It’s the Law!

BY Dick hyman

In Collingswood, N. J., dogs are forbidden by ordinance to bark between the hours of 8 PM. and 6 A.M.

An ordinance in Mt. Pulaski, Ill., forbids boys to throw snowballs at trees within the city limits.

It is against the law in Maryland to knock a freight train off the track.

Florida has a law forbidding you to hire away your neighbor’s cook

IT’S THE LAW appears each month in The American Magazine

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Go South, Young Man

Amazonia, a land of fabulous unclaimed wealth, beckons now to men of vision.

By Lester David

THIS is the story of the richest treasure trove in the world today and of frontiersmen who are tapping bonanzas from a land of incredible opportunity. It is the story of a territory that has a welcome sign up for venturesome pioneers, backed by a promise of untold wealth. It is, in short, the story of the mammoth Amazon River basin in South America, by far the greatest storehouse of unworked natu- ral resources on the face of the globe.

Dangerous—impenetrable—a green hell. That’s what the area has been called. But the strongbox is finally being unlocked by Americans as well as pioneers from other countries.

There’s Robin H. McGlohn, for one.

McGlohn used to fly planes for Pan-American World Airways and for years was imbued with a restless urge to make the southward trek. Finally he took the plunge. Now he controls a vast empire of rubber, hides, lumber, gold and precious stones.

When McGlohn first ventured into the Amazon a few years ago, he did pretty well and persuaded two former Navy fliers, John Paul Sammons and Philip N. Blotner, to come down and join him. Blotner made a trip up the Tapajos River, one of the Amazon’s tributaries, and came back with an exciting story. A firm known as the Alto Tapajos Company was old and tired and its holdings were for sale. “The whole river above the rapids,” he reported, “is on the block.”

“Let’s buy it,” McGlohn said promptly.

“Sure,” replied Blotner, “but they want $300,000 down.”

“Okay,” said McGlohn and took off for New York City to raise the necessary capital. He buzzed around the city, talking up the wonderful opportunity and in a short time raked together the cash. Then he went back to the Amazon and found himself overlord of 400,000 acres of land on the Upper Tapajos, 24,000 acres on the island of Gurapa and about 4,000 jungle Brazilians who dwelled on his holdings. McGlohn is doing fine and is convinced that other hardy pioneers can do the same. He knows from firsthand experience that the region holds the largest deposits of highgrade iron ore in the world and that there’s enough there to supply all the nations of the earth, not for years, but actually for centuries. And iron ore isn’t all. McGlohn has an office in the Brazilian city of Belem just crammed with samples of tin, bauxite, copper, lead and even gold ores. Each is a symbol of a potential mine, great and rich, somewhere in the broad, oak-leafed basin which stretches across six countries of the continent.

Then there’s young George Nale. George used to run a sawmill in California and for a long time he read and heard stories of the fabulous frontierland. The idea took root, wouldn’t be dislodged and ultimately he pulled up stakes and headed south.

Now understand this: The world’s greatest timberlands lie in the Amazon jungles. There is such a super-abundance of valuable woods that skippers of small craft plying the rivers actually stoke their boilers with logs of rare mahogany! Name a tree and you will find millions of them in the vastnesses of Amazonia. There are more than 20,000 different varieties, bearing the choicest woods for the construction of fine furniture and cabinets. American, Canadian and Russian forestlands are picayune compared to these.

George Nale knew when he went down; that’s why he went. He cast his eye on a large tract of virgin timber not far from Belem and is now in the sawmill business there, selling his lumber on the local market.

They say there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, but there are a lot of rich men, too. Listen to the story of a push-cart peddler who founded an empire more fabulous than any maharajah’s.

Back before the turn of the century, Francisco Matarazzo was one of a group of immigrant Italians, Germans, Britons, Slavs and other Europeans who settled in Brazil. Many of them began small business enterprises that flourished well, but most spectacular of all was the man who started a tiny lard-rendering business after he had saved enough money from working as a day laborer.

Matarazzo reinvested his profits, expanded his enterprise, launched new businesses until today his son runs an organization called Industrias Reunidas F. Matarazzo, the most incredibly successful organization of its kind in the world. The firm employs 30,000 workers in its 367 plants which consist of textile factories, food enterprises and 80-odd other miscellaneous products.

Count Francisco Matarazzo, Jr., is a rich man indeed, but he’s not the only wealthy gentleman in Brazil. Talk about your Texas millionaires—they move to the rear when some of these Brazilians come into view. Some of their moneyed exploits make the spending hi-jinks of the Texans seem penny-ante stuff.

The count, for example, recently mar- ried off his daughter and really made a job of it. He brought 800 guests down to the city of Sao Paulo by private train and tossed around gold gifts like rose petals. Now the count had a yen for a special kind of cheese and since he couldn’t get it at the corner supermarket he simply imported a large herd of Italian buffalo to provide same. And the womenfolk had to have their hair done up in extra-special style—so what could be more natural than to call in a couple of French hairdressers? He got them from Paris, of course, by plane!

Francisco Pignatari, 36-year-old nephew of the count, is another Brazilian gentleman of means. He took over the family’s metals plant a few years ago and made it into the largest non-ferrous rolling mill in South America. When he had to have a house for his bride, he built her a million-dollar mansion complete with two Turkish baths, bowling alley and two swimming pools, one indoors, one outdoors. The indoor one is like an Arabian Nights fantasy. It’s 130 ft. long and at one end is a stunning waterfall 30 ft. wide and 21 ft. high. One swims beneath the cascade and emerges in a breathtaking grotto equipped with a bar, lounges and all the refinements of leisure.

In the city of Manaos is another fabulously wealthy Brazilian named Agesislau Araujo who operates a host of factories, mills and even a fleet of steamers. He owns 36 ranches and a vast number of trading posts. He’s the proprietor of a tract of land roughly the size of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia combined! Still another Croesus is Antonio de Moura Andrade, whose holdings include a 120,000-acre ranch with 90,000 head of cattle, 2,500,000 coffee trees and a fleet of five planes. And he single-handedly supports a city, called Andradina in his honor, the size of Green Bay, Wis.

Yes, it’s a land of moneyed men and what do they think of the opportunities there? Araujo sums up their feelings with this vital statement: ‘This country is about like the North American west two centuries ago . . . it’s wealth is fabulous.”

It’s a dramatic and revealing remark. Empires, you will recall, were built in America by the men who heeded Horace Greeley’s injunction to “go west, young man, go west.” And now, here’s a new place which offers the same opportunities to men with guts and vision.

What, specifically, is there?

There are fortunes in rubber, minerals, chemical and medicinal resources. There are fully 500 different types of palms which produce such important and commercially valuable substances as waxes, dyes, sugar, resins, oils, fruits, starch and fixatives for perfumes.

The possibilities are limitless and even the wealthy Mr. Araujo finds new wonders almost every day. Not long ago he discovered that workers were tossing away waste fibres from jute plants which could not be used in the manufacture of coarse cloth. There were tons of the stuff around and Araujo figured something could be done with it. He got chemists busy and received his answer in a short time—the jute waste made wonderful wrapping paper. Another industry was born.

What else? Copper, beryllium and tungsten which are in such great demand throughout the world; industrial and even gem diamonds; quartz crystal, vital in the manufacture of precision instruments; inexhaustible fisheries; salt mines—a new one, which is believed to be the largest on earth, has just been discovered.

How about agriculture? Listen to Mrs. Joan Bowen, an American who settled in Goias, a Brazilian interior state. She describes the area as ideal for the cultivation of a list of crops as long as your arm. To name a few: coffee, rice, corn, beans, cotton, tobacco, pineapples, guavas, mangoes, avocadoes, grapes and all kinds of citrus fruits. “Chicken and eggs are very cheap to raise,” she adds, “and can be produced and shipped by plane to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo at a good profit. Hogs are also an excellent business especially profitable because of the bumper crops of corn raised.” And not the least of the inducements: filet mignon steak costs 30 cents a pound!

Then there’s another resource which makes millionaires—oil. Declares Willard Price in his book, “The Amazing Amazon,” “A good part of Brazil, it is believed, floats upon a sea of the precious fluid and similar liquid wealth abounds under the river country of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.”

From one end of South America to the other there is a spectacular business boom unequalled in the continent’s history. Take Venezuela, for example. General Motors, Chrysler and the General Tire Co. are but a few major U. S. firms which have opened plants there. In fact, a vast construction program is now under full steam. The government is spending a whopping $2,-300,000,000 on improvements such as new roads and buildings and already thousands of Americans have funneled into the country to cash in on the bonanza. The point is that when so much money is being spent on improvements there is an enormous market for everything from tractors to shoe horns.

So Americans have set up businesses ranging from Yankee handicraft shops to amusement parks. Sam Bakerman, from New York City, cast his eye at Coney Island in Brooklyn, then looked at Venezuela. He put them together and actually set up a Coney Island in the latter’s capital city of Caracas. Now the residents happily loop-the-loop, grab for the brass rings on the merry-go-rounds and pop away with rifles at clay pigeons, causing the cash to jingle merrily in Sam’s pockets.

Jack Reynolds also figured it right. No miner or engineer was Jack, just an insurance man. With money floating around, he reckoned that he could make himself a tidy little business in Venezuela. So down he went, opened an office and soon was swamped with business. His agency, one of the most active in the entire city of Caracas, writes policies totalling millions annually.

There’s one interesting point to bear in mind about Venezuela. The tax laws are extremely favorable to individuals and corporations. The government receives such a vast revenue from petroleum royalties that it doesn’t need to bother with income taxes which are consequently low.

They are calling Venezuela a Klondike with a Spanish accent because it’s oil-rich, iron-rich and getting richer all the time as developers continue to tap what nature has put into the land.

Head south to the city of Sao Paulo in Brazil and see a metropolis that has increased by 67 per cent in the past decade and which has been called the world’s fastest-growing major urban center. The boom is going on at such a fevered pace that when Walter Gropius, the famous architect, visited the 400-year-old city not long ago, he observed: “Sao Paulo does not grow … it explodes!”

Says one resident: “Go out in any direction and buy land; any land, swamp, hillside, anything. It will be worth ten times what you paid for it before long.”

There’s money to be made in Sao Paulo and Americans are finding it out. Already thousands have poured into the city. One has set up a chain of restaurants, another .has gone into the building business, a third into advertising. All are doing well and all report that the future looks rosy because the city’s two-and-a-half-million persons are rubbing elbows in the crowded streets, fighting for adequate transportation, constantly complaining about the housing shortage.

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Her Brains Didn’t Get in Her Way

First her I.Q., then her beauty, brought fame and fortune to Vanessa Brown. Now, in Broadway’s funniest hit, she demonstrates that nothing succeeds like sex BY HYMAN GOLDBERG

When a movie called “I’ve Always Loved You” opened several years ago, a young critic named Smylla Brind declared in the student newspaper of the University of California at Los Angeles that Vanessa Brown, the feminine lead, made the picture seem much better than it was. Miss Brown would bear watching, the young critic wrote, for she was certain to make her mark as a serious actress.

A few months ago, when the play “The Seven Year Itch” became an overnight hit on Broadway, the college critic’s judgment was borne out. For New York’s hard-bitten critics described Vanessa Brown’s acting as “a delight,” “a joy to watch,” and “a perfect performance.”

This was highly gratifying to Vanessa Brown, whose real name is Smylla Brind.

Her I.Q. Is in the Genius Class Strange and wonderful things are to be expected from young ladies with Vanessa’s attributes. Vanessa is beautiful and extremely shapely. She has blue eyes and auburn hair. When her I.Q. was taken some years ago, she scored 169, in the genius category. This makes her a definite anomaly in Hollywood, where bust and I.Q. measurements work in reverse.

Among the pictures she has made are “Margie,” “Mother Wore Tights,” and “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.” In “The Late George Apley,” she played Richard Haydn’s daughter. In “The Foxes of Harrow,” she played Haydn’s wife. “I suppose,” she says, “that eventually I’ll play his mother, then his grandmother.”

When Vanessa was fourteen, she made her debut on the legitimate stage in the road company of “Watch on the Rhine.”

At the same time, she became one of the famous “Quiz Kids.”

Vanessa has struggled to live down her Quiz Kid reputation. When she called on Katharine Hepburn to read for a part in a play, Miss Hepburn snapped, “You’re that Quiz Kid, aren’t you?” Vanessa blushed. “Well, if you’re so damn smart, tell me what Shakespeare meant by ‘bearded like the pard’?”

“I had no idea,” says Vanessa, recalling this encounter, “but I’ve never been afraid to make a wild guess, which is very often mistaken for brilliance. So I took a guess. I said, ‘Leopard, bearded like a leopard.’ Miss Hepburn jumped up and yelled. ‘How did you ever know that? Lord, do you know Shakespeare that well?’ But I just smiled, and didn’t say anything, which is also sometimes (continued) taken for brilliance. I got the part, and toured with Miss Hepburn for five months. We got along fine.”

Vanessa Brown got along so well, indeed, that Katharine Hepburn has called her the one young Hollywood actress sure to achieve greatness on the stage.

Elliott Nugent, co-producer of “The Seven Year Itch,” Vanessa’s current play, says he was warned about Vanessa before he heard her read the part. “I was just a little leery,” he says, “about her reputation as a Quiz Kid. I was warned that she was too intellectual and that she’d probably be constantly theorizing and analyzing the play. But I saw from the start that she had just the right combination of innocence and provocativeness for the part, and I found that she is intelligent. But her intelligence was an asset, not a hindrance. She studied the play and her part so thoroughly that she brought depth of character to her portrayal of a girl who is essentially a simple type. You don’t often get that combination of good looks and intelligence in an actress.”

Vanessa, an only child, was born in Vienna. Her father is Dr. Nah Brind, a philologist, or student of languages. “He speaks nine languages,” says Vanessa, “or maybe it’s fourteen; I forget.” Her mother is Dr. Anna Brind, a practicing psychologist. Both her parents earned their doctorates at the University of Vienna, and both now lecture at UCLA. They left Vienna to go to Paris in 1932.

“My father,” says Vanessa, “has a strong historical sense, and he could see trouble brewing. I went to school in Paris, and then, five years later, my father went to America, because he saw that even Paris wasn’t going to be safe. After he had established himself in New York, he sent for Mother and me.

“Just before we left, Mother decided to go back to Vienna to visit her mother. When we came back to Paris we found a cable from Father warning us not to go to Vienna before we left Europe, because it would be too dangerous. That very day, Hitler marched into Austria.”

Vanessa speaks French and German fluently, and gets along fairly well in Italian. Although she was out of school for almost a year while she traveled around the country with the road company of “Watch on the Rhine,” she still managed to graduate from junior high school among the top ten in her class.

She did her schoolwork with the help of five girls who took turns sending her the assignments. She attended Hunter College High School in New York, which accepts only honor students, and then transferred to Hollywood High School when the family moved to Los Angeles after Vanessa was signed to a long-term movie contract. She was graduated from UCLA. She hopes eventually to earn her doctorate. “Everybody in my family is a doctor. I don’t want to be the only one who isn’t.” she says.

Her Husband Has Positive Ideas Her husband is Dr. Robert A. Franklyn, one of Hollywood’s leading plastic surgeons. Dr. Franklyn, a New Yorker who served in the medical corps of the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. is a man with positive opinions. When the management of the hotel in which he was then living objected to, his huge German shepherd dog, he had built for himself a large, ultramodern home, of rock, glass, and rare woods, where he and the dog could live undisturbed.

Several years ago, while Vanessa was in New York, a man serving a summons on Dr. Franklyn in a civil suit involving $100 complained- that he was greeted at the Franklyn house with a revolver shot. Dr. Franklyn said he had been asleep and was awakened by his dog’s barking. “Since I was alone.” he said, “I got my gun. As I walked down the driveway, a man came toward me. mumbling, and I fired into the air to scare him off. I thought he was a burglar, or a prowler, and I called the police.” The incident was settled as a misunderstanding.

Dr. Franklyn and Vanessa met through the good offices of a mutual friend named Martin Abramson, a magazine, radio, and television writer. “I had interviewed both of them before,” says Abramson, “and when I was in Hollywood gathering material for stories, I visited Dr. Franklyn. My wife. Marcia, was with me. She asked him how it was that a man like himself, rich and successful, and with a wide acquaintance among Hollywood beauties, had never married.

” “I’m tired of all this shallow Hollywood glamour.’ he answered. ‘If I could find somebody young and with a cultural background, sexy but innocent, beautiful and clever, glamorous and witty, maybe I could fall in love with her.’ ”

Abramson and his wife stared at each other. “We’re on our way,” said Abramson, “to see the girl you jus! described. Do you know Vanessa Brown?” Dr. Franklyn couldn’t believe such a girl existed, but he went along. Vanessa’s mother engaged Dr. Franklyn in a heated discussion as soon as they were introduced. Plastic surgeons, she maintained, do not give their patients sufficient psychological preparation before their operations. In the midst of the debate. Vanessa announced that she had a date. Dr. Franklyn told her later that he was appalled that she could think of going out with someone else when he was there, but he agreed, nevertheless, to drive her to where she was going.

They were married a year later, and Vanessa moved into Dr. Franklyn’s ultramodern home.

Every two weeks Dr. Franklyn flies to New York to see her, and they call each other two “or three times a day. “We talked about all the money we spend on long-distance telephone calls,” says Vanessa, “so Bob bought stock in the telephone company.

“Of course, being separated like this isn’t the best thing in the world, but it does have its advantages. When we meet every two weeks, it seems like a perpetual honeymoon. And. anyway, it’s Bob’s fault that I’m away from him so long. When I said I wanted to do a play, he picked ‘The Seven Year Itch’ because he thought it wouldn’t run very long.”

Her Husband Requests Glamour Dr. Franklyn. who is ten years older than Vanessa, has guided and influenced her in other ways. Before they were married, Vanessa’s wardrobe ran largely to skirts and sweaters. Her husband, whose taste runs to off-the-shoulder dresses and blouses, taught her to dress more glamorously.

Every night when she comes to the theatre. Vanessa asks what organizations have bought up blocks of tickets. She doesn’t vary her performance to suit the audience, of course, but she likes to know for whom she’s playing because she has lectured to so many different groups.

Vanessa, incidentally, is a startling lecturer for groups expecting a Hollywood beauty who will simply smile and add glamour to their gathering. Vanessa seldom passes up a chance to speak out.

When she was invited recently to attend a meeting of the Nassau County Cancer Committee, who wanted her help in publicizing their cause, she called on a friend of her father’s, a noted cancer expert. She spent several hours with him. absorbing technical information. As a result, the Nassau County Cancer Committee heard a learned lecture on cancer by Vanessa Brown, star of stage, screen, and television.

When she was introduced at the Dutch Treat Club, a luncheon group of New York business and professional men, as “a young lady who thinks like a man.” she took umbrage. “The greatest compliment a man can pay a woman.” she remarked, “is to say that she thinks like a man. But I think that maybe it isn’t such a great compliment, when I look around at the state of the world and consider that men made it that way by thinking like men.”

Though Vanessa Brown is undeniably an intellectual, she is not hesitant in letting it be known that her face and form are lovely to look at. for she well understands the sweet uses of publicity. In “The Seven Year Itch,” she plays the part of a giddy and acquiescent young model who cooperates thoroughly with a married man. whose wife is away in the country, in proving to himself that marriage hasn’t robbed him of his appeal to other women. In the play, Vanessa is supposed to have posed for a photograph in the nude, which she shows to Tom Ewell. who plays the married man.

With this material at hand. Vanessa embarked on a highly successful publicity stunt. She let it be known that since she was going to play the part of a girl who had posed for a nude picture, she thought she should have her picture taken unclothed. Next came word that she was looking for “a respectable married man” to take her picture in the nude. Thousands of photographers volunteered.

Then word came from Hollywood that the picture of Vanessa in the nude had already been made, but that it would not be released. This set off a great debate: Did Vanessa pose in the nude, or did she not?

