’s best wares.
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I’ve only ever seen plastic birdies, so I guess this was a success.
Plastic Badminton Bird
Now available for badminton players is a plastic shuttlecock that the manufacturer claims will last four times longer than a feathered bird. It is true in flight and unaffected by moisture or prolonged disuse.
His Vision Made Television
The True Story of a Boy Who Had a Big Idea and Followed It Through to Final Success
By ELLIOTT ARNOLD
HE only trouble with Philo T. Farnsworth’s story is that it is out of time. It belongs to another day. It ought to be a hoary legend now and it’s just twenty years old and still in the making.
It has everything the school teachers love —boyhood on a farm, the dreamy inventor, the years of struggle, success. It’s the story of television and it all took place when folks whose names slip the mind for the moment did a lot of shouting about the frontiers being gone.
Farnsworth dreamed of television without moving parts when he was thirteen; a year later, still in high school, he invented some of the basic parts of electronic television. In 1927, when he was twenty, he took out his first patent, on an entire television system—not just one part—and Donald K. Lippincott, the radio engineer, called him “one of the ten greatest mathematical wizards of the day.”
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