Recently Vanessa told the story of what actually happened. “It did seem like a good idea,” she says, “so I had pictures made of me in the nude by ‘a respectable married man’—my husband.”

At twenty-five, Vanessa feels, rightly, that she has a long career ahead of her in the movies and on the stage and in television. “But,” she says, “in the American theatre, the accent is on youth. I’ll have to prepare for the time when I won’t be in demand.”

She Writes—and Sells—Stories When that time comes, Vanessa hopes to be established as a writer. She has collected masses of rejection slips, but she lias sold three short stories. And she has written a play, which some people think has merit. “An actress gets old.” she says, “and people don’t want to see her. But a writer improves with age, like brandy.” The End

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Women and Nerves

Why Women Are More Subject to Nervous Troubles and What They Can and Should Do About It

By Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, m.d.
Bart., C.B., M.S., F.R.C.S. President of the New Health Society, London, England

IT IS a matter of common observation that women are greater sufferers from “nerves” than men. This was recognized in the classical days of Greek medicine when the ancient physicians described hysteria as a purely feminine illness, believing it was due to the erratic wanderings of the womb. Today, we know that this organ is relatively fixed but we realize that those early doctors were not so far out in their theory of causes and that much of the nerve trouble of women is centered round their sex life. The old saying that “because of her womb, a woman is what she is” contains a large measure of truth.

We must remember, in considering this question, that the sex function is much more complicated in women as compared with men. To a man sex to a large extent is merely an incident in his life: to a woman it is her whole life. At the age of eleven to fifteen there commences that monthly change, that minor upheaval which continues to recur till middle age and which considerably affects her emotional life. Then there is the serious stress of pregnancy and childbirth, the major responsibility of a woman’s sex life, and a stress which readily detects any weak spots in a woman’s nervous system. Finally, there is the climacteric or “change,” the time when the entire make-up of mind and body undergoes a revolution.

Psychologically, too, women have much more difficult sex problems to solve than is the case with men. They are subjected to far greater repressions and the sex taboos have a much greater significance for them. Again, owing to the relative preponderance in numbers of the female over the male sex, many women are compelled to remain unmarried. That means that the supreme function of their lives is not exercised, in flat opposition to nature’s intention. Lack of gratification of the sex instinct, with a failure to direct its energies into other creative channels, is very likely in unstable types to cause a nerve tension which ultimately ends in a complete nervous breakdown. Marriage also has its difficulties. Sexual adjustment is not easy for many women, especially if they (or their husbands) are ignorant of sex hygiene. Similarly, unsuitable methods of birth control can be productive of much mind tension, and is, indeed, one of the common sources of nerve trouble.

Not least in importance are the many problems of family and home life which fall mainly upon the wife and mother. Every day she is subjected to a multitude of worries. She has responsibilities both great and small to bear. She has constantly to be making decisions. Often, her natural inclinations for creative artistic expression have to be subdued or side-tracked. It requires a fairly robust temperament to withstand the hosts of minor stresses which women have to bear, and, considering those numerous threats to her nervous stability, it is hardly surprising that so many women in these times succumb to nervous breakdowns which render them unfit to respond to the calls of life.

It must not be thought that all women are inevitable candidates for nervous ailments. While it would be rash to say that no woman is immune, on the other hand, there are certain types of women who are definitely prone to attacks of “nerves.” There is the so-called neurotic or highly strung woman. Such a woman is generally the child of neurotic parents, parents who have been unhappy and who have endeavored to extract a morbid amount of love and affection from their child. As a result, the child fails to grow up emotionally. In adult life, such children are emotional Peter Pans. They are emotionally unstable, have difficulty in controlling their feelings, react excessively to ordinary situations, are self-centered and think only in terms of themselves.

Naturally, it will require a much greater effort and expenditure of nerve energy for such women to adjust themselves to the emotional problems of every-day adult life. There is a constant leakage of nerve energy and when some really trying situation presents itself, there is an emotional explosion followed by exhaustion. It is always a hard task for the neurotic woman to make a decision on some troublesome issue. Unconsciously she dislikes responsibility and she will often evade it by an attack of “nerves.” We are all familiar with women who, rather than face some important domestic or family difficulty, develop an intense headache which conveniently removes them from the scene of turmoil. It is a form of retreat but it must not be thought to be wilful or cowardly: it is an inevitable outcome of the woman’s type of mental make-up.

‘V[OW, while I have stressed the psychological aspect -L^ of the nerve troubles of women, it must not be imagined that physical factors are unimportant. Not infrequently it is some bodily disorder which precipitates the nervous breakdown. Bad nutrition is probably > the most common of these physical factors, particularly if it occurs during adolescence and early womanhood. Every doctor is constantly coming across cases of young women who are irritable, always on the ¦ verge of tears, despondent, sleeping badly, unable to sustain their attention, and doing their work badly. They have lost confidence in themselves, worry over trifles, and imagine they are a prey to all kinds and manners of disease.

Such symptoms are very often clear evidence of a brain and nervous system which are starved of their proper elements of nutrition. Investigate the diet of such victims and we will find that they are subsisting on most unhealthy foods. Their staples will be white bread, sweet cakes, biscuits, and other concentrated artificial foods, potted and bought cooked meats, with innumerable cups of tea throughout the day, “to steady their nerves.” In the absence of adequate fresh fruit and vegetables, and fresh dairy produce, the victims of such a dietary will inevitably (Continued on page 60) be constipated. Now, nerve tissue is peculiarly sensitive to any circulating poison in the blood stream; and the constant draining of poisons from the constipated bowel, from septic teeth or gums, or from the nose and throat, has a most exhausting effect upon the entire nervous system.

There is one factor in the production of nervous breakdown which requires special comment, namely, overwork. With the public, it is a favorite cause of nerve trouble. Actually, it is doubtful if overwork is ever the sole or even the underlying cause of a true nervous breakdown. Overwork is naturally a very popular causal factor for it is obviously highly respectable and even commendable! It takes away responsibility from the person concerned.

When we investigate, we generally find that the complaint of overwork is really a symptom of an already existent nervous exhaustion. When a woman is tired and low-spirited, her work and duties seem to magnify a .hundredfold to her weary brain. The more she worries the greater does the mountain of overwork appear to her. She gets sleepless nights and unpleasant” dreams, her nerves are on edge and “all is dark within.” Clearly, the “overwork” is relative to a pre-existent weary nervous system. The fundamental cause is not in the overwork but is within her own mind. Some gnawing fear which the conscious mind will not recognize, some conflict between opposing desires, some profound dissatisfaction with her marital, her family or her occupational life—in such factors as these will the root cause of the nervous exhaustion be found.

Great effort of mind or body can, of course, produce some degree of exhaustion, but the human organism is well able to look after itself and such exhaustion is rapidly dispelled with rest. In neurasthenia, there is a constant “always tired” feeling which incapacitates the sufferer from facing up to life. The neurasthenic woman is unhappy: she experiences numerous unpleasant symptoms, pressure on top of the head, tremblings, dyspepsia, sleeplessness, and she has an acute sense of her shortcomings. She knows that her fears are groundless but is unable to make the effort to overcome them.

Another common nervous complaint in women is the anxiety state. It arises in the neurotic type of women when confronted with some threat to their sexual, economic or family security. The symptoms are legion, from fears of insanity to palpitations, tremblings and sweatings. It is fear which is the fundamental motive of all the symptoms and signs, a fear which may be unknown or which cannot be faced by the conscious mind. Until the ghost of this fear is laid, the state of anxiety will persist.

HYSTERIA as we have already noted is one of the major nerve troubles of women, although it is not exclusive to the female sex as was once imagined. There is definitely an hysterical type, the woman who is easily emotional, weeps and laughs on the least provocation, who has a desire to be theatrical and who has a morbid craving for sympathy. When such a woman is threatened with some social situation which is distasteful to her she very readily develops an hysterical attack. * This may take an endless variety of forms, paralysis, tremors, deafness, speechlessness, blindness, trances, or wandering fits.

Now, it is essential to understand that all those symptoms of “nerves” which have been described are not “just imaginary.” They are intensely real to the suffering woman who is fundamentally unhappy and badly adjusted to some aspect of her life. The “nervous woman” is not an impostor. She certainly clings to her illness but only because she is afraid. To adopt an attitude of blame is not only futile but is definitely harmful. The neurotic woman is largely the victim of her early environment, the victim of parental mishandling.

What the neurotic type must endeavor to do, is to grow up emotionally. She must gain the mastery of her feelings, and direct them in an adult, not a childish way. This is easy to say to the nerve-racked woman but difficult for her to realize. Still it is possible by sympathetic discussion to help her to an understanding of the root cause of her nervous illness. What is imperative is that nervous troubles should not be permitted to get firmly established. In their early stages, the outlook is generally good, provided sound treatment is carried out by an expert in this branch of medicine. The sufferer from “nerves” will not find the remedy in a “bottle of strengthening medicine.” The cause lies within the patients mind and until the cause is eradicated no hope of recovery can be sustained. The tyranny of “nerves” is the greatest of all human tyrannies and as such it deserves the greatest of our efforts if it is to be conquered.

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An engaged couple candidly discusses the age-old problem of PREMARITAL RELATIONS

As told to SHIRLEY GUTTENTAG

WE SHOULD

He: To present my side of the argument it is necessary to start at the beginning. I first met Alice when her date at a party got drunk and I volunteered to drive her home. I didn’t see her again until I was invited to a party given by one of her friends—an invite I suspect was extended to me at Alice’s request. We had a few dates and I was always a gentleman—in fact the first time we kissed was on my birthday.

One summer evening we stopped off in a quiet spot after seeing an early movie and it was Alice who started the little necking session that evening. A few dates later I made some advances and she didn’t mind my fondling her breasts and unzipping her dress.

Now, a year later we are on the threshold of marriage. The date is set, the catering contract for our wedding reception has been signed by her parents, the invitations have been printed and we’re preparing the guest list. I won’t back out now. I am going to marry Alice but I can’t stand the mental and physical torture of playing with her and then being sent home without having spent my passion. It’s getting so that I can’t do my work—I think of nothing else.

I respect Alice and wouldn’t think her cheap if she gave herself to me now. Many is the time that I’ve argued this point with her and tried to convince her that our love is God-given while the marriage contract is only a man-made device of society. If it will be all right to fulfill our sexual desires after we are legally married as the culmination of our love for each other, do we love each other any less now that we can deny ourselves the right to make love?

Alice wants me. I know she wants me as I do her—that is why I can’t understand why we both are facing and putting up with a physical denial which is giving us both emotional troubles.

WE SHOULDN’T

She: Dick is quite right when he intimates that I connived to see him again after he drove me home. His being a gentleman was a refreshing change from the other fellows in the crowd who thought that they were God’s gift to womanhood and that they had a right to paw us after free-loading at a party.

I liked Dick right from the start and “helped” him along when I saw that he was very bashful. O.K., so I let him make advances. I wasn’t ready to give myself, but I always heard from the girls that it helped snare a husband if you put out the right bait!

Dick resorts to the old cliche— if you really loved me, you’d let me. But, I always remind him of an even older cliche—if you loved me, you wouldn’t make such demands.

Yes, I’m quite sure that we are going to get married, even if we started having intimate relations from now to the time of our wedding bells. But. what if Dick did find some excuse to back out of the engagement? Where would I be then? I’d be thrown back into the pond, probably with the word getting around that I was no longer chaste. I’m well aware of the fact that non-virgins do manage to get married, but I’d rather not gamble on being passed from one fellow to another for sampling. If I want to lead that kind of life, I’d be better off doing it on a commercial scale, than being an unpaid amateur in search of a husband.

I’ll even agree that our love is God-given but I can’t go along with the idea that the marriage contract is meaningless to lovers because the marriage ceremony is actually a legal contract in accordance with laws established by the society of the times. To me, the marriage contract is God-given too for it is within His scheme of things that we find one mate and live in monogomy.

More than once I’ve wanted to go all the way. I get passionate when I allow Dick to probe my body as I do his. but I control myself and feel that we can wait.

Dick doesn’t know it but when we just started going steady. I found out that one time when he lied and said he couldn’t take me out. he was out with the boys—out whorering. I dated a former beau that night and came as close as I ever did to losing my virginity. I did things that night, that in retrospect shock me now, but I was angry and I was trying to get even for the hurt of being tossed aside for a strumpet.

Mature adults shouldn’t get married because they have an incurable sex urge —they should consider sex as necessary, but as a pleasant by-product, rather than the focal point of marriage. If Dick can’t wait, I’d be agreeable to moving up our marriage a few months, something which can easily be arranged, a lot easier than my compromising my principles and losing both respect for Dick and for myself.

Related posts

• WHY MARRIED MEN VISIT PROSTITUTES (Oct, 1965)
• Behind college doors… “The TRUTH about CAMPUS IMMORALITY” (Oct, 1965)
• What is your Sex Quotient? (Oct, 1965)
• What turns you on? (Oct, 1965)
• HOW MEN AND WOMEN LOOK AT SEX (Oct, 1965)
• EXTREMES IN SEX BEHAVIOR (Oct, 1965)

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Earn Good Wages in New Gold Rush

by John Edwin Hogg

THERE’S a new gold rush on—one in which you can participate as well as the reasoned prospector, with the reasonable assurance of panning out a fair day’s wages, and with the ever-present possibility of striking a nugget which may vary anywhere from $50 to $5,000 in value. Hundreds of men, thrown out of work by the business depression, are today panning out gold in the thousands of places where it is known to exist in small quantities. They are making fair wages in a healthful, outdoor occupation, and they’re assured a job as long as they are willing to shake a gold pan.

If you are wondering what chance you would have to become a gold panner, let me present the facts and permit you to draw your own conclusions.

Pan gold or placer is usually found in the beds of streams. It occurs in innumerable mountain streams in nearly all of our western states. The big mining syndicates are not interested in this kind of gold unless it is found in what they consider commercial quantities. A location where a single miner working with a gold pan would be able to pan out good wages for an indefinite period wouldn’t be of the slightest interest to the big dredging outfits. The big dredging concerns would have to have millions of tons of such gold bearing sands before they could be sure of paying for their costly machinery, and paying dividends to their stockholders over a period of years. So, they have left all the small gold-bearing streams for the “little man” with low overhead expense and primitive methods of removing the pay dirt from the sand.

The prospector who goes along such streams examining the sands will usually have his attention attracted to what he thinks is gold by seeing it sparkle. The yellow sparkle may be gold, or it may be mica, iron or copper pyrites, or numerous other substances having much the appearance of gold. Having found what looks like gold in a stream, the prospector usually makes what is known as “the toothpick test”. With the point of a toothpick he reaches under the water and endeavors to pick up one of the yellow flakes. If it is mica or iron it will float right away when it is touched with the toothpick. If it is gold it will come right up on the toothpick or work down into the sand.

Another test by which gold dust may be instantly distinguished from iron is to use a magnet. Iron will stick to the magnet. Gold will not. The next test for the yellow particle thought to be gold is the test for malleability. Place the yellow flake on the tongue, then get it between the front teeth, and bite down hard. Gold is malleable, and when you bite it it’s exactly like biting down on a flake of lead. It can almost be chewed like chewing gum without going to pieces. Mica, pyrites, or other substances are gritty when bitten. The yellow flake that responds to these tests, is almost certain to be gold. Now examine it with a miner’s magnifying glass. If it is gold, the tiniest flake of it will look exactly like a nugget. The final test, however, is reaction to acids and mercury. Gold is immune from the corrosion of nitric and sulphuric acids. Gold will not float in mercury. Anything else will.

Having located gold-bearing sand, the isolation of it in the gold pan is a fairly simple process. The amount of gold in the sand and the willingness of the gold panner to work determines the financial returns. A quart or more of sand is placed in the pan and covered with water. The pan is then rocked gently to and fro. The particles of gold are heavier than anything else in the pan, and will gradually work down out of sight in the sand. When all the yellow particles have disappeared the water and sand on top are carefully brushed out of the pan with the hand. More water is added, and the panning process is continued. Eventually all the sand will be eliminated, and the fruits of the effort will be a streak of color in the bottom of the pan. A magnet is often useful for removing iron sand, which always remains in the pan longer than the lighter particles. The little streak of color that remains in the gold pan is then ready to be laid out and dried. When dry it goes to the treasure bottle as gold dust worth $20.67 per ounce.

It may take half an hour or more to work the gold out of a single pan of gold-bearing sand, but if the panning yields only a small pinch of pay dust, the effort is well worth while. With gold worth $20.67 an ounce, it takes only one eightieth of an ounce to be 25c worth, and one eightieth of an ounce of gold dust wouldn’t begin to fill the eraser socket of an ordinary lead pencil. A location that will yield 25c worth of gold for an hour’s work means $2.50 for a ten hour day, and with living expenses reduced to about $5 a week, is far better than being out of a job and stony broke in a city.

By moving about a bit, however, and finding the highest grade of gold-bearing sands one’s earnings may be vastly increased. A lot of gold panners in California streams are earning as high as $8 and $9 for an eight-hour day—and they’re out in the sunshine and air leading a life that many would regard as a vacation. Moreover, nuggets of gold are by no means a thing of the past in gold-bearing streams. Nuggets have been found worth all the way from 10c up to hundreds of dollars, and it may be any gold panner’s good fortune to shake out a nugget.

In Central California near where the original gold strike was made in 1849, a lot of jobless gold panners are working the moss in the bottom of the streams, and are making the equivalent of good wages. Someone discovered that the moss has virtually converted the streams into placer sluice boxes. So, these fellows are harvesting the moss, shaking the goldbearing sand out of it, and panning the sand. In various other parts of the west where gold bearing sands occur in running water amateur prospectors have set up home-made sluices, hoppers, and small scale placer operations. By developing such low cost methods for extracting the gold from larger quantities of sand than could be handled in a gold pan they have increased their earnings until they can now thumb their noses at the wolf of unemployment.

Quite a bit of amateur placer mining is being profitably done by men who have been able to procure some lengths of old pipe. Mountain streams are usually short and swift, and by placing a pipe in the stream at a higher level they develop a head of water for placering gold-bearing sands into their sluice boxes. A number of others have obtained financial rewards for their ingenuity by rigging up old automobile engines and centrifugal pumps with which they are operating what are virtually inexpensive, small scale i gold dredging operations.

Several years ago the Saint Francis Dam, in San Francisquito Canyon, a part of the 286-mile, Los Angeles Aqueduct System, collapsed. A flood of water tore through the Santa Clara Valley to the sea scattering death and destruction before it. It was one of the major tragedies of the past decade, but a tragedy that has since been a blessing to many jobless men. The flood gouged out the canyon walls and brought down vast quantities of free gold, or “float”, that is now providing work and the equivalent of wages for hundreds of jobless men. Many of these men were destitute. Now they have a source of income that will last as long as they need it, or until such time as returning prosperity gives them work with wages.

San Francisquito Canyon, however, is by no means the only location where free gold occurs in quantity sufficient to be of interest to jobless men. There are literally thousands of other locations where men who are willing to work can earn from 25 to 50 cents an hour for every hour spent shaking the gold pan. As a result, much of the west, and particularly the states of California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada, are experiencing something of a gold rush. The maps reproduced with this article show you the areas in which the prospector is reasonably sure to find gold.

The identification of gold as it occurs in various forms of gold-bearing ore is something that cannot be summed up in a few paragraphs, unless the ore is sufficiently rich to permit the flaking out of actual metal samples. Detailed descriptions of this subject, however, are obtainable in numerous mineralogical books available in every public library. Moreover, the amateur prospector, or the jobless man who takes up gold panning as a source of livelihood during times when wages are lacking, is probably more interested in finding gold to be panned and converted into cash.

Why is it that prospecting, and practically every phase of mining for precious metal, has been at a low ebb for more than a decade? Gold, being the monetary standard of the nation, retains a fixed value. During the World war, and for some years after the war, the country was prosperous. Jobs were plentiful and wages were high. The value of gold remained the same while the price of labor, machinery, transportation, and everything entering into the cost of bringing gold out of the ground rose to unprecedented levels. Only the richest gold mines could be operated at a profit. Most mines shut down, and there was little or no incentive for prospectors to seek new discoveries of minerals incapable of profitable development.

Most of us, however, are well aware that this condition changed abruptly immediately following the stock market crash of November, 1929. We’ve since had idle factories, business depression, falling prices, and jobless men. Gold still remains the monetary standard with the price fixed by the United States mints at $20 an ounce. Mines operating with low grade ore have recently found it possible to resume operations, and during the past few months there has been a revival in mineral prospecting such as the nation has not witnessed for more than a decade. There can be no over-production of gold as long as Uncle Sam continues its free coinage for anyone who delivers it to the mints.

Prospecting has long been a poor man’s game, as well as one from which many a poor prospector has become rich. Any man, young or old, who is not actually physically incapacitated, and who is really in earnest about it, can usually find someone of financial means who will help him to a grubstake and outfit. The usual arrangement is that the prospector who operates on a stake goes fifty-fifty with his financial backer on any mineral claims discovered. The prospector or gold panner who goes out upon his own resources doesn’t need much capital. A camping outfit, a few simple tools, and groceries sufficient for the length of time one expects to spend in the mineralized regions, are about all that’s needed. Transportation, of course, is essential. Many good gold-panning streams can be reached with a cheap, second-hand automobile; but serious prospecting, with the possibilities for making a worth-while strike are largely a matter of travel afoot or with pack animals. Burros are by far the best animals for this work, and a pair of burros can be picked up almost anywhere in the west for five or ten dollars. They can go for two or three days without water, and can usually find enough to eat in country where a horse or a camel would starve to death.

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PEACE – OR ELSE!

HUMANITY is faced with the greatest decision it has ever had to make. The atomic bomb, in three gigantic, flashes, has transformed our planet into a world which has only one choice left. Earth has become a world of Either/Or.

Either—we are firmly determined that there shall be no war, and spend as much energy, thought and money on the problem of preventing it as we now spend in preparing for it. In that case—and if we succeed—the future promises a period of incredible achievements, of unlimited progress, of infinite riches of knowledge and material riches, of immediate preliminaries to humanity’s spread through the solar system as a first step to a spread through the galaxy.

Or—we blunder into irretrievable errors, such as trying to outlaw atomic energy, or believing that size and distance will save us, or thinking that there can be war only between other nations.

If we choose the latter course, we will almost inevitably become involved in another war—an atomic war. …

Atomic war will come without warning and without declaration, with a fury so monstrous that the mind cannot conceive it. The first authentic publication on the subject, the report written for the War Department by Professor H. D. Smyth, (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes), has already pointed out that the atomic bomb is especially suited to sudden, unannounced attack—blitzkrieg to make the Nazis’ version of it pale into insignificance. “A country’s major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power,” as Professor Smyth puts it. Overnight destruction of America’s major cities means the death of eighty million people in twelve hours— 57% of the population! That is, tragically for us, not a nightmare, but a very definite possibility.

The possibility can in no way be done away with by preventing potential aggressors from obtaining the “secret.” Several nations stood on the threshold of atomic energy when the war started: we barely won the race. Within five years} every nation will be able to construct atomic bombs, even though they will not be able to keep that fact secret. The prevention of war, therefore, is not a scientific problem—it is a political problem. Of course, destruction would be mutual. The Intelligence Service would know that war was brewing, and the military could get ready to hit back. The result would be destruction of all the centers of population and manufacture of all the belligerents, with nothing left after two days of war but small and unimportant villages and only about one-quarter or one-third of the populations of the warring nations still alive. It is a prospect so incredible that the mind rejects it, but in order to understand it clearly we must try to visualize the details. For that purpose we must understand a few pertinent facts about the atomic bombs which have been used. The atomic bomb has a mimimum size. It has been officially declared that the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just about as small as they could be made. The destruction achieved in Japan is, therefore, the minimum destruction possible. British sources claim that these bombs weighed about 400 pounds, most of which was not the atomic explosive, but the mechanism required to make it safe in handling and to set it off. Furthermore—the bombs were set off in the air. The deaths of 100,000 Japanese in five microseconds was, therefore, the gentlest possible application of the smallest possible atomic bomb.

Our purpose was to put a stop to the face-saving, delaying tactics of an already-defeated enemy, but a future aggressor would aim at maximum destruction of life and property. He would use bigger bombs, and he would not use them relatively gently in the air to avoid both dangerous after-radioactivity in the ground and earthquakes: he would want the reverberations of earthquakes which might be set off by atomic blasts on, or in, the ground; and he would have no reason to avoid post-explosion radioactivity.

Size and weight of the bomb determines its use.

Airplanes, at first glance, appear to be the most obvious method of transporting bombs to target. Anything from a fighter bomber up can carry them. They cannot be used in projectiles, either because the projectile is too small, or because, if large enough, the firing battery would be within the destructive range of its own bombs. Only the primary turrets of battleships would have the necessary size and range, provided that the fuze mechanism of the bomb could be shot from a gun.

But guns will be of little use in an atomic war.

If the air defense is too violent, there are the German V-weapons. Of course, radar-equipped A.A. batteries shot them down in droves—but the A.A. battery which shoots down a V-1 flying bomb with an atomic warhead, cruising at an altitude of a few thousand feet, will never fire a shot again: it will be vaporized. Those V-1’s which got past the A.A. batteries were taken care of by fighter planes. Londoners, in spite of strict orders, used to stand on the rooftops and watch, cheering if a fighter pilot exploded a V-1 in midair.

But if the warheads had been atomic, there would no longer have been a London after three such “successful” exploits. Furthermore, the V-1 of the future will not be the clumsy robot which could fly only in a straight line at a set altitude. Since far fewer would be needed, they could be highly developed and expensive jet-propelled planes, without pilots, but with television sets, guided by means of television screens placed underground and well camouflaged in the aggressor’s base.

Still, theoretically you might cope with airborne atomic bombs if carried by aircraft or by robot planes. Here it is still a question of distance: robot fighters, also guided by television, and robot A.A. batteries might explode them some fifty miles from the city limits. The great difference is that only o?ic need get through. In World War II, London absorbed some 2000 robot bombs that got through, and continued to live and work.

But there is V-2, the long-distance rocket, against which there is no known defense. Couple V-2 and the atomic bomb (it can be done today) and you have a destroyer of cities against which there is no defense once the rocket is in the stratosphere. (It can be disturbed at take-off.) And if the long distance rocket can be equipped also with an atomic drive instead of a chemical, liquid-fuel, rocket motor, it can reach any point on earth from any other point on earth. It seems fairly certain now that V-2 was actually a part of the German atomic program; the rockets were finished in time, but the atomic bombs were not.

But there is no need to elaborate on the subject of atomic destruction. Future war is almost certain to be a sudden assault from a nation which is not openly hostile. There will be traffic and exchange of goods with that nation up until the very moment the bombs fall. It is all too probable that a potential enemy will be able to ship atomic bombs into a country with trained agents, store them in a corner of a commercial warehouse or in the basement of a private house rented for that purpose, bury them under the slagheaps of an industrial town—and set them off when ready.

At this moment of history, science does not know any counter measure whatever against atomic explosives.

Some writers have thought of a kind of force field into which no atomic explosive could be brought without being instantly exploded. But there are drawbacks to that idea. The most important is that such a field still has to be invented. If it were to be invented years from now, it might be highly dangerous to turn it on. If it were to be invented soon, it would also prevent the existence of atomic industries. To say that it should be used in such a way that it affects only quantities approaching critical mass is absolutely no solution, even if that restriction could be applied. The simple pieces of Plutonium in an atomic bomb are all below critical mass until the bomb is ready for explosion.

To find out about them we need nuclear research, the more the better; it is the only possible source of information. But quite aside from scientific research, we need to realize that a new era in human relations is here, an era that no longer permits the concept of war which now means complete, mutual, atomic destruction. What we have to learn is to live with atomic energy!

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Little Oddities of Life

Lanky Bob Fitzsimmons Dons the Gloves Again

Not against Jess Willard, however. This time Bob has tackled even a sturdier and more wiry foe—His Satanic Majesty. Mr. Fitzsimmons has announced his intention of starting a career as an evangelist.

QUINTUPLETS?

Here are “Bill”. “Hill”, “Will”, ‘Phil”, and John Smythe of Oklahoma. John has his back turned, but you may take our word for the fact that his face matches . What is your explanation of this extraordinary photograph?

HAVEN’T YOU OFTEN WONDERED?

When two automobiles suddenly seem to go crazy, whisking in and about each other, backing and jumping like no sane flivvers could act, haven’t the mechanics of the process interested you? Well it’s fairly simple. Each picture is taken separately. This enlargement shows one stunt that looks most convincing in the camera.

CONGO HAS MORE SENSE THAN SOME OF US

This baby hippopotamus of the Central Park Zoo, New York, has no desire to see circus life. Although he has been sold to such a concern, he refuses absolutely to desert his mother’s “apron strings” for the lure of the sawdust circle.

WILL THIS HELP SOLVE THE H. C. OF L.?

Near Manchester, New Hampshire, a certain N. J. Nassikes has started a large goat farm and dairy, purposing to enter into active competition with the bovine product. When a goat is milked, the hind legs must be held firmly, or an “accident” results.

“CALL FOR MR. ORVILLE ORTMEIER!”

This sentence, breathed distinctly, yet in a soft, musical tone, will be heard in the lobby of the McAlpin, New York City, soon. The management of this hotel believes that bellhops should “page” without becoming obtrusive or annoying, and in accordance with this belief has engaged Miss Edna Baily, an elocution teacher, to train the boys’ voices.

Marking El Camino Real

Marking the path of the padres between the Mission San Diego and Mission Sonoma, seven hundred miles north, are seven hundred of the oddest road signs in the United States. They are in the form of mission bells, such as hang in the belfries of those of the California missions which have withstood the wear and tear of time. The upright bearing the bell carries also a plate giving the name by which this path was known nearly a century and a half ago. El Camino Real—The King’s Highway—and also the distance to the nearest mission in each direction.

And a right royal road this is today since it has been made a part of one of two state highways running1 the length of California, one through the coast counties and one through the middle of the state. Most of it has already been paved and all of it will one day be, and even now El Camino Real is a Mecca for motorists who find a sentimental interest in the chain of missions, in ruins or restored, that show where the ruthless hand of civilization was first laid upon the aboriginal Americans on the Pacific Coast. The road as traveled by the Franciscan fathers connected their twenty-one missions, three pueblos and four presidios, the latter being the military establishments which were the secular contribution of ambitious Spanish colonizers toward the conquest of the Indian inhabitants. The photographs shown here were taken on the day that the connecting links of this modernized highway were completed and the bells raised to mark the event of opening the road.

A BLUE SKY TONSORIAL PARLOR

Jim Ryan’s clientele consists entirely of “knights of the road”, and for this reason he has to be situated within easy loafing distance of the railway. Because the hobos object to enclosed barbershops, Ryan clips and shaves out under the sun. Perhaps it is more sanitary, anyway THE OLDEST ACTIVE PREACHER Mrs. Mary Goddard, the minister of this little Quaker church at Brunswick. Maine, was born before the United States entered the war of 1812—she is 107 years of age. Since Lee surrendered she has preached in this same church.

New Theory of the Universe

The Copernican idea is all wrong —we live, not on the outside of the earth but inside its hollow shell; the sun, moon and stars are all contained within this shell, which comprises all there is of the Universe. This is the remarkable theory propounded by a sect called the Koreshans, a theory which seems to be made plausible by a unique model now being exhibited in Washington. The maker is Mr. L. B. Webster, one of the leading men in the faith.

This model is a large, hollow glass globe. It represents the crust of the earth, the land and water being painted on the inside of the sphere. The configurations of the land and water of the world are correctly represented as if seen on the inside of the globe, so that to get a proper idea we must imagine ourselves viewing the concavity from a point inside its sides.

The Only Safe Place to Live

Strolling tigers, panthers, and other hungry wild animals make sleeping in a hut on the ground in the province of Assam, British India, a very risky proposition. The hut on the earth’s surface makes open doors and windows a necessity—even during the night the thermometer often registers well over one hundred degrees—and these are nothing but an invitation to all four-footed lovers of human flesh. In order to escape these perils, the ordinary living house in Assam is a “borang”, or tree bungalow. These are perched high, and reached only by ladders that can be drawn up at night.

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Behind college doors…

“The TRUTH about CAMPUS IMMORALITY”

By L. RICHARD BIRD

Do you believe in sex before marriage?”

- “Not if it delays the ceremony.”

This bit of banter took place on a popular national satire TV show. It served to point up a contemporary situation that exists on many college campuses today. Only since it has been brought to focus by publicity have many colleges or responsible adults attempted to solve the problem. It is a rather interesting situation when you consider that many of the adults who are so upset have had a hand in creating it. We shall discuss this point later.

It is a problem to the point where many collegiate authorities are attempting to focus on the campus problem and reach a solution. Dr. Blaine of Harvard, Sarah Blanding of Vassar, and Prof. Kirkendall of Oregon State University have voiced concern over sex on the campus.

Why is it wrong? It leads to out-of-wedlock pregnancies, or unwanted marriages, venereal diseases, divorce, unhappy homes, the abrupt end of education and possibly careers. These can lead to many more frustrating and traumatic experiences than can the ability to say “no” to an ardent and ego-nurturing “lover.”

The young people of our college campuses are more intelligent, better provided for materially, have more opportunities, and are more sophisticated (a rather nasty word when you really define it) than any previous generation. How, then, can they allow themselves to be “conned” into illicit relationships that in many cases are not even physically gratifying? In some ways it is not too difficult to get to the root of the problem.

First, it is the magic word THEY.” “They say,” “they do,” “THEY”-”THEY”—”THEY.” Our society has become more conscious in many ways of what “they” say than what the individual knows is right. This nebulous, faceless crowd, then, allows us to rationalize our wrongdoing by “passing the buck” over to the crowd. “They said it was O.K.” “Everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?” please turn page On the other hand, we are afraid of what “they” will say if we get caught. Now we are in a moral and intellectual dilemma. Which way Out?

Unfortunately no contemporary group or individual has come upon an answer to the dilemma of these young men and women. But there is an answer. It is a spiritual one, but many clergymen and churches are hesitant to give this answer because they too are spiritually empty and therefore unable to supply the vast empty spiritual chasm that exists within the soul of many of our young people.

Ours, therefore, is partially a crowd psychology where the individual is at most a quasi-nonentity and is therefore laughed at, mocked, ridiculed, or ignored because of a firm moral stand.

Our young people are like this also because there is no firm code of discipline for anyone to follow on many of our campuses. Consequently, a rebellious young adult reacts accordingly. Yet they do want the colleges to take a stand, one way or the other, but take a stand.

In the June 20, 1964 issue of Saturday Review of Literature Donald Eldridge, President of Bennett College stated that 40 young men and women of 8 eastern colleges asked to meet with “college deans and/or presidents … to consider jointly possible developments for . . . student-defined propositions.”

Two of these propositions are very interesting.

1. The college’s position on moral standards should be made clear. It should take a stand on where the responsibility lies. Many institutions remain ambiguous in this respect.

2. The college should represent something identifiable to its students, enabling them to know what they are living by. There is a general lack of direction.

When one sees these statements by college students we wonder where * in the name of good sense have the homes and churches been in the past few decades? Wallowing in permissiveness, ecumenicalism, pious platitudes involving international brinkmanship, right and left-wing menaces? (I have a feeling I’m in for trouble with those last two!) Have parents been so busy with their social cancers that they cannot give their children the sense of direction that they so sorely cry for in college.

I teach. United States History is my field of endeavor. I watch undisciplined young people trying to cope with a course that demands mental and intellectual discipline. Many of them barely succeed. If they barely succeed with the mental disciplines, where, then, will they succeed with the moral, spiritual, or psychological discipline of self-control? Selflessness? Is the young man with a young lady in a motel room thinking of her or their welfare? Hardly. He is just thinking, in most cases, of his own ego-nurturing attitude. Ask him later what type of girl he wants to marry, chances are he will think a second and say “well, she will have to be a nice girl.”

* The adults of our age, then, are in some ways responsible for their own children’s attitudes. Where have these adults been? Why haven’t they established a “position on moral standards”? Why haven’t they taken “a stand on where the responsibilities lie”? Why haven’t they “represented something identifiable” to their offspring? Why haven’t many of the clergymen and teachers of our generation done these things? Aren’t these the people to whom we look for guidance?

A child listening to a parental harangue on the evils of drinking is not going to heed the message too much when he sees his father quaffing cocktails before dinner. No son or daughter will likewise accept parental advice when they know the morals of their parents are in question. The standards must be set by the home and before the young person is 18 years of age.

A good deal of the heartbreak and frustration could be avoided if only the interest and time were taken before these desires began burning as unquenchable and destructive flames. A fire in the home is good when used properly to create the right temperature and feeling, but when not properly cared for the whole house and sometimes the neighbor’s can be destroyed. Knowledge then becomes a prerequisite. How much more important is the human life and soul and love than the combustible material of a house?

A Massachusetts lawyer and judge of 25 years’ experience Judge Lennie Loitman Barron states: “We have a basic task to undertake: home training.” Dr. Stephen Nordlicht, a New York psychiatrist, points out that the earlier age of today’s sex-social activity often leads to adolescent pregnancies and marriages, and that orientation must begin at home, before youngsters enter high school.

“Having done a good job at home, mothers and fathers have a right to expect the schools to follow through.” Yes parents, to follow through, but not to bear the brunt of the whole burden.

Why do I seem to hit hard at the home? Recently in a newspaper article the Drs. Duval were asked: “Where does a girl get her moral standards?”

This was their answer: “At home, by a wide margin. When Dr. George Callup’s staff asked some 2300 representative American women what had been the most help in establishing their personal sense of morality, most of them credited their homes. Education in schools was given credit by 14* of the women. This does not mean [then] that schools should not try to upgrade moral standards—after all, 14* of American women represent millions of homes in the making.” This seems to be an avenue worth pursuing in order to reach a solution.

As a teacher I have seen the results of these mature young people and their exploits into adult unmarried love. One college age girl is now pregnant and forced into marriage with a college man she barely knew who probably wanted her to “prove her love.” If they cannot cope with their emotions at a fraternity party or the processes of reproduction in these days of “safety,” how then will they cope with the emotions of parenthood and marriage? It is amazing that these young girls who break down crying when a young man won’t notice them or who are afraid their looks or personality won’t attract a certain male, will take the chance of bearing a child which requires more patience, maturity, wisdom, and stamina than flirting or being noticed.

¦ I admit to the sexual urge of the teenager and young adult. I used to be one. I went to a military school where the natural tendencies of these young men were evident in the usual ways: bull sessions, bravado, etc. However, many of us were able to control these natural tendencies. None of us were humiliated by our lack of sexual experiences. We didn’t suffer any traumatic experiences. We were healthy and happy. Many of us participated in extra-curricular activities and were therefore able to relieve much of our anxieties.

* Recently at a class reunion, I found many of these young men happily married and not seemingly suffering from any lack of premarital love.

In our situation it was largely due to a discipline that had been instilled in us at home and/or military school—not a harsh Spartan discipline, but a firm discipline with understanding both by parents and instructors. This is one of the major factors, along with discipline, as I see it, the understanding and knowledge of an adult and not unequivocating condemnation.

Sex is not a toy as some men may contend, or a weapon as some women may wield. It is a definite, exciting, beautiful, and exhilarating part of life. It must be shared wisely by two people who can cope with it and share its ramifications for life—a life that can be whole and completely shared.

* Sex is not a quick grab for temporary ego-nurturing in a motel room or the passing moments of so-called social acceptance on the sand of a beach. Sex is too fine to be subjected to the whims of a fad. It is, in a sense, eternal and fulfilling, something that fads cannot achieve. If I sound the idealist, I am, although, I hope, not a naive one.

Where then can we seek solutions? The answers are not all found easily. Many, however, can be found in the home with the setting of a mature and spirital code or tone, something the young people can actually see and sense.

The young mind cannot always grasp the abstracts of moral philosophy, but they can grasp the realities of a guideline—a non-hypocritical guideline of practicing and living what one teaches.

“If only . . .” is the beginning of many a tearful breakdown to the explanation of shame. If only the church, the home and the school would get off their lackadaisical and platitudinous bottoms and get down to the basic idea of setting these guidelines based on knowledge and adult and human understanding, many a frustration could be avoided and a sense of moral discipline instilled.

It is not a simple task. It requires great effort and patience, but I think the young people of this country are intelligent and capable of seeing, understanding and then following those guidelines. After all, they are asking, almost imploring, our help.

John W. Gardner in an article entitled, On Men and Moral Values, states: “The moral order undergoes regeneration as well as decay—a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’, offsetting death. Men are always corrupting the old symbols, drifting away from the old truths. But while some are losing their faith, others are achieving new spiritual insights; while some grow slack and hypocritical, others bring a new meaning and vitality to moral striving.”

Are we, the adults of this generation, going to aid in bringing “a new meaning and vitality to moral striving,” or will we in our own moral slackness allow hyprocrisy and immorality to succeed and introduce chaos? Your answer is in the same hands that hold this magazine.

Related posts

• WHY MARRIED MEN VISIT PROSTITUTES (Oct, 1965)
• PREMARITAL RELATIONS (Oct, 1965)
• What is your Sex Quotient? (Oct, 1965)
• What turns you on? (Oct, 1965)
• HOW MEN AND WOMEN LOOK AT SEX (Oct, 1965)
• EXTREMES IN SEX BEHAVIOR (Oct, 1965)

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CHRISTMAS AT MACY’S

As becomes the world’s largest store, it is prodigious, furious and for cash only In the last four weeks before Christmas, R. H. Macy of New York, the world’s largest store, goes through a kind of retailing blitz. On the day after its Thanksgiving parade (opposite page), which initiates New York’s Christmas season, an augmented staff of more than 14,000 sets furiously to work to sell everything in sight to an average 250,000 daily customers.

Macy’s is not merely the physically biggest store in the world, selling the greatest variety of items (400,000); it is also the world’s largest drugstore, bookstore, furniture store, liquor store, fabric and china store, for its departments handling these items all under one roof are bigger than any other store specializing in them.

The author of this implausible reality was Rowland Hussey Macy, a Nantucket whaler who believed money could be made in dry goods by advertising aggressively and selling for cash only. Macy tried these theories in Boston, failed, tried in San Francisco, failed again and failed a third time in Haverhill, Mass. Undaunted but by now a dangerous credit risk, he opened another dry goods store, this time in New York. It was a success from the start and grew enormously. After Macy’s death the greatly expanded store passed into the hands of the Straus family, long-time Macy associates. Strauses still run it (next page) but with marvelous fidelity to the original Macy policies. For Macy’s, now 90 years old, still sells for cash only, sells all items that are not price fixed (at least 85% of its stock) for at least 6% under its competitors’ prices (and has its own way of getting around price-fixed items), changes the price on a single item as many as five times in 12 days to meet competition. Since it won’t open a charge account for anybody, Macy’s has evolved the Macy Bank, in which customers deposit money and then draw against it as they buy. This unique device currently has $9 million of customers’ money on deposit. Macy’s still advertises and promotes exuberantly; at various times it has installed a complete barnyard and a ski slide within the store to help sell livestock and ski equipment. All this multifarious activity helps to sell a stock which ranges from Crosleys to church organs, from fresh Italian cheeses to genuine Regency backgammon boards. During the current Christmas season, largest in Macy history, that stock is being purchased at the rate of more than a million dollars a day—every cent of it paid for in cash.

JANET STEURER SELLS PEARLS IN A BEDLAM FOR $33.50 A WEEK

Janet Steurer, 20, of Tarrytown, N. Y. sells imitation pearl necklaces on Macy’s main floor five days a week from 9:45 a.m. to 6 in the evening. Like a lot of other Macy salesgirls Janet took a merchandising course in college (Stephens in Columbia, Mo.), went through two weeks of intensive Macy training during which she learned the right words to use on reluctant customers, how to add up a sales check and master a cash register.

At her jewelry counter near the 34th Street entrance Janet is right in the center of the elbowing bedlam of her first Christmas at Macy’s. Rarely are there fewer than six people clamoring for her services. Meanwhile, adding to the din, 40 children get lost daily in the rest of the store, and 40 customers and salesgirls are escorted or carried to the store hospital.

In the middle of all this frenetic gaiety Janet Steurer tries to keep her wits, does not always keep her shoes but averages 300 sales a day at $1.69 each. For this she earns $33.50 a week, a fair salary for a 20-year-old girl, although far behind the 35 veteran Macy salesmen in furniture, major appliances and rugs, who average $ 10,000 to $20,000 a year in commissions.

Magnetic Secretary
SECRETARIES who prefer to sit on their boss’s laps while taking dictation may not like this new office aid, but for more efficient business it holds promise. The mechanical secretary is a little thirty-pound gadget called the Peirce (spelling correct) magnetic wire recorder. As the boss talks into the mike, his voice is transferred into electrical impulses. These are changed into magnetic impulses which magnetize a fine steel wire. When played back, the magnetic impulses revert to electrical impulses and are amplified into high fidelity soun

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HOW RCA IS PLANNING…. YOUR WORLD OF TOMORROW

By James C. G. Conniff

RADIOS as small as sugar cubes. Typewriters that print letters as fast as you can dictate them.

A memory storage plate smaller and thinner than a postage stamp—a shoe-box full of them will store and produce any one of a million facts in seconds.

An automated house with electronic devices that awaken you in the morning, make your bed, prepare your breakfast, clean house and make it burglar-proof while you are out.

All of these electronic miracles are in existence. They are products of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N. J., and scientists of the Radio Corporation of America are working today to make them available to you tomorrow.

Let’s examine the automated house and its amazing Home Electronic Center, which consists of a miniaturized system of all-electronic mechanisms already lab-tested at Princeton. This system will let your wife run her home by push-buttons in a few short years. For example, with this Home Electronic Center setup your wife will dial the electronic controls the night before to wake you gently to music in the morning. The system will shut the window when you get up or turn up the heat or air conditioning. In the bathroom you’ll put your chin into what looks like the lower half of a catcher’s mask upholstered in flexible, multi- perforated metal. It is a soundless electronic abrasion shaver which will adapt to the contours of your face for a fast, clean, sting-free shave. Meanwhile your shower is running at your preferred temperature.

RCA engineers call this wonder system the Home Electronic Center Kid, or HECK. While your wife snoozes on, silent HECK is busy preparing your breakfast—chilled juice, hot coffee, eggs and toast—which will be served by HECK as you approach the kitchen table.

You eat in a room suffused with electronic sunshine, even in the coldest weather. A tilt-up, table-top Telefax reports world news in text and pictures while HECK clears the outside walks of snow via buried heat grids. An electronically-activated servo mechanism opens the garage doors and warms up the car.

When your wife finally gets up, HECK has already done your dishes and tidied up and will do the same for her. While she enjoys a breakfast, HECK silently sorts and washes the laundry, dries it and folds it before dusting the house by electronic precipitation.

HECK will make the beds and quietly dispose of all garbage via machinery and deep underground tanks. All your wife has to do, besides keeping pantry and freezer loaded, is insert punched menu cards to have HECK come up with a simple snack or an elaborate dinner at a pre-set time. An ingenious delayed-transmission unit stores current to run this automatic household for 24 hours in case of power failure.

HECK will record telephone messages while you’re out and turn up the electroluminescent panel-lighting to welcome you home after dark. A simple but thief-proof key-and-IBM-card arrangement permits HECK to receive goods and pay de-liverymen by check during your absence. HECK will instantly signal for police if burglars try to break in when you are out or sound an alarm in case of fire.

A mobile radio-controlled unit to trim grass and hedges, powered by wafer-thin atomic batteries and responsive to HECK’s command, is also planned for this dream house.

There are also a host of other startling electronic wonders designed to make life easier and more pleasant for you in the future.

Video cameras, for example, are already being miniaturized to the size of a package of frozen food for widespread home and industry use: nursery-watching, quality control in mass production, detection of pilferers, on-the-job training, etc.

To speed up the working of electronic computers which assist in such discoveries, the RCA lab recently devised a memory storage plate smaller and thinner than a four-cent postage stamp. It has 256 tiny holes in it and can keep a million facts on file and produce them in any combination or alone in milli-seconds.

But it is probably in the field of human health that the David Sarnoff Research Center will make its greatest contributions. General Sarnoff, Board Chairman of RCA, fully expects increased use of television to give any patient seriously in need of it the benefit of consultation among medical giants anywhere on earth. The marvels of our day, like artificial hearts and lungs and kidneys are, in Sarnoff’s view, merely the forerunners of an electronic age soon to be upon us when they will be miniaturized and individualized to such a degree as to become “familiar as artificial teeth or hearing aids.”

We will have sensitive electronic massagers to bring back life to paralyzed muscles. Artificial limbs set with tiny but powerful instruments, now in the development stage, will take advantage of the least nerve twitch to make those limbs perform with a measure of ease and gracefulness rivaling that of nature.

Two amazing proofs of how successful this determined invasion of the human body may be have recently emerged from Princeton Center. One is a tiny radio broadcasting station, about as big as a medium-size pill. Doctor has you swallow it while he listens to its signalled account of how you’re doing inside. At the end of the examination, he removes it by pulling it up on a silk thread with little discomfort to you.

The other: a device to make blind men see. It is about the size of a cigarette filter and is a light-sensitive instrument which tells not only where light is coming from but how strong it is.

Set like a stone in a finger-ring, it will guide the hand of a blind person to a pre- arranged light source to perform routine tasks, such as running a switchboard or operating simple machinery. The light cell reacts to a glowing lamp—say for an incoming call—with a not unpleasant earphone hum which diminishes when the ring comes near and stops altogether when the hand wearing it is at the right spot.

“Some day,” says Sarnoff, “we hope to make available a cheap but effective electronic tool to render the print on a page as a language of signals in earphones. When that day comes, the blind will also ‘read.’ ”

These are just some of the electronic miracles that you will live to see. They are in the labs today. They will be in your home tomorrow.

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Strange Perils that Confront City Dwellers

by ORVILLE H. KNEEN

Headline disasters, such as mysterious fires, explosions, collapsing buildings, bringing sudden death to thousands of city dwellers annually, are the results of strange perils that lurk in unsuspected places. Why these disasters strike with such violence and abruptness is explained in this unusual article.

DWELLERS in cities large and small go about their everyday affairs in the utmost confidence that they are living in complete safety, little knowing, fortunately, that they are constantly menaced by innumerable strange perils.

Each year, statistics show, exploding gas mains, collapsing buildings, disabled airplanes, autos out of control on icy streets, and so on down the list to runaway elephants in circus parades—these unusual dangers take a heavy toll of lives of city dwellers.

Death Fog Sweeps Belgian Town Rarely was a community ever so completely paralyzed with fear as was the Meuse Valley of Belgium. A poison fog swept in one December day, sending hundreds to the hospitals and killing scores. For days nearly all of western Europe shivered in fear under the same thick fog, densest and coldest known for years.

In the stricken Meuse Valley those with weak lungs or asthma could only gasp as the clouds of deadly vapor rolled over the land. The pungent odor, along with the sudden death of many cattle, proved that some deadly gas was being carried by the fog.

Cause of Death Fog A few weeks ago, after a long inquiry, a report was submitted by scientists that sulphuric acid fumes from various factories, mixing with the water vapor, dust and “toxic particles,” had rendered the air poisonous.

Abnormal weather conditions had kept the air from circulating and prevented warming of the earth by the sun; frost kept the temperature down. The report stressed the “urgency of measures to protect the populace . . .”

Thus thousands of people are dependent upon the weather for life itself.

Chemical Plants Menace Towns Gas attacks are only one phase of the hidden perils that hang over modern cities. The hazards of wholesale death are ever-present when multitudes of people are living close to chemical industries, power plants, combustible buildings and explosive materials.

Death-dealing forces in scientific laboratories sometimes burst their bounds. And the worst of it is that city-dwellers rarely think of being in danger.

But the crowded city harbors, on every side, above and below, sleeping forces that, released on a moment’s notice, are far more dangerous than the worst hazards of battle. The entire wiping out of a city is not only possible, but has occurred more than once since the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Probably the worst single catastrophe of modern times was the explosion of the Baden Aniline Dye and Chemical Works, at Oppau, Germany. Over 1,000 were killed, thousands were injured, the town was wrecked and damage was felt for more than fifty miles.

Last year almost every citizen of Oradour-Sur-Vayres, in France, suddenly lost the power of speech. Many had strange fevers that did not yield to treatment. Few houses that did not have one or more cases.

Finally the mysterious plague was traced to arsenic in the wine, just sufficient to paralyze the tongues of those who drank it. AU recovered, but the source of the poison was not found.

Our own epidemic of “jake” paralysis was far more serious. Tens of thousands of liquor drinkers in the Middle West were more or less paralyzed, but the original source of the obscure poison, found only in bootleg “Jamaica ginger,” was not discovered. Publicity, however, quickly stopped the supply. Thousands of the victims today are able to walk only with crutches.

Germs in Laboratories Form Deadly Hazard Another sort of hazard was revealed in 1926, when a Swiss bacteriologist was working with a virulent culture of tuberculosis germs. Suddenly the glass container, under pressure, burst with a loud report, showering the scientist with deadly germs. Locking the door, he tore off his clothes and for hours burned his hands as he washed every part of the laboratory with antiseptic.

In London, test tubes containing influenza germs enough to start an epidemic were stolen from a doctor. Nothing happened, but it is disquieting to think what havoc unscrupulous persons might spread with such germs and bacteria.

Planes Flying Over City Endanger Life Wholesale death from overhead was not much of a hazard until recently. Falling materials, planks, safes, and so on, usually; catch only one or two persons. But we now have wider hazards from falling aircraft. In New York last year, when a spinning plane headed toward crowded Broadway, only chance landed the craft on a roof instead of among hundreds who thronged the. streets.

Airplane Cylinder Falls Into House Recently a Negro maid in Harlem turned white when showered with plaster, as a terrific crash shook the house. A 25-pound cylinder had dropped a mile from an airplane which was later found by aerial detectives. It had lost a cylinder, a piston and part of the cowling, and made a forced landing in a small garden on Ward’s Island. Three weeks previously a pilot lost control of his machine when his motor went dead while he was looping. He lit with terrific force on the roof of a frame dwelling. The motor crashed through and landed on the dining room floor, missing two young people by inches. The pilot escaped with minor injuries. With less good fortune an entire family or even scores might have been killed or injured.

Disabled Blimp Kills 10 in Bank In 1919, a 158-foot blimp with two 80-horsepower rotary motors burst into flames and plunged down into a Chicago bank. Gasoline flames were sprayed over the interior, ten employes were killed instantly or died later, and thirty more were injured.

Air laws are being enforced and will reduce such hazards to a minimum. But with planes and dirigibles carrying scores or hundreds on each flight, catastrophes can only be avoided by keeping aircraft away from cities.

But by far the greatest city perils come from underground. Modern cities, honeycombed with water pipes and sewers, elec- trical conduits, cables, subways, manholes, tunnels and passages and cavities of all kinds, employ thousands to run the underground cities and keep them safe. Sometimes they fail.

Houses Fall Into Excavations Few cities are built on solid rock, as is the Manhattan part of New York. Some towns have had mining shafts and stopes driven directly under them. Springs, creeks and even small rivers, covered over by fills or buildings, have excavated large areas into which houses, apartments, factories, hotels, have suddenly or slowly sunk. Cities built on steep hills have had scores killed by sudden slides.

Considering the enormous amount of electrical cable and wiring underground, the number of short-circuits and fires is surprisingly low. In 1928 a burning cable filled a New York subway with choking fumes, stalled a long train with about 3,000 passengers, and overcame hundreds before they could rush out to the nearest exit. A burst water main shortly afterward flooded subway tracks, and 89 were injured in the panic.

Spouting geysers fifty feet high, from high-pressure mains, have drenched pedestrians, flooded streets, and caused heavy damage. Boilers have exploded, releasing superheated steam in great clouds, and causing fires. Perils such as these are infrequent, however, and at worst affect only a small part of a city and a few people.

But a far more horrible, insidious and inescapable peril is that of poisonous gases. A vast number of chemicals are used today, and most of the plants are in cities, often in congested parts. Products that are safe enough in industry become terrible menaces to whole cities when released, as when a fire or explosion suddenly converts them into gas.

On May 20, 1928, two girls fishing from a rowboat near Hamburg, Germany, suddenly collapsed. Several hours later people and cattle on Wilhelmsburg Island, in the Elbe River, began dropping in their tracks. The wind shifted. Scores of men, women and children at a pleasure resort were suddenly stricken. Some died in agony. At a wedding feast the guests became unconscious.

Chickens, ducks, cats and dogs and pigs gasped and died. Soon it became known that a poison gas was loose. Hundreds rushed in terror from their homes. • Eventually a hissing tank was found, one of many containing deadly phosgene gas, the first kind used for gas attacks in the war. Expansion from warm weather and a corroded top, had caused the gas to escape. Eleven persons died, and many of the 250 sent to hospitals were ill for weeks, some for months.

Numerous cities have had experiences with “peace-time gas attacks.” In June, 1929, hydrogen sulphide gas suddenly swept over a part of El Paso, Texas, killing two sleeping children and sending a number of people to the hospital. It probably came from oil refineries nearby.

On the lower east side a chemist’s kettle exploded and routed out scores, killing one and injuring a great number.

The Cleveland clinic horror of May 16, 1929, in which 122 hospital patients and rescuers died, was caused by deadly gases from burning X-ray films. An electric light too close to the films probably ignited them. A ventilating system sent the fumes to every room. Health officers reported that the gas released was sufficient to have killed four million people. With a high wind, fog, or other conditions, this might easily have been the greatest disaster of its kind in history. Various cities have had film fires, gas “attacks,” and loss of life.

In London, two years ago, over a mile of roadway in the heart of the city was wrecked when gas mains exploded, one after another. Buses and vehicles were upturned, buildings damaged, houses shaken, manhole covers flung far and wide, while clouds of gas and sheets of flame added their terrors to the lurid scene. Water, gas, electric, telephone and other services were wrecked in an area of nearly one square mile.

Explosions in sewers, from sewer gas, gasoline fumes, etc., have been frequent. Terrific blasts in Ottawa sewers, from an unknown cause, blew off manhole covers, sent sheets of flame into basements, and rumbled under the streets for hours, injuring many. In Chicago a similar explosion killed twelve and wrecked a building in a thickly populated area.

In the home there is danger from carbon monoxide, odorless and invisible gas from motorcar exhaust, which may be eliminated by a new carburetor recently invented.

Household refrigerators mostly use harmless gases, and should be in ventilated rooms. Operators of central refrigerating systems in large buildings should use great care.

Safety measures must be taken to protect cities from deadly gases. Electrical detecting and warning devices must be installed—some are already available. Counter-active antidotes and resuscitating devices must be instantly available. Probably we shall require gas-tight, ventilated refuges, such as used in mines, for factories and for homes near chemical plants.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIPS AT OXFORD.

Probably no will made public in years has attracted so much attention as that of the late Cecil Rhodes. It is characteristic of the man that its provisions should be on such a vast scale as to affect the interests of three continents. The feature of the will which is of the greatest interest to Americans is the magnificent provision for the establishment of scholarships in Oxford University for American students. This desire to bring the three great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race into closer unity and understanding appeals to our imagination and fills us with astonishment, even in a country where we are accustomed to having enterprises established on a gigantic basis. We believe that this is almost the first time in the history of the race that an individual, by means of his will, undertakes by a single provision of that will to bring about so many praiseworthy and far-reaching results. The objects he strives for are apparently: First, the binding together of three great peoples in a bond of common brotherhood; second, the establishing and inspiring of high educational standards; and> third, the establishing, as far as possible, of an ideal standard of manhood.

We believe, also, that this is the first time that a scholarship or fellowship has ever been offered in any university in which the standard of attainment was not based upon scholarship alone. In the present instance, however, the incumbent must possess other great qualities besides that of learning. He must be recognized as a man among men. In selecting the incumbent his character is to be taken into consideration; his manliness and love of athletic sports; and even the qualities of kindliness and unselfishness are to be taken into consideration.

The questions of how the incumbent is to be selected, and how these qualities are to be determined upon are only vaguely set forth in the provisions of the will. The terms of the will state that two candidates shall be admitted from each State and Territory and that the amount of the scholarship shall be $1,500. It is interesting to quote Cecil Rhodes’ own words in connection with this matter: “My desire being that the students so elected to those scholarships shall not be merely bookworms, I direct that in their election regard shall be paid to their literary and scholastic attainments and fondness for and success in manly outdoor sports, such as cricket and football, and their qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship exhibited during their school days, moral force, character and instinct to lead and to take interest in their schoolmates, for these latter attributes will be likely in after life to guide them to esteem and perform public duties as the highest aim.

“As suggestions for the guidance of those having the selection of the scholarships my ideal of a qualified student would combine these four qualifications in the proportions of three-tenths for the first, literary; two-tenths for the second, fondness for sport; three-tenths for the third, the qualities of manhood, and two-tenths for the fourth, exhibition of moral force. According to my ideas, if the maximum number of marks were 200 they would be apportioned, sixty each for the first and third, and forty for the second and fourth qualifications. The marks for the several qualifications should be awarded independently, for the first, by examination; for the second and third, on ballot of their fellow students, and for the fourth on the report of the headmaster of the candidate’s school. The awards should be sent for the consideration of the trustees or some person appointed to ascertain by averaging the marks in blocks of twenty the best ideal of a qualified student.”

It must be admitted that as we think over these provisions of the will and the rather nebulous manner in which these provisions are set forth, the plan seems almost Quixotic. It seems as if the testator hardly realized the difficulty of trying to determine how in each State or Territory it would be possible to find the most available representatives to receive the scholarship. From what schools or colleges is the incumbent to be selected. In an empire like Germany this problem is not nearly so difficult of solution. It would be a comparatively simple matter, perhaps, for the Kaiser to elect that the applicant should be selected, in the manner provided by the testator, from certain institutions. Of course, such a method of selection is not possible in the United States. It is probable that large discretionary powers have been vested in the executors of the will. If they are familiar with the conditions of our institutions of learning in this country, it is probable that some method of alloting the scholarships can be determined upon. Perhaps it would be possible to appoint a joint international committee which*could delegate to certain schools or colleges, according to their geographical situation and their literary standing, the privilege of offering, perhaps, to their first year men an opportunity to present themselves as candidates. It will be very interesting to follow the fate of these provisions. The problem as presented is entirely novel, and in order that the object of the testator may not utterly fail, it requires the most judicious and tactful handling. At all events, it should place before the youth of the land a high ideal of what scholarship in its highest sense should mean.

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UNJUST AND UNGENEROUS.

We regret to see that Marconi is not to be spared the ungenerous criticism which has been made against so many distinguished inventors, just as soon as they had demonstrated the commercial practicability of their ideas. This criticism usually takes the form of denying the originality of the invention, and insinuating or openly stating that the inventor is claiming credit and appropriating profits that rightly belong to another. The last notable instance of such a charge occurred a few years ago, when an attempt was made to prove that not to Bessemer but to some obscure Pittsburg iron worker belonged the credit of inventing the converter with its epoch-making effect upon the world’s steel and allied industries. The Scientific American took an active part in that controversy, which ended in the universal indorsement of Bessemer’s claims; and the position we took then upon the question of credit for inventions is the same that we hold to-day in the mat ter of the Marconi telegraphy.

We believe that if the profits and honor of an invention are to be claimed by any one man, they belong, not to the inventor of some one detail, however essential it may be, but to the man who by a comprehensive study of the whole problem and by patient practical experimentation, develops the idea from the first crude device, or from many separate unrelated devices, to the complete, practicable apparatus, capable of taking its place among the serviceable appliances of our modern life.

Such an inventor is Marconi, and such an invention is the system of wireless telegraphy which bears, and we venture to think will for all time bear, his name. Clerk Maxwell suggested and Hertz discovered the etheric waves by which the transmission of electrical impulses is rendered possible; Onesti discovered, Branly and Lodge improved, and Marconi perfected a coherer by which these impulses might be picked up and thrown upon a telegraphic receiver; and to Marconi belongs the credit of developing what was merely a curious toy into a wonderfully perfect system, which takes rank with the invention of Morse as one of the greatest in modern times.

The scientific world has always been the more ready to give Marconi full credit for his brilliant work, because of his modesty, and the unvarying candor and fairness with which he has acknowledged his indebtedness to Maxwell, Lodge, Branly and other workers in the field of etheric telegraphy; and hence the recent unseemly attack made upon him by Prof. Sylvanus Thompson in the Saturday Review, so far from shaking the public confidence in Marconi, has merely served to awaken astonishment, that charges so manifestly unfair should emanate from a physicist of such high standing. Thompson is entirely in error when he says that Marconi uses without acknowledgment these devices of Lodge, for he has always, at least during his many visits to this country, been ready to give ample credit to their inventor.

Apart, however, from all question of these acknowledgments, is that of the actually accomplished facts of wireless telegraphy. We do know that messages have been sent over 1,500 miles of water, and that signals have been sent clear across the Atlantic; we do know that only one man has done this, or to-day can do it, and we know furthermore that these epoch-making achievements have been wrought by that one man as the crowning triumph of long years of indefatigable experiment, invention and design. Can Lodge send signals across the Atlantic and messages for 1,500 miles? Can Slaby? We think not, and we also venture to believe that had the practical Marconi never turned his thought and zoal to the problem, Lodge’s coherer might to-day have been merely a curious laboratory toy, and Slaby’s professional zeal might have been confined to the quiet of the classroom and the lecture hall, and might never have been quickened into commercial activity by the alluring possibilities of etheric telegraphy, as demonstrated by the early successes of the young Italian.

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THE AIRSHIP AND THE AEROPLANE.

There is no question that as between the airship and the aeroplane, the latter is the more scientific and mechanically the more attractive type of air locomotive—if we may use the term; although it must be admitted that in the present state of the mechanical arts, a practicable aeroplane as yet exists only upon paper. The airship with its huge, unwieldy, and perishable gas-filled balloon, has nothing to recommend it but the fact that it can float at a predetermined adtitude and does not depend for its ability to remain in mid-air upon the continuous working of its motors. The aeroplane does; and the instant its propellers cease to revolve, its buoyancy is lost. But at what a cost and risk the airship maintains its equilibrium is shown by the numerous disasters that have befallen Santos-Dumont in the various (six in all) airships which he has built. The whole trouble with the gas-supported ship lies in the vast bulk of the balloon, and the great area that it presents to the wind. In any but the most moderate breeze, the craft is more or less unmanageable; and we do not yet know how to build a motor which will be light enough to be carried by the balloon and have at the same time sufficient power to drive it against a strong breeze. And even if such a motor could be built, the frame and fabric of the balloon would collapse under the wind pressure to which it would be subjected. In view of the many and baffling problems presented, we cannot but admire the persistence and pluck of Santos-Dumont, who is to try again—this time on our side of the water.

But why do we not hear from Langley, Maxim and others whose experimental work of the last decade was so extremely interesting and so full of promise? The advances that have been made of late in the development of light, high-powered motors, should materially assist in the development of a successful aeroplane.

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MEN OF WEALTH AS INVENTORS.

The impression that the American young man of wealth passes his time simply in seeking his own amusement is very far from being the case, as is evidenced by the number of well-known names which may •be: found among the list of those who have received letters patent. Narrow as the scope of this list may be, it nevertheless proves that the inventive genius of the American is not confined to the mechanic or the farmer, but that men of wealth do their share in enhancing the industrial development of the country.

Perhaps the most widely-known rich inventor is Cornelius Vanderbilt. Most newspaper readers have learned merely that he is the patentee of a locomotive boiler of some peculiar construction. Exactly what the peculiarity of this construction is, perhaps only the readers of technical papers know. As a matter of fact, the main feature of the invention consists in a firebox made cylindrical in cross section and having its rim corrugated in a transverse direction; the firebox being located eccentrically within a firebox section inclined to the horizontal, to reduce the water space below the firebox line at the back end, the forward end being submerged to a less extent than the rear, to increase the effective heating surface for a rapid generation of steam. So efficient is this improved construction, that the Vanderbilt boiler is used by the principal roads throughout the country. In 1900 six locomotives were built at the Baldwin Works equipped with Vanderbilt boilers; in 1901 twenty-three were in use on various railroads. Mr. Vanderbilt has not stopped with the invention of a firebox. He has also devised a new type of locomotive-tender which is now in practical use; a process of making truck-bolsters, brake-beams, etc.; a draft-gear; a car-truck, and a tank-car which is now widely used. The annual royalties accruing from these various inventions are substantial and must represent a handsome amount.

Col. John Jacob Astor likewise finds time to invent new machinery. Several years ago he patented a pneumatic road-cleaning machine; and only a few weeks ago he received a patent for a novel turbine which is to be used primarily for the propulsion of steamers.

Both Mr. Astor and Mr. Vanderbilt have devoted their attention exclusively to industrial invention. Mr. P. Cooper Hewitt, on the other hand, has branched out in the field of electricity and physics. At a conversazione held last year at Columbia University, and at a recent meeting of the American Society of Electrical Engineers, his mercury-vapor lamp was exhibited—the practical culmination of research in a new field in electro-physics. Turning his attention to the

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Uncle Sam Battles “Dusters” and Floods

By James Dyson

RADIO warnings, people evacuated to hills, city streets swirling torrents, houses tumbling down murky rivers, hunger, thirst, almost pestilence—that was the spring just past.

First flood, now dust—a billion tons of priceless top soil afloat over the ailing earth.

It is difficult to think of anything wetter than a flood, hard to imagine anything dryer than a dust storm, yet basically they are the same—Nature’s way of venting her fury on man for upsetting her delicate balance.

Ol’ Man River brings the flood down. We dam him, sand-bag him, stone his banks and bed, but always at the point of effect, seldom at the cause. But we can’t even do that much

when dust clouds storm the land. We can only choke, gasp for breath, and ponder the reason for it all.

The reason?

Nature gave a glorious land to the Indians, a land carpeted with vegetation, with undergrowth, the great trees of the forest, and the grassy plains for which these first Americans so vainly fought. The wind blew as hard then as now, and when rivers infrequently spread out of their courses, they did so slowly and with no violence.

Then came the white man—and civilization with covered wagons which rumbled further and further west. Forests were chopped from the hills to make homes for the descendants these pioneers left behind; grass was ploughed under the plains. Wheat, corn, potatoes and cotton replaced the tight soil

and the matted grass binder. Nature was stripped bare.

Year after year Nature nursed her grief silently, striving with new undergrowth to repair the ravages man had wrought to her once proud beauty. Finally, when she couldn’t stand the pain any longer, she went berserk—centering her wrath at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Every year since she has somewhere wreaked her revenge on puny man with flood, drought and dust.

Chief H. H. Bennett, of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service, explains it this way:

Pour water on a slanting board. It dashes off immediately. Spread a rug or door-mat over the same inclined surface and most of the water is held back or absorbed. Some of it may run off, but it runs off in a trickle,

not in a flood. Apply the simile to millions of gallons of water rushing down denuded hillsides into streams that have limitations upon their capacity for carrying water, and

the cause of floods is clear.

In the final analysis, there can be no permanent control of floods until we have control of erosion over entire watersheds, from the crest of ridges down across the slopes where floods originate and where soil is picked up to choke river channels.

There, too, lies the key to dust storm and wind erosion problems. The great “dusters” of the last two years, and those occurring now, are the result of a number of circumstances, topped by several years of intense drought. The overgrazing of cattle and sheep, along with the consequent destruction of nature’s carpet, bared the soil on the high plains. The drought came along about this time, and with grain crops failing on successive years, no binder at all was left to hold the land together. The sun baked the soil oven dry and it crumbled to powder. The wind swept it up and buoyed it aloft to float for miles on end, billions of tons of it. And it took nature between 400 and 600 years to create just one inch of this priceless top soil. In the United States 75 per cent of all cultivated land slopes enough to be subject to water erosion. The steeper land should never be broken; it must be permitted to go back into trees and grass.

“The men have been in the field every work day when weather conditions permitted. This section has received very little moisture this winter, but has had some very severe dust storms which made field work impossible at times. A severe wind and dust storm in March blew over the stakes and the markings were cut off by the dust, even the hedge posts were polished as if with sand paper while dust was drifting across roads. During another dust storm it was impossible for us to see for more than ten feet in the daytime.”

But it took two major disasters—the floods in Pittsburgh and Hartford to bring the problem home to Congress and the people. Now the law makers can be expected to act. Legislation was proposed in March that would give the Federal Government control of the Missouri River Valley in so far as flood protection was concerned. Already Representatives from flood-ridden States of the East are urging that similar legislation be enacted to protect their section of the country. Today all signs point to action.

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GOTHAM’S CANYONS Up-To-Date

Remarkable Aerial Photos of Manhattan’s Ever – Changing Skyline.
Photos by Ewing Galloway

Mountains of Brick and Glass! That is what O. Henry might have called these man-made skyscrapers. Here is an air shot looking directly down Fifth Avenue. New buildings are pointed out.

Here’s how the famous Battery looks to an airman. The new financial district, the winding 6th Avenue Elevated line and the Staten Island ferry piers can be seen. A symphony in architecture!

This is the new Wall Street. The sub-treasury building, now tucked obscurely away, once was the landmark of the street and stood rather openly and exposed. Manhattan has grown up around it at that astonishing rate which has made New York the world’s foremost city of skyscrapers.

The tower of the Union Life Bldg., showing the “light that never fails,” a new monster built to replace an older hotel, and a portion of the famous park called Madison Square were caught by the aerial photographer as he circled O. Henry land. Many of the buildings shown are newly built.

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Science’s Greatest Adventure

To Richard E. Byrd and his hardy companions of the South Pole Expedition, this section of Modern Mechanics is dedicated. The photos reproduced herewith tell a graphic story of the South Polar Adventure.

WITH the return of Commander Richard E. Byrd and his crew of 80 men from the Antarctic, one of the most dramatic chapters in all history is brought to a close. That the Expedition, which for 20 months ferreted out the ice-locked secrets of the South Polar lands with airplanes, dog teams, and all the instruments of modern science, was an adventure which in its various phases of hardship and discovery ranks with the achievements of Magellan, Columbus, Hudson, and other great explorers, no one will seriously deny.

Yet therein lies the danger that the drama of it all may have overshadowed the solid scientific basis on which much of the Expedition’s fame will rest. For Dick Byrd is always the scientist as well as the adventurer.

Well, you ask, just what did Byrd achieve that made the expenditure of a million dollars justifiable? If such justification were necessary—which no scientist, and certainly no adventurer, will admit—it can be pointed out that: Byrd has claimed in the name of the United States 125,000 square miles of land which he discovered. There is every possibility that there are enormous coal deposits in this land, for the Antarctic was once tropical in climate, as proved by carboniferous deposits secured by Dr. L. M. Gould, geologist of the party, from a 5000-foot mountain top.

Three mountain ranges which had never been seen before were mapped and many details added, all through the use of aerial photography. Carmen Land, reported by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, was proved to be illusory. The Rockefeller mountain range was found to be among the oldest mountains in the world. The expedition discovered the range.

Biologically, many interesting examples of Antarctic vegetable life were brought back for study. Of course, such vegetables were of an exceedingly primitive type. In oceanography numerous soundings charted the bottom of the Polar seas for the first time. In taking these soundings a special instrument known as the sonic depth meter was used. In principle, it consists of a device which records the time necessary for sound waves to travel to the bottom of the sea and back again, knowing which it is a simple matter to chart the depth.

Ice is superimposed on land to a depth of 1500 feet, it was discovered. The volume of water locked in this immense ice cap is almost inconceivable. It has been estimated that if the Antarctic ice should suddenly melt, the released waters would add an additional two feet of depth to all the oceans of the world. Meteorological observations made will prove especially important, in the opinion of Commander Byrd, who has pointed out that more bad weather develops from the glacial planes of the Antarctic than from the Arctic Circle. Strategically located stations, therefore, would be able to predict weather conditions for Europe and America by observations taken at the birthplace of storms.

A notable fact about the expedition, and one which tells in itself a complete story of the thoroughness of Commander Byrd in equipping his expedition for all possible contingencies, is that every man in the expedition returned home in better health than when he left.

“P. K.” WRIGLEY – Millionaire Mechanic
Here’s a millionaire who loves to work with tools. Though head of a gigantic organization he looks forward to donning overalls and fixing his autos and boats in the workshop.

PHILIP K. WRIGLEY — they call him “P. K.” for short—is one of those folks who has many-millions of dollars. These millions do not interfere with his interest in mechanics, for he prefers to repair his own cars and yachts.

“P. K.” owns beautiful Catalina Island, twenty miles off the coast of California. He owns two baseball clubs. He has real estate and skyscrapers in many sections of the country. Steamships, yachts, airplanes, limousines—almost everything money can buy—are his.

To “P. K.” there are business interests, affairs that require a certain amount of time each day in his offices. He is the general who gives orders to thousands of employees everywhere that the name of Wrigley is known.

But outside the office, “P. K.” is just another mechanic, just another tinkerer and putterer, just another grown up American with an insatiable desire to know how and why machines run.

He loves a chance to tune up the motorcycle, or install fender lights on his shiny blue roadster.

A slight crash to one of his many cars was welcomed. The millionaire mechanic gleefully turned to acetylene welding to make repairs on horn and fenders.

On Wrigley’s big 88-foot power yacht, Wasp, are two pairs of grease – stained overalls, to be used when her owner is not controlling the ship from the bridge.

When the Wasp is slashing through Georgian Bay, and guests are lounging and chatting on deck, “P. K.” is most likely to be below deck, checking gauges on the power plant. When she’s in port her owner may be found clambering up to tinker with her whistle.

The flagship of his fleet doesn’t use up all his marine engineering hours. There’s a challenge to his talent and energy in the steel-hulled, 72-foot Ada E., and there’s fun in tinkering with and driving his Gar Wood high speed boat powered with a Liberty motor, his Chris-Craft speedster, and all the others.

“Working on machinery and making it run better through my own effort is creative work, in my opinion,” Wrigley says. “Designing an improvement in a gas engine is as important to me as writing a poem is to a literary man.”

A millionaire business man is “P. K.” Wrigley, but first of all he’s a mechanic, and a darned good one!

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The Last of the Explorers

THE adventurers of this century are the archaeologists. Theirs is the thrill of finding the new, the strange, and the startling. Trekking through jungles, skimming alligator infested streams, plowing through sands, delving in old caves, the modern archaeologist can find more thrills than the big game hunter of Africa or the airman of the ocean’s watery wastes.

Expeditions sent from Washington recently uncovered stones with inscriptions unfolding stories of a people whose very existence was unknown before America was discovered. The Spaniards overwhelmed them and the conquered people dropped into obscurity. Now, however, their history is being uncovered, and the world is learning the tale of the Maya people of Central America, who were cultured and religious, with a learning of the arts and sciences far surpassing the peoples of Europe.

The Peninsula of Yucatan contains the secrets of that great race. Only bit by bit have adventurous scientists wrested it from the past. The “five crazy Americans” of the Mason-Spiden exploring expedition recently discovered another of the lost cities, a great fortress built between 1000 and 1500 A. D. Forty yards away was a great pyramidal structure of rising terraces, its roof forty-five feet above the ground. Here grotesque grinning faces decorated the corners. The Maya engineers built for time and eternity else their structures would not have endured the creeping jungle and the obliterating power of the tropics. There is Tezna, for instance, an important outlying city of the old Maya empire. It is a great acropolis more than five hundred feet on a side, having on its summit five impressive temples surrounding an immense sunken court.

Several score large and small cities and towns have been located in the jungles of Yucatan showing that the old empire was mighty and powerful, with arts and crafts as superior as those of ancient Egypt. It is in these cities that scientists hope to find a key that will unlock the story of the rise and fall of a great nation.

The whole of Yucatan seems filled with these lost cities. Some are unimportant. Others are yielding priceless treasures in jewels and art, and still others are yet to be explored. That the Maya people were intelligent and cultured there is now no doubt. The Spaniards who suddenly swooped down upon them were children in comparison. Maya rulers offered the Spaniards cotton shirts and, later, jewels. Cotton was one of the great gifts of the Maya nation to the world. At that time it was unappreciated. The jewels only were desired. It was largely because Europe had turned mechanical that the Spaniards were able to win the bloody battles provoked by their destruction of the border cities. Scientists now believe that the Maya people had no metal tools nor even so simple a mechanical contrivance as the wheel. They had no beasts of burden, and the great limestone blocks of the giant temples were cut with stone tools and put in place by man power alone.

The Maya nation had nothing so deadly in battle as the guns of the Europeans, but it was years later before Europeans began to realize that the already crumbling civilization, given its death blow by the soldiers of Spain, had possessed great cultural achievements that put them to shame.

For example, the Maya people were far more accurate in their counting of time than the people of the old world. Their calendar shows at a glance, for instance, just how many days have passed since the event from which it was counted. If we read a date on our own calendar it is not obvious how many days have passed since the birth of Christ.

The Maya nation had two systems of numerical notation which were not greatly different, except simpler, than our Roman numerals and our Arabic numerals. Discovering these facts it is possible to read the dates on their monuments and in their temples; thus we know their age. Digging in some ruins, Yucatan scientists found fragments of a tobacco pipe, which, when fitted together, formed a complete and beautiful specimen. Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with the introduction of tobacco into the civilized world, but the Maya people had used it for centuries along with pipes.

The mystery of the origin of this highly civilized race, who built pyramids and temples comparable to the greatest in Egypt, is one of the most baffling science has ever tried to solve. Sometime between 1000 B. C. and 200 B. C, their dates show that they reached Central America.

They were certainly an agricultural people. Indian corn was their chief food even as wheat is today in America. Pottery making was early in their national life along with the polishing and cutting of precious stones. The cultural arts grew at a time that Europe was a barbarous people. When Christ was teaching in Palestine the stone temples and monuments were raised. Already the calendar had been developed along with mathematics.

During the next three centuries the Maya people grew in might, building many cities. These were artistically constructed and laid out, with plazas, courts, reflecting pools, temples, palaces, roads, walks—all in a region that is now an almost trackless jungle explored only by scientific adventurers and the seekers after chicle.

Now, two great secrets are being sought —where the Maya people came from and what caused their downfall. Already this latter is partially known. Evidences are being found that indicate periods of depression and suffering. Overgrown cities could not be supported by the Maya farmers—the high cost of living defeated a people whose attainments are the marvel of archaeology.

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The Great Wall of China to be Motor Highway

The plans of the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China for converting the great wall into a major motor highway are revealed to the world for the first time in this exclusive story.

THE Great Wall of China, long considered one of the most remarkable engineering feats in the world, may soon become one of the greatest and most unusual motor highways on earth if the plans of the Nationalist government are carried through.

The great wall was built about 220 B. C. by the first emperor of the Tsin Dynasty as a protection against the roving bands of Tartars, which were then in the habit of descending from the Mongolian plains and making sporadic raids upon the Chinese cities to the south. After 2150 years the wall is still in a remarkable state of preservation considering that only twice, in the fifteenth and again in the sixteenth century, were any extensive repairs made upon the structure.

The height of the wall ranges from twenty to forty feet, while at intervals of about two hundred yards are towers about 25 feet higher than the wall. The northern parapet of the entire fortification is loop-holed to protect the defenders from the missiles of the enemy, while the towers are surmounted by such a parapet around all four sides. Many of the towers are roofed over, and were no doubt used as barracks by the Chinese soldiers, while sentries were posted at the other towers.

The wall is from fifteen to thirty feet wide at the base, and tapers inward to an average width of about twelve feet on top. Two solid masonry parallel walls from eighteen inches to four feet in thickness were first built, and the space between was then filled with loose stone and earth. Owing to lack of care, these outside walls have crumbled in places, but not to such an extent that their repair would be exorbitant.

Imagine, if you can, such a wall stretched across the United States. Starting at Washington, D. C, it would extend north to Cincinnati, then south around Cairo, Ill.; north again to Marshall, Missouri, south of Wichita, Kansas, and west to about fifty miles from Denver, Colorado—a serpentine path more than 1,500 miles in length.

With a smooth motor road laid on top of the wall its value to China would be enormous; for besides its unquestioned military value, enabling the government to stamp out the incessant banditry in the interior provinces, it would do much toward helping the rehabilitation of those who are isolated in this mysterious interior country, and who sometimes starve to death because food, plentiful on the coast, cannot be transported inland i*i time.

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NEW SCIENTIFIC MARVELS OF The WORLD’S FAIR

by PAUL PADDOCK

SCIENTISTS, turned showmen, are displaying an amazing $44,000,000 spectacle at this year’s version of the Century of Progress in Chicago. Actually the World’s Fair is depicting 101 years of progress. In that brief period of twelve months man has moved forward rapidly.

The marvels of his achievements are recorded in more than 100 new attractions in the second act of this great show. Except for a few outstanding buildings, the visitor will scarcely be able to recognize last year’s fair. A new panorama of color, new buildings, a resplendent lighting system, original, thrilling, and amusing attractions, and a dramatic review of the world’s latest accomplishments—all are combined in this mammoth exhibition on the shores of Lake Michigan.

From the world’s largest fountain, jutting out 450 feet in the north lagoon, and the huge new Ford building to the simplest exhibit the entire fair sparkles with the swift march of science.

Spectacular Colored Fountain The spectacular fountain is a huge bank of water illuminated by a giant “aurora borealis” of 40 searchlights playing a melody in five colors. The flow of water required is great enough to serve a city of 1,000,000 population.

Overwhelming in magnitude is the $1,500,000 Ford building. It is 900 feet long and occupies eleven acres of ground. Fourteen hundred tons of steel, 700,000 square feet of wall board, 1,600,000 feet of lumber, 5,000 yards of concrete, 160,000 square feet of tile flooring and 160,000 square feet of composition roofing have gone into the huge structure. . .

Outstanding feature of its interior decoration is the largest photo mural ever made, depicting the development of the motor industry. The mural, in effect a single photograph, is approximately 600 feet long and 20 feet high. What a comparison to the marvel of 1904, when the largest single photograph, 10 feet by two feet, was shown at the St. Louis exposition!

World’s Largest Photo Mural The mural, encircling the building’s rotunda, requires seven-eighths of a mile of photographic paper, 40 inches wide. Nearly 200 pounds of paste were required for the mounting. Forty men worked a month to complete it. It consists of 97 panels, each weighing more than 400 pounds.

The photographs used were enlarged in a special enlarging machine, requiring 7,000 watts of brilliant light. The 8×10 inch originals were enlarged after midnight to insure steadier electrical current and less vibration from street traffic. The completed panels form seventeen scenes.

Dominant section of the Ford building is a great circular structure 210 feet in diameter rising in receding terraces to a height of 110 feet. It will house the “Drama of Transportation,” an exhibit of passenger vehicles from the chariots of the Egyptians to the modern automobile.

Science building will again lure those interested in scientific developments. There “Wonder, the Robot” will perform approximately 5,000 movements with a mechanical brain and nervous system weighing 600 pounds and containing 3,000 pieces. With a face composed of surgeon’s rubber bandage material “Wonder” can realistically talk, smile, and express emotions. Robot’s “nervous” system is a section of steel tubing perforated with 4,500 tiny holes. As the tube turns, the holes make and break electrical contacts which operate the robot’s lips, hands, and other parts.

For those interested in amusing and thrilling rides and shows, the Midway, moved over to the island to allow space for the fair’s many new villages, provides almost endless hours of fun. There is the whirling merry-go-round that catapults heavily weighted cars up an incline into a scenic tunnel. Another ride shoots cars down an incline. They make three sensational half loops before coming to a landing, combining the thrills of ferris wheel, coaster, and rocket car.

Outstanding amusement attraction is “Adventureland,” an application of science and showmanship to the field of enchantment. There children will find themselves walking through a forest of laughing and winking trees, darting long tongues at the young visitors. A fairy queen, scarcely three inches high, will move about in a bowl swarming with live fish. The phenomenon is accomplished by means of mirrors that reflect into the bowl an image of a young lady performing her act in a hidden section underneath. A stick of candy wind tunnel, talking lollypops, jumping jack brownies, and blowing elves, operated by electric eye beams, are among the many features of this romantic playground.

Diners can enjoy their food at the fair while watching a beautiful Polynesian prin-(Continued on page lb3) cess throw herself into the mouth of a flaming volcano as a sacrifice to the gods. The volcano replaces the A. & P. carnival of 1933 and will provide a background for a Hawaiian garden seating 1,500 diners. A combination of smudge pots, electrical lighting, and rubber sponges, resembling rocks, have been ingeniously used in producing the volcano sensation.

Among the features shown on the lagoon is a radio controlled boat maneuvered at the will of an operator on shore. There, too, is the water theatre, with its “floating” stage, terraces, and restaurants.

Huge Patent and Model Display Inventors can enjoy a huge patent and model display in the Travel and Transport buildings. It features early and modern inventions. Amateur photographers will want to see the latest wonders of cinema and still photography and listen to helpful lectures in the Hall of Photography in the Science building.

Home lovers will want to see the Crystal House, made of glass panels with a prefabricated steel frame. The ground floor walls are of light-diffusing glass through which persons outside can not view the occupants within. The upper floors are of transparent plate glass. All equipment and furnishing are examples of the latest developments for home comfort.

For the first time the public is able to hear and see those messages from unknown worlds, the cosmic ray, trapped and harnessed in an apparatus called the hodoscope. Only two of these instruments exist in the world. The hodoscope, converting the mysterious rays into electricity and light, suggests that man may derive a practical use from this adventure into a scientific wonderland.

Practically all basic science exhibits have been changed or improved. One interesting section is devoted to models showing the fallacy of man’s dream of perpetual motion. Another sh6ws models of string, illustrating geometric and other mathematical principles.

Free Scientific “Circus” Shown In the great court of the Hall of Science a daily free scientific “circus” is being presented. At the east end of the court a huge stage has been erected and 10,000 free seats provided. Two huge screens show scientific films and television, while a complete radio station can be wheeled upon the stage to communicate with sixty different countries.

On a platform on one side of the stage a reflecting telescope will nightly capture the light rays from the star Arcturus. The ray will then light the Century of Progress beacon, a huge torch of gas flame.

These are but a few of the outstanding attractions of the World’s Fair. No short article can do justice to that great panorama of marvels being unfolded on Chicago’s lake front.

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The New Century of Progress

HOW would you like to make a trip around the world in a day, stopping for an hour or two in England and Prance, seeing the sights of Italy, Spain, Ireland and Switzerland, paying a visit to Germany and China and catching a glimpse of such out-of-the-way places as Tunis and Morocco ?

This is part of the lure of the Century of Progress for 1934 which has been transformed into an international exposition by adding to the wonders of industry and science shown last year more than a dozen foreign villages, each a faithful miniature of the nation it represents.

These foreign communities, depicting the architecture, industries, customs and dress of most of the principal countries of the world, will give visitors an insight into other nations which could be obtained otherwise only by expensive travel or by weeks of intensive reading and research.

The mediaeval Belgian village of last year which charmed millions of visitors with its age-weathered stone towers, winding cob- bled streets, quaint buildings, old-world population and exact detail of life in Flanders, gave the cue for the many-picturesque communities this year and forms the nucleus about which cluster these villages of the nations.

One of the most elaborate is the Spanish village whose three acres are covered with reproductions of historic castles and other structures from the six most famous provinces of Spain. To produce these feudal towers in exact detail, architects and antiquaries made moulds and rubbings on the spot from the ancient buildings themselves. Casts were made in plaster from the moulds, and these casts formed the models for making exact duplicates and providing the same coloring. Native people wind through the old streets lined with Spanish workshops and restaurants.

Reminiscent of the Moorish conquests is the Tunisian village, a typical North African hamlet with its “souks” or bazaars, a mosque where a priest calls the faithful to prayer and an Arab theater presenting native entertainment and music. Appropriately near is the “Oasis,” representing a Bedouin village on the edge of the great desert. Bedouin war dances.

drills of the French Foreign Legion and native craftsmen hammering their silver and brass ornaments will greet visitors here.

The entrance to old Italy is a reproduction of the gateway of Signa with a tower representing the Campanile of San Gimignano. Here the visitor finds himself in the Piazza Benito Mussolini, with the Vias Marconi and Cristoforo Colombo to his left and right while before him rises an antique temple. A leaning tower from Bologna, a reproduction of a feudal tower of the thirteenth century is another feature.

The Swiss Alpine village has as background a reproduction of the mountains with synthetic snow, chalets and St. Bernard dogs. This village is a reproduction of the older portions of Berne where Swiss watch makers, yodelers and native dancers entertain visitors. Nearby is the German Black Forest village, a winter scene with synthetic snow and icicles, snow covered hills and a frozen mill pond in the center for ice skating all summer long. Air conditioning plays an important part in carrying out the illusion of cold weather by maintaining the buildings of this group at low temperatures. Around the mill pond are shops showing German home industries.

The French village this year represents a section of the old Montmartre quarter of Paris and the England of the sixteenth century is brought back in the Old English community which includes a reproduction of part of the famous Cheshire Cheese Inn of London, resort of Samuel Johnson and his literary cronies. Sulgrave Manor, ancestral residence in England of George Washington’s family, the cottage of Anne Hath- away, Shakespeare’s sweetheart, the church where Gray wrote his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and the gateway of the Tower of London are other reproductions.

America is represented in this galaxy of nations by a Colonial village with reproductions of Washington’s birthplace, Franklin’s print shop, Paul Revere’s house, Pilgrim cottages and a village smithy. Old North church dominates one vista of this community and Mount Vernon the other.

The Chinese village portrays a gay and colorful section of the streets of Shanghai. Pagoda towers eight stories high and painted in brilliant hues mark the entrance to a colony of typical Chinese buildings of brilliant mandarin red, jade green, Chinese yellow, blue and gold. Chinese shops, theaters and restaurants contain native merchants and craftsmen and the narrow streets are illuminated by thousands of Chinese lanterns.

Nestling in the deep green moss, ferns and shrubbery of its native heath and flanked by a setting of blue-flowered flax, peat bogs, thatched cottages and ancient gray castles, the Irish village typifies the life and activities of all the counties of Ireland. There is a reproduction of Tara’s hall, famed in literature as the meeting place of Irish kings, clergy, princesses and bards. A Creole village, a Mexican colony and a section of old Vienna also nestle in the international section.

The largest new structure erected for the 1934 fair is the Ford exposition building, 900 feet long, 110 feet high and situated in an eleven acre tract. The main section of the structure is cylindrical with a sawtooth wall on the outside and three similar sawtooth walls set back at intervals as the structure rises. This gives the impression of a set of four gears and the idea of motion is supplied to the gears by lights, thus presenting a gigantic optical illusion.

The structure is to house a drama of transportation, depicting the development of passenger vehicles from the early chariots of the Egyptian kings to the automobile of today with a moving spectacle of all the industries which contribute to the automobile today, including the parts played by farms, mines and factories.

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EXTREMES IN SEX BEHAVIOR

by Ebe Alongi, M. D.

In sex — as in every other aspect of human endeavor — there are giants as well as pygmies.

IN most books on health written in the past, men were almost always advised to have only moderate sexual contact with women, if they wished to have physical and mental vigor. This advice was especially to be applied at certain times of life and in certain circumstances.

Dr. Alongi is assistant at the University Clinic for Nervous and Mental Illnesses of Naples University and, for a number of years has been Official Consultant on psychiatric and neurological problems of the Court of Justice and the District Court of Naples.

Even if one were to grant the correctness of this counsel, we run into difficulty. The moment we ask: “How many times in a month can a man safely sacrifice to the goddess of love?” we find that no one answer can be given for all men.

Biology is far from being an exact science. Man does not live and act according to an established rule, particularly in the area of sex. Any regulation may be too much for some people, too little for others. Nothing is more variable than sexual drive and ability in different individuals.

It is well recognized that intellectual and artistic ability vary greatly from person to person. On the one hand we have the man of genius like Leonardo da Vinci, Dante, or Shakespeare; on the other a mental idiot. Between the two extremes are a multitude who constitute the greater part of mankind.

Man’s sexual power is equally variable and there is an equally wide range between extremes.

Let us take a look at examples which the field of history gives us.

The historian Prisco tells us, for example, that Attila, known as the “scourge of God, ” had an uncountable number of women and that his sons constituted an entire nation. Gibbon, one of the greatest English historians, in his famous work, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, added that Attila died of a stroke while he was sleeping with a beautiful young woman for the first time.

The Emperor Charles V was also a great lover. The Venetian Ambassador declared in a secret memorandum to his government in 1548: “According to reports compiled by his physicians, and as other people very near to him reveal, he is very inclined by nature to sexual pleasure. ” The Emperor was then 48 years old. And the Emperor Proculus, it was reported, violated ten virgins in a single night.

In striking contrast we have Honorius, great Emperor of Byzantium, and Boleslaus, King of Poland. Honorius’ wife Mary died a virgin after ten years of marriage. King Boleslaus, Montaigne narrates in his Essays, in agreement with his wife, maintained complete chastity during his whole life.

We need not go back to ancient history, however. There are more recent examples, referred to by famous scientists.

In the year 1869, the Court of Justice of the Department de l’Ain, France, condemned to jail Mr. Mathieu Grange de Firminy for five years because of violence against a 90-year-old woman.

During the proceeding, it was brought out that the accused, aged 40, had engaged in intercourse twice or more every day for a period of over twenty years.

One great Swiss scientist reported— also in the last century —that a woman in Zurich had told him that one man had made love to her eighteen times during one night.

One young Englishman closed himself in a room with a girl, provided himself with strong wines and exotic foods, and tried to commit suicide by means of excessive love. After four days of continuous sexual relationships he got sick, but he did not die.

Many other unusual sexual feats have been described.

One learned English nobleman, aged 63, was accustomed to make love once every two days and frequently had sexual relations twice in one day. An Italian worker made love regularly three or four times a day, even when he reached the age of fifty. An Italian woman reported fourteen sexual relationships with one lover during one night.

Obviously I recognize that in some of these stories, it is possible to find a certain exaggeration. But it has been well demonstrated scientifically that some unusual individuals find it possible to make love a great many times a day, without any danger to their health.

One woman, after having been treated for frigidity, wrote that her husband, in the first honeymoon week, had had 56 sexual relations with her. In the following months they had made love almost every day. When I discussed this with her husband, a very strong man aged 30, he told me that, in the two months before the wedding, he had been observing sexual abstinence. He claimed that his diet was very strong and also rich in spices and so-called aphrodisiac foods.

A few years ago the newspapers of Naples reported a very curious and rare accident. Two young people, just married, were carried to a hospital. The young man was 22 years old, his wife 18. The woman was in a severe condition of shock. Her husband, in a state of exceptional sexual excitation, had possessed her continuously for two days and two nights.

The man, when in the hospital, was still very excited, both mentally and physically. Only after three days of treatment with sedatives was he reduced to a normal condition. One newspaper published a humorous daily bulletin about that “Fire Honeymoon, ” as it had been labeled.

When questioned, the young man confessed that until marriage, he had relations with females very rarely because of his very poor economic conditions. He was not able to explain his great sexual excitement.

In contrast to these two cases.

I could refer to many cases studied by myself of married men aged between twenty and thirty who never had more than two sexual relations in a month. They were not troubled by this at all, even when they were very strong and in very good health.

Many persons have observed absolute sexual abstinence for months and even years. A well-known mathematician confidentially told me he had coitus with his wife not more than twice a year. He was a normal man, very strong and very intelligent.

These great individual differences, as you can easily understand, make very difficult the establishment of any exact rules, such as for example, were often given in the Middle Ages.

At that time, physicians pre- scribed: “Once a day bad, once a week good, once a month very good. ” Almost at the same time, it might be added, the Queen of Aragon, by royal decree, assigned the limit of six sexual conjunctions a day, and no more, as the normal duty of the husband to his wife.

For sceptics, I might say that this last fact is referred to by the smiling Montaigne in chapter V of the third book of his celebrated Essays.

The waning of virility likewise does not have established periods. Here too we encounter great extremes. While some people, by the time they reach the age of 45, have lost all their sexual ardor and ability, there are others who are still active sexually in their seventies and eighties.

What about woman’s sex capabilities? A comparison with the male cannot be made. The possibilities of sexual love are definitely superior in women because of their different constitutions.

Even if the number may seem exaggerated, prostitutes studied by me assured me that they had daily relations with fifty or sixty men. One of them told me she had intercourse 100 times in fourteen hours.

When a female participates in sexual pleasure more than once a night, she may become tired, but less so than the male. Many women, participating in sexual pleasure several times in a night, have reported to me they did not feel definite fatigue until the day after. Since no woman under thirty told me that, such a phenomenon may manifest itself only after that age.

What then can we conclude from this discussion of extremes in sex behavior? Obviously no one can formulate any definite set of rules for other individuals to follow. The best course is for each person to follow his own nature,, while at the same time keeping in mind the age-old Latin adage, “In medio stat virtus. ” (There is virtue in moderation. )

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Exposition for Inventors Attracts 3,000 Designs

A FIELD day for inventors was the International Fatent Exposition at Chicago a few weeks ago. Hopeful designers of more than 3,000 devices showed off models of their inventions. Meanwhile, prospective buyers of patents strolled through the rows of exhibits. On this page are shown some of the novelties of the show. Evidently the scheme to bring inventors and buyers together was successful, for another inventor’s exposition is planned for September.

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Will You Lose Your Job Because of A New Machine?

By MICHEL MOK

AN ENGLISH watchmaker’s apprentice named John Kay, in 1738, invented a flying shuttle for weaving cotton. This was the first modern labor-saving device and with its aid, one man could do the work of two.

To the amazement of the young inventor, a roar of protest rose from the English weavers when it was introduced. Thirty years later, Kay aided in the development of a second labor-saving device, the spinning jenny. When this was installed in the English cotton factories, riots broke out.

An American manufacturer named Lloyd Raymond Smith, president of the A. 0. Smith Corporation put into operation at Milwaukee, Wis., in 1920, an automatic plant for making automobile frames. His monstrous machinery turns out steel automobile frames at the rate of 10,000 per day—one every eight seconds of the day and night. ‘ Two hundred men do the work of 2,000. Only fifty of them actually touch the frames. Without doubt, the Smith plant is the most complete instance of the use of labor-saving methods to be found in the world.

Almost 200 years have passed since Kay’s flying shuttle infuriated the English weavers. During those two centuries the attitude of thousands of men and women toward labor-saving devices has not changed.

Time and again, the Smith plant is cited as a horrible example by those who believe that machines throw men out of work. Eighteen hundred men displaced by machinery in this one enterprise. Only 200 mechanics left at work while a staff • of more than 600 engineers try to make machinery even more nearly automatic so that more jobs can be taken from more men!

ON THE face of it this looks like a final argument against the machine and justifies you in branding it as a man eater. But the fact is not a single man has lost his job in the Smith plant because of the new automatic machinery. On the contrary it has given work to many more men.

Eager to know if these statements given out as facts were really true I put the problem up to the A. 0. Smith Company. An official of the company told me they are true and then gave me this explanation: “The automatic frame plant was put into operation at a time when there was a large increase in the demand for frames. We, therefore, kept all of the men in the old ‘hand’ plant and employed new men for the automatic plant. We still operate the old plant for the ’small runs,’ and use the automatic plant for the large quantity production runs.”

That’s part of the story. The rest, still more surprising, shows how even more men were put to work. Research by the same staff of 600 engineers that seemed bent on kicking men out of jobs led to a new electric arc welding process which, applied to couplings for joints in oil well pipes, has supplied jobs, directly and indirectly, for more than 5,000 men! In short, the Smith research gang robbed not one man of work but literally put thousands of new ones on the pay roll.

Today, the new Smith pipe plants turn out thirty-two miles of pipe, ranging from four to twenty-four inches in diameter, every day in the week. In two months, last spring, orders came in for 4,000 miles of pipe in the laying of which an army of men is still employed.

BECAUSE of the undreamed-of low prices made possible by labor-saving machinery and mass production, gas now is piped 1,250 miles from Texas to Chicago; from Amarillo, Tex., to Denver, Col., 375 miles; from the Monroe field of Louisiana to St. Louis, Mo., 431 miles; from Kettleman Hills, Calif., to San Francisco, 190 miles (P. S. M., Aug. ‘30, p. 23).

All of this seemed like a wild fairy tale and I again appealed to the Smith Company official for an explanation.

“That’s right,” he said. “When the pipe plant was ready for operation, additional men were employed. Therefore, we have a great many more employees on our pay roll today than before the automatic frame plant was started and before we began the manufacture of pipe.”

The Smith plant is only one of many in which labor-saving devices have made jobs, increased the pay roll, and put no man out of work. For instance, here are examples, not hand-picked but chosen at random, and anyone so inclined can add to the list without the least trouble: Until a few years ago, all packing in a New York food factory was done by hand. Then came a “stacker” that did the packing mechanically, and with its installation more than 1,000 men lost their jobs. But the new packing method so speeded up distribution that all of the old men were taken back and put to work on finishing and labeling.

A New England screw factory installed new automatic screw makers, a number of which could be cared for by one man. Out of 600 men previously employed, 200 were dropped from the pay roll. But the new machines increased production, an official of the company told me, lowered prices, and so stimulated the demand that every one of the old employees had to be taken back to pack, count, and weigh.

In the case of the Smith plant, machines made new jobs. The other labor-saving devices were responsible, first, for the loss of old jobs, and second, for the creation of new ones so that the number of employees remained the same or was increased.

TODAY millions of men, able, anxious to work, are out of jobs. They see a machine doing the work of a hundred, a thousand men, and they blame it for their idleness and suffering. But all over the world men are out of work; they are idle and hungry in the countries where the machine is not developed, where handwork is still the main source of production.

These facts must mean something, and those who claim to know, who have made a study of the ups and downs of trade, say the millions are jobless today because of economic conditions with which the machine has nothing to do. These wise ones blame over-production of crude products like coffee, sugar, etc.

Still others will always blame the machine as being the thing handiest to kick. Am I wrong then when I pat the machine on its shining back and cite instances to show that it makes jobs instead of ending them? If you think so, imagine trying to meet the demands of Chicago, New York, London, Paris with handmade, hand-packed, hand-transported produce! Could it be done? Could civilization, as you know it today, carry on without the machine? Where then are you going to set a limit and say up to this point the machine is good and beyond it it’s bad?

To banish labor-saving devices would deal a death blow to all machinery. For the same type of mind, the same kind of research, that creates labor-saving machines also produce the thousand-and-one devices that do not save labor and that have become indispensable to our civilization.

Take, just as one example, the late Elmer A. Sperry. Back in 1888, he invented the first electric chain mining machine, a labor-saving device if ever there was one. But since then he also has given us the gyro-compass and the airplane and ship stabilizer, now absolute necessities to navigation and aviation.

THROTTLING invention and research, suppose it were possible, would be one of the worst calamities that could befall mankind. Picture, for a moment, a world without electric light, without automobiles, airplanes, steam engines, tractors, telephones, telegraph, radio, moving pictures, cranes, elevators, typewriters, the X-ray, and modern surgical instruments, to name but a few. These and countless other inventions and mechanical developments have contributed to the comfort, happiness, and health of the human race. Also, don’t forget they have given jobs to millions of workers.

The automobile itself—especially the truck—is a labor-saving device. It has done away with untold drudgery by men and horses. When its use first became widespread, numbers of men, such as blacksmiths, wagoners, wheelwrights, saddlemakers, lost their jobs. But since then, it has given work to a huge army of men. The National Industrial Conference Board has no axe to grind. It wants tacts, truth, and maintains a bureau of research for the purpose of finding out what’s what in industry. Dr. Magnus W. Alexander is president of this Board, which probably knows more about what’s going on in the factories and distributing plants of the world than any other existing organization.

“IS IT true,” I asked Dr. Alexander, “that machines put men out of jobs and by so doing take the food out of their mouths?”

His reply was an emphatic “No.” The idea that improved machines mean fewer jobs, he told me, has been proved false by an extensive survey made by his organization.

Naturally, he said, the use of labor-saving machinery means fewer men for the production of a given quantity of goods. But labor-saving machinery has built up and expanded the machine-building industries as well as lowering production costs. The net result is not only lower prices, but also higher wages.

ALSO, he explained, lower prices lead to A greater demand. For example, when automobiles were made so cheaply that you and I and thousands of others could afford to buy them, we got them. As a result, the men who were thrown out by labor-saving machinery were rehired, often along with many others, in an effort to make the output meet the demand.

Few industries are self-supporting. More automobiles mean more rubber, more upholstery fabrics, more glass, more steel, and more of other raw materials and articles. This increase all down the line makes jobs for many additional men. Meanwhile, higher wages increase the national purchasing power. That means more business, more work—an endless chain.

Also this greater volume of goods must be distributed. Thus, again thousands of new jobs are created. In the case of articles like the automobile, thousands of men are needed for servicing and other tasks. It is like the spread of ripples on water when a stone is thrown into it.

Largely because of the use of labor-saving-machinery, Dr. Alexander went on to explain, wages have more than doubled since 1914, the last normal pre-war year. In the same period, the purchasing power of wages has gone up forty percent. Meanwhile, the demand for manufactured goods at lower prices has so increased that twenty-seven percent of the theoretically released workmen were put back at work and an additional 1,500,000 new men were employed.

Finally, he insisted, the research and invention that led to labor-saving methods often has resulted in the creation of entirely new products or the discovery of new uses for existing articles, the manufacture of which provides jobs for many men.

Official figures show that men thrown out of work by labor-saving devices in one industry are absorbed by others. The introduction of new machinery may change a man’s work but does not put him in the bread line, according to a table and chart recently compiled by the U. S. Department of Commerce.

The figures cover these labor shifts between 1920 and 1927 in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, the U. S. Government service, professional, domestic, and personal service.

They show an increase of 817,000 in the total of men and women employed. There were 2,800,000 more holding jobs in transportation, distribution, professional, and personal service, and about 2,000,000 less in agriculture, mining, manufacture and Government service.

These figures, of course, do not give any detail concerning this constant shifting and absorption process. Take, for example, the automobile industry. Every auto factory and every accessory plant had to depend on men trained and let out by other industries. In 1930, 4,700,459 men worked in automobile factories and plants supplying them with raw materials and other products, such as rubber, frames, glass, upholstery fabrics, malleable iron, steel, and the like. The total also includes those employed in the production of gasoline, in servicing, filling stations, and garages.

BECAUSE it has thrown a number of so-called legitimate actors out of work the moving picture industry has been cited as an example of machinery destroying jobs. As a matter of fact, picture making has supplied a huge number of men and women with work. In 1920, 200,000 men were kept busy in the industry. By 1927, that number had grown to 350,000. As a result of sound pictures from 18,000 to 25,000 more, it is estimated, have been given jobs in the past three years. Many musicians who lost their jobs through the talkies, have been given work with the radio, which also has created new jobs for hundreds of technical men.

The development of the modern hotel, apartment house, office building, and restaurant, has provided jobs for an army of men. They permanently employ engineers, steam fitters, boiler men, electricians, machinists, firemen, carpenters, painters, elevator operators and service men. In 1927, 2,025,000 men had jobs of this kind. At present, it is estimated, their number is 2,225,000.

No amount of figures, however, can wipe out the fact that the United States, even in periods of greatest prosperity, suffers from unemployment. The reason for this, in the words of one economist, is that “technical knowledge and mechanical progress are much further advanced than is our understanding of political and social problems.” In other words, we do not know how to adjust ourselves to the machine age. Men, thrown out of work by new machines, join the unemployed class until the growing industry again gives them jobs. The trouble is mechanical progress is faster than absorption. A striking instance occurred a few years ago, when the Ford Motor Company spent one hundred million dollars to change its chief product from Model T to Model A. More than half of all production machinery was scrapped, and 60,000 men were laid off. These men, and probably more, have since been taken back, but meanwhile there was a great deal of suffering.

WHAT is the remedy? In the old days, the workmen took matters into their own hands and sought redress by physical violence.

Unemployment insurance, private and Governmental, has been suggested. The other day, former Governor Alfred E. Smith, of New York, urged the adoption of a system of public employment agencies in the various states, cooperating with a federal exchange. Such a plan would only be possible if Governmental machinery for the gathering of unemployment statistics first were created. A bill which is now pending in Congress provides for the establishment of such a special census.

Among the first private concerns to write unemployment insurance for its men is the General Electric Company, which is trying out an experimental program calling for premiums of one percent of wages to be paid by the employees while working. Payments consist of fifty percent of wages to those entirely unemployed and of a smaller amount sufficient to make up fifty percent of normal pay to those retained on less than half time.

Organized labor’s remedy, according to Frank Morrison, secretary of the American Federation of Labor, is a drastic reduction of the work day and work week and increased wages that will expand labor’s purchasing power and make possible a greater diffusion of wealth.

Whatever the cure, it will not be found in doing away with labor-saving devices. Scrapping all machinery is out of the question. To return to the primitive methods that prevailed before Watt’s condenser made the steam engine practicable is unthinkable. Can you discard electric lights and put tallow candles and oil lamps back in your homes?

Inventive genius can no more help inventing than a duck can help swimming. The engineer’s desire to develop and apply invention to a point where it will serve mankind is a wholly normal urge that can no more be checked than the child’s instinctive desire to know.

No benefit can be derived from halting progress. The present problem, as a famous economist puts it, is the result of “mankind’s spiritual development failing to keep pace with the rapidly developing elements of science and technology.”

This means that unemployment is not an engineering problem but one that must be solved by the economist, the sociologist, and the expert in the science of government. It is their duty to devise methods whereby progress may continue unchecked until all have an opportunity to enjoy a safer, fuller, and happier life.

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Where TELEVISION Stands Today

by DAVID SARNOFF

President, Radio Corporation of America What progress is being made in television? How far has it advanced today? What new developments lie in the immediate future? These pressing questions, about which the vast public waiting for television is wondering, are answered in this unusual article by Mr. Sarnoff, whose eminence in the field enables him to speak with unquestioned authority.

IMPORTANT strides are being made with television. In our development work now proceeding at Camden, N. J., we are seeking to perfect television to a point where it is capable of rendering real service before offering it to the public.

While the public was willing, and even eager, to experiment with radio in the early stages of broadcast development, it seems to us that it will desire a comparatively more advanced television receiver than the early crystal radios.

There was no precedent for the taking of sound and music out of space, but the public has been educated by the motion picture industry to expect picture transmission of a high quality, and it is doubtful whether interest can be sustained by inferior television images.

The progress we have made so far has given us the belief that ultimately a great service of television can and will be made available. I do not believe that television will supersede sound broadcasting by radio. It will be a correlated industry.

The present status of television might be likened to the condition of radio in the immediate pre-broadcasting era, when amateurs were beginning to hear faint sounds through the air.

Voices and music were passing through space in those early days of radio; comparably, there are actually some images passing through the air today. They are being received by established experimental stations and by amateur operators in various sections of the United States.

The next stage should find television comparable to the ear-phone stage of radio. Then, television should attain the same degree of development as did radio sound broadcasting in the early period of the crystal set.

This does not mean that the actual physical structure of the first television receiver will be similar in any way to the crystal receiver.

Before television reaches the practical stage of service it is necessary that several experimental stations for the transmission of sight by radio be established. Through the operation of these experimental stations, we expect to obtain exact information and practical field experience which are required before definite plans can be developed for a television Service of nationwide scope.

The effect of television upon the present established radio industry will be beneficial. There will be no interference between the broadcasting of sound and of sight. These services will supplement each other and complete the impression upon the human mind by reaching it through both the eye and the ear.

Television broadcasting stations will operate on wave lengths different from those now used for the broadcasting of sound. An entirely different receiver will be necessary. In the practical sense of the term, television must develop to the stage where broadcasting stations will be able to broadcast regularly visual objects in the studio, or scenes occurring in other places through remote control.

Reception devices must be developed that will make these objects and scenes discernible in millions of homes.

Devices must be built upon a principle that will eliminate rotary scanning discs, delicate hand controls and movable parts. Research must make possible the utilization of wave lengths for sight transmission that will not interfere with the use of the already over-crowded channels in space.

The potential audience of television in its ultimate development may reasonably be expected to be limited only by the population of the earth itself.

This vast increase in the entertainment audience has been made possible by the introduction of modern science into the older arts. And now television will come to open new channels, to provide new opportunities for art and the artist and to create new services for the audiences of all the world. Potentially speaking, tele- vision can be utilized by 26,000,000 homes in this country alone.

The instantaneous projection through space of light images produced directly from objects in the studio or the scene brought to the studio by remote control involves many problems.

Special types of distribution networks, new forms of stagecraft, and a development of studio equipment and technique will be required. With these must come a new and greater service of broadcasting, both of sight and sound. A new world of cultural and educational opportunities will be opened to the home.

But even more appealing to the individual is the hope that television may, at least in a measure, enable man to keep pace with his thoughts. The human being has been created with a mind that can encompass the whole world within the fraction of a second. Yet his physical senses lag woefully behind. With his feet he can walk only a limited distance. With his hands he can touch only what is within reach. His eyes can see at a limited range and his ears are useful at a short distance only.

When television has fulfilled its ultimate destiny, a man’s sense of physical limitation will be swept away, and his boundaries of sight and hearing will be the limits of the earth itself.

Editor’s Note : In connection with the predictions made above by Mr. Sarnoff, engineers expect the development of television will follow along the lines of one of three outstanding systems now being employed. A tense but silent battle is now being waged between these systems—the Baird system, developed by John Logie Baird, of England; the well-known scanning disc system; and the cathode ray tube system, which has a great advantage in that it employs no moving parts.

The Baird system promises to open a new field of television movies, both in the theatre and in the home. With the perfection of this system, which is illustrated in an accompanying drawing, we may be able to sit comfortably in our home or in the theatre and watch the performance of plays being transmitted from a master theatre, much in the manner of present chain broadcasting.

This future development of television was foreshadowed in a demonstration conducted recently in London. For a period of some thirty minutes the audience was treated to visual and aural entertainment by several well-known British artists performing in a distant studio. The images were declared by spectators to have a brightness and definition comparable to the usual motion picture performance.

The images were produced on the screen, measuring 2 by 5 feet, by a bank of 2,100 small tungsten filament lamps, each of which was set in a small compartment. The 2,100 compartments formed a huge honeycomb, thus building up the image in small squares. To diffuse the image and thus eliminate to a great extent the “square effect,” an opaque screen of ground glass was placed before the “honeycomb.”

The battery of lamps is switched on and off to form the image by a special commutator machine having 2,100 segments, each of which is connected to a lamp in the “honeycomb.” A rotary contact arm, or selector revolving at a speed of 750 R.P.M., sweeps over the aforementioned segments, delivering current to the lamps at a rate of over 25,000 contacts every second!

The majority of engineers at present are striving to develop a home television receiver which eliminates the cumbersome scanning disc. What is sought is a receiver which is quiet in operation, practically fool-proof, and which has a minimum of moving parts to get out of kilter.

The cathode ray tube possesses many of the qualities necessary to fill the bill. Forming an almost self-contained unit, save for the amplifier, the cathode ray tube is primarily a projector, with a glass screen covered with a fluorescent material. The filament of the tube emits a stream of moving electric particles which are transformed into a pencil point of light when they impinge on the fluorescent screen.

Controlling this electron stream are two sets of deflecting plates swinging the stream of particles back and forth to correspond with the motion of the scanning instrument at the transmitter. The result is a complete scanning of the fluorescent screen on the end of the tube, building up the image as it sweeps back and forth.

The system which has found most widespread use at present, particularly in the United States, makes use of the well-known scanning disc. Credit for the most outstanding development with this system to date goes to Ulysses Sanabria, young Chicago investor, who has perfected equipment which can project an image of remarkable brilliance and definition on a 10-foot screen.

At a demonstration conducted recently in a New York theatre, 2,000 people witnessed a television program which drew such comments as from “pretty good” to “extremely creditable.”

What distinguishes the Sanabria system is the new high power lamp which projects the flying spot on the screen, and the specially designed transmitting and receiving scanning discs. The receiving disc has 45 holes in all, arranged in three sets of spirals, each covering 120 degrees of the disc. With such an arrangement one-third of the entire surface of the subject is scanned in one-third of a revolution of the disc, which rotates at 900 R.P.M.

It is the unusual design of the projector which makes possible the almost movie-size images. The disc, 3-1/2 ft. in diameter, instead of having mere holes is fitted with 45 lenses, each two inches in diameter.

Directly behind this disc is a Taylor projector lamp, designed by Mr. Sanabria, who is keeping its construction a secret. The screen on which the image is formed is set 18 feet in front of the projector. The translucent material of the screen permits the image to be thrown against it from the rear, while the audience views the performance from the front.

Most of the current television programs are being broadcast on wavelengths around 150 meters. Signals transmitted over a distance of more than 150 miles, however, tend to show “ghost” images on the viewing screen, as illustrated in an accompanying drawing.

To eliminate this defect, engineers are designing transmitters to operate on wavelengths around 5 meters. The waves are transmitted directly to the receiving antennae, so that reflection of secondary waves from the heaviside layer to the receiver is avoided.

Regular television service from station W6XAO, in Los Angeles, was opened recently, broadcasting on a wavelength of 6% meters, or 44,500 kilocycles. At the present time signals are being sent out between six and seven P. M. (P. S. T.). Eighty lines are used and the image is repeated fifteen times per second.

There are practically no mechanical features to the system in use at W6XAO, as the system employs cathode ray beam at both transmitter and receiver, instead of motors and scanning discs. The receiving area extends approximately forty miles from the point of projection. Reception is also weakened by intervening hills.

The early part of the year of 1932 will see the inauguration in New York City of a new low-wave television broadcasting system operating down on 4 meters. The antenna is now in process of construction on the tip of the mooring mast of the world’s tallest structure, the Empire State Building.

The station is expected to serve only an area within 15 to 25 miles of the tower, as the waves are limited to visible distances. In this area, however, an audience of ten million can be served.

Despite the present status to which tele- vision has advanced, it still labors under many serious difficulties. Chief among these are a lack of definition (poor detail) and brilliancy.

With the few lines now utilized the images do not receive a thorough scanning, particularly where scenes covering a wide area are involved. Increasing the number of lines will bring clearer pictures, making it possible to televise such spectacular events as football games and boxing matches.

For images lacking brilliancy, insufficient signal strength, and particularly, the present inadequacies of the neon lamps now available are largely responsible. Television will not arrive at perfection until a lamp is developed which can respond brilliantly to weak signal currents.

When engineers have vanquished the difficulty of perfect synchronization they will have made a noteworthy advance. When the scanning disc of the receiver gets out of step with the transmitter, strange things happen to the televised picture. As illustrated in an accompanying drawing, the image rises and falls on the screen, sways from one side to the other, or shifts dizzily back and forth till it becomes unrecognizable.

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MI Readers Suggest: Amazing Marvels of Tomorrow

Here are the 50 Golden Hammer-winning inventions for the world of 2055, selected from the thousands submitted by MI readers.

Illustrated by Gurney Miller IF YOU future-minded MI readers can bear to cast a backward glance (just to the March 1955 issue) you’ll recall a rosy forecast of the year 2055 A.D. entitled Amazing Marvels Of Tomorrow by that joyous prophet O. O. Binder. In connection with that article we announced that 50 Golden Hammers would be given for the 50 best ideas for inventions that would make the world of 2055 even jollier. From the thousands of suggestions that poured in from enthusiastic futurists we have selected the 50 below. Some of these ideas were sent in by as many as 20 different readers. In such cases, when the idea was a winner, we gave the award to the writer of the letter with the earliest postmark.

To all MI readers who sent in suggestions: a million thanks. And may the world of tomorrow be as wonderful as we all hope!

Sound and color cameras that record on tape. Home movies can then be played back on your TV set. B. E. Arnold, Wilmington, Cal.

Instead of doors and walls, force beams cut off vision by bending light rays. To enter a house you merely step through the electronic beam. Larry Hyder, Metolius, Ore.

Protective solution for teeth that permanently prevents decay. R. Sheehan, Manitowoc. Wis.

Small nuclear-powered oxygen extractor that allows frogmen to stay underwater indefinitely. A. J. Gilbert, No. Canton, Ohio.

Radio that picks up voices from the past, lets you tune in on historic speeches. Mrs. Link Jackson, Slaughters, Ky.

For craftsman: an easily worked plastic-metal in strip, sheet and mastic form. An electric light hardens work into tough, seamless unit. Ben Chance, Park Ridge, Ill.

Recording tape that plays back voice and image on receiving machine, to be mailed like letters. Harry Russell, USS Eldorado.

For home decorators, a projector that transfers color photos to walls, can also erase them. Harold Chapin, Athol, Mass.

A thin, waterproof, one-piece garment that is thermostatically controlled, to wear outside roofed-over towns. R. L. Smith, Syracuse, N. Y.

Central Information Bureau that flashes desired information on any subject on a screen after question has been dialed in. PFC Frank Schreiber, U.S. Army, Schweinfurt, Germany.

Fast sleep machine: crawl in and get the equivalent of eight hours’ sack time in minutes. Larry Larson, Branson, Mo.

Chemical stimulant for regrowing lost parts of the body—hands, legs, fingers, etc. Winfield S. Weaver, Delphi, Ind.

For hunters and cops, a paralyzing ray which stuns temporarily. No more fatal gun accidents or cruelly wounded game. Daniel Garcia, Chicago, Ill.

Building and paving material that stores light, glows all night. J. B. Butler, Denver, Colo.

Impulse-induction spectacles for the blind, or for seeing in the dark. Transmits images directly to the brain. Howard Moore, San Diego, Calif.

Ocean floor vacation resort: a Glassteel bubble enclosing an underwater hotel. Laverne Huber, Hamilton, Ont.

Electronic Transporter: person or object to be transported any distance is put in analyzer, converted to electronic pattern and sent via radio beam to preselected integrating receiver, then converted back to original form. O. H. Klinefelter, Glen Ridge, N. J.

Space binoculars that convert earth’s magnetic field into light rays visible to viewer, thus allowing one to see around curvature of earth, underwater, in mines, buildings, etc. A. E. Smithson, San Diego, Calif.

Automatic two-way translator that allows you to converse with anyone while you speak your language and he speaks his. Jason W. Lee, Ashland, Ore.

For mothers, a pocket viewer similar to a tiny TV screen, enabling you to keep an eye on what’s going on at home. Ruth Hazel, N. Randolph, Mass.

Moving road map on your dashboard that shows the exact location of your car as you drive merrily along your way. Thomas Halt, Burley, Idaho.

Electronic money: funds are automatically transferred by pocket radio hook-up to a central bank. Robert Mc-Grane, Chicago, Ill.

Radio device on cars lights up highways coating for a few miles ahead, eliminates glare, allows greater speeds with safety. Michael Miller, Ft. Huachuca, Ariz.

Daily exposure to vitamin ray supplies your exact daily requirements, controls weight by inhibiting or encouraging assimilation. Brian Larkin, Philadelphia, Penna.

All housework done automatically by appliances controlled by timers, working on light beams of various colors.

Ray Bene, South Newport, Ky.

For home bars, automatic drink mixers. Push a button, get your favorite drink mixed just the way you like it, effortlessly, in only a few seconds. Gerard Severynse, Glendale, N. Y.

Thought projector converts human thought into visible image on screen. Invaluable in crime detection, phychiatry. Harold Jackson, Kankakee, Ill.

TV tape that records programs you especially like, plays them back on set. You can record yourself or buy tape recordings. Neil Burnett, Springfield, O.

Degravitation unit that can lift, suspend, transport or lower objects weighing thousands of tons. W. F. Edmondson, Sr., Greenville, S. C.

Hand tool that emits narrow force field, cuts any material to specified depth. Ralph Jones, Leaksville, N. C.

Factories that take in sea water endlessly, retaining and sorting useful matter. Albert Ericson, Detroit, Mich.

For doctors, an electronic diagnostic device that locates pain exactly. Jack Champlin, Seattle, Wash.

Electronic master clocks that control all timepieces in the area, keeping them on time. Lou Tiffany, Napa, Calif.

Ageometer: medical device that brings the life cycle to a halt, kills all harmful organisms, reactivates patient’s body, giving him perfect health, extended life expectancy. W. H. Allen, MD, Tucson, Ariz.

Shopping by TV: you have only to dial the item number; it is billed and shipped to you immediately by underground conveyor tube. John Heffley, Collinsville, Texas.

Automatic cleaning closet for the home; clothes are cleaned and freshened by ultrasonic beams. Daniel Wilshire, Lake Zurich, Ill.

Exterior and interior walls that can be turned to different color and transparency frequencies. Carl Klamut, Bellport, N. Y.

With Teleautovision on your dashboard you can see the road ahead of the cars in front of you; no need to pull out of line for a peek before passing. Henry Roy, Sr., Devon, Conn.

For enjoying home life in peace, an electronic screen that lets in only the sounds that you really want to hear. Scott Pope, Bay City, Mich.

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The Age of Man-Made Rubber

CHEMISTS’ dream of making a better rubber than nature can produce has come true. Barely six years after the first commercial production of synthetic rubber in the United States, the industry now functions on a million-dollar scale and hopes to reach the billion-dollar class before the end of the next decade.

There are two synthetic rubbers being produced in the United States. One called thiokol is manufactured by the Thiokol Corporation, and the other, duprene, is a product of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc. Thiokol is the discovery of Dr. J. C. Patrick and has been on the market since 1930.

The one-acre plant for making thiokol has a production capacity of 200,000 pounds in five hours, compared to one acre of rubber trees yielding about 500 pounds of rubber in 500 years. The trees require careful nursing for five years before they yield the white milk from which rubber is made.

Thiokol sells for fifty cents a pound, as against ten cents a pound for crude natural rubber. The chief advantage of the man-made product is resistance to destruction by oils, chemicals and gases. One grade of crude thiokol is able to do service in temperatures between —30 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Industrial firms and consumers are willing to pay more for synthetic thiokol because it withstands trying conditions much better than the natural product. Thiokol is now an army specification for fuel hose. The bureau of standards tested thiokol fabric for lighter-than-air craft gas cells and found it, according to a company spokesman, “twenty-five times better than ordinary rubber for preventing the escape of helium gas.”

In its record-breaking flight across the Pacific ocean, the gas tanks of the “China Clipper” were sealed with a thin film of thiokol sprayed on the inside of the tanks.

Thiokol is also used in the printing industry. Printers have long complained that rubber press rollers and blankets swelled because they absorbed the ink chemicals. Today some of the largest American newspapers use thiokol blankets.

All sorts of printing plates, including half tones, are now made out of thiokol. The synthetic product is much lighter than metal and, therefore, can save shipping costs.

According to the makers of thiokol, the synthetic-rubber plates use about half as much ink as metal plates, and they also eliminate “make-ready,” one of the expensive, time-taking steps in the printing industry.

The latest development is a synthetic rubber powder for molding articles of various shapes. Three minutes is all the time required for molding a glossy, smooth, oilproof thiokol product.

The chief ingredients of thiokol are sulphur, salt and natural gas, all of which are abundant in the United States.

Duprene, the other synthetic rubber manufactured in this country, is made of such cheap and common substances as coal, limestone and hydrochloric acid, the latter made from common salt.

The plant recently completed for the manufacture of duprene is practically automatic. Only fifteen employes per shift are required to keep it running at capacity. The annual production is about 1,000,-000 pounds.

The raw material produced by DuPont is “plastic polymer,” the equivalent of smoked sheet rubber. The processing is done by manufacturers to whom it is sold. The preparation for service is done by the same methods and by the same machinery used in the processing of natural rubber.

Most commercial rubber products contain varying amounts of sulphur, pigments, fillers, carbon, antioxidants, etc., which give the finished products special properties. Thus rubber tires differ in composition from inner tubes, and so on.

Duprene can also be endowed with special properties by the addition of various ingredients. In this way, hundreds of uses have been found for man-made rubber. Each use demands specifications which the manufacturer knows how to meet. After the synthetic rubber is compounded with other ingredients it is vulcanized. Then it is ready for service.

One of the great advantages of duprene is the ease of vulcanization. Whereas natural rubber must be vulcanized in the presence of sulphur, duprene requires only heat and pressure to make its composition permanent.

Hundreds of uses have already been found for duprene, but the possibilities are as unlimited as the requirements of industry. Simply by varying the quantity and proportions of the ingredients added to the “crude,” thousands of duprene compositions are made possible.

Duprene can be made to stretch 1,100 per cent its ordinary length and it has a greater “ultimate elongation,” but a slower recovery from stretching than rubber. The ability to return to its original shape makes duprene valuable for printing rolls and printing blankets.

Chemically, duprene has been found very stable and resistant to acids, gases, oils, high temperatures and exposure to direct sunlight. It has a longer life than natural rubber. A sample of natural rubber was immersed in Diesel engine oil at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade for a test. At the end of four days it had completely disintegrated. A sample of duprene tested under the same conditions showed little effect.

Because of its resistance to high temperatures, duprene is being used as a covering for automobile ignition wires. The temperature under the hood of an auto often reaches 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Certain duprene compositions can withstand a temperature of 350 degrees Fahrenheit. One automobile manufacturer uses duprene in place of a small metal spring in the water-cooling system, because it resists the attacks of antifreeze solutions which had corroded the metal spring. On another car, duprene is used as a grommet where heat and oil are encountered.

Duprene has also been adapted to the manufacture of gaskets, washers and packing; to lining for hose to convey gasoline, oil and kerosene, hospital sheeting and balloon fabric; binder and adhesive for use with leather, cork and felt; gloves for chemical plants and paint factories, as well as dozens of other uses.

Duprene is supplied to manufacturers in three forms, the “plastic polymer” which corresponds to crude rubber; duprene latex, which is a white milky liquid, and duprene cement.

Although duprene was commercialized at a time when natural rubber ranged in price from three to fifteen cents per pound, many manufacturers paid a premium of about one dollar a pound for the synthetic product.

The present high cost of synthetic rubber is due largely to the investment in modern manufacturing equipment, but as production increases, the price will drop proportionately.

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Electrical INDUSTRY Creates Mechanical Brains

by Robert Francis

The electric eye, which functions as a virtual automatic brain, is working miracles in industry, and may soon oust the human brain and hand from the control levers of machinery. This field offers many new opportunities.

THE most promising, the most amazing and without doubt the most fascinating field of endeavor today is electronics, the baby billion-dollar industry.

Indeed there is no industry in America however large, however undeveloped, however needful of bright young minds and willing young hands, that can offer even a small percentage of the opportunities that are literally begging acceptance in electronics.

But what is electronics? What is this new bonanza of opportunity?

Like its parent, electricity, electronics is finding its way into hundreds of industries, and at so rapid a pace that trained men cannot be found fast enough.

A hot billet of steel rushes and plunges back and forth under a rolling mill unguided by human hands. It obeys nothing but a beam of light.

A flash-over occurs on a large and powerful dynamo supplying a small city with its electric lights. Although no human is present, this great piece of brute mechanism is brought to rest before it burns itself to pieces. A little tube no larger than a crab apple stops it.

Feats Performed by Electric Eye

Packages of cereal are rudely snatched from a conveyor belt because they have been improperly wrapped and a little electric eye has detected them and thrown them into the discard.

A wire-making machine suddenly and abruptly stops because something slipped and the wire coming from it is no longer of the proper size. It stopped itself, because its electronic brain brought it to a stop.

The brakes of a locomotive are automatically applied at the entrance to a block, an elevator stops at exact floor level, the conveying machinery of a steel mill stops when the bin is filled, and the tonsils of patients are removed without the shedding of blood.

We could go on and mention hundreds of other applications of electronics but space will not permit even a small percentage of the conquests of this new art to be outlined.

It amounts to the most astounding engineering achievement of the century; the new and golden age of automatic control where the human eyesight, the human hands and even the human brain is replaced by the controlled flow of electrons; the same electrons that light our lights, toast our bread and send our radio messages.

Electronics a Billion Dollar Industry

Within the next few years billions of dollars worth of electronic equipment will be sold and thousands of young men trained in the new and fascinating art will be needed to install it and to care for it. No industry will be able to escape the changes it will bring about and no young man can afford to overlook the opportunity that calls with such positive conviction.

Even today the electronic engineer is the man of the hour. Yesterday he saved a steel mill a hundred thousand dollars a year, tomorrow he may revolutionize another industry by the ingenious application of his little tubes that work so much magic, that lift such heavy loads from the backs of men. It is rather difficult to fully appreciate the possibilities of this new art. One of its most important tools is the photo-electric cell, commonly called the electric eye.

At the present time there are over one hundred applications of this amazing device. We find it in a dozen industries doing chores that save money and speed up operations that were formerly controlled by the human eyesight.

Industry Needs Trained Young Men What the future holds for it can only be awkwardly guessed at, so alluring are its prospects. Hundreds of new applications are being held for bright young men to find —young men trained to see such things.

It is very difficult to describe the field of electronics in so many words because its ramifications are so great; indeed so utterly confusing to one who knows little about the subject.

The best the writer can hope to do within the confines of this comparatively short article is to describe some of the tools of the electronic engineer. It is the marvelous devices that he has to work with that lead us to fully appreciate the prospects in store for those who succeed in mastering the new art.

As previously stated, in the photo-electric cell we have a device that replaces the human eye.

In the grid-glow tube, another electronic instrument, we have a device that in a way functions as a substitute for human feeling; it is sensitive to touch, even a wave of the hand being sufficient to control it.

Electric Eyes to Control Factories

Then we have the ordinary vacuum tube and here the writer predicts that some day vacuum tubes will be used more in industry than they are in home radios.

Then we must not forget the thyratrons, the pliotrons and the many other electronic tubes and the wonderful things that they do. The thyratron is a most versatile device capable of performing real miracles. It is able to control large sources of electrical energy without moving parts like switches, or relays.

Perhaps the reader will be able to better appreciate the great field of electronics if the writer outlines some of the industries and arts that are now using electronic devices.

Field of Service Unlimited

The following industries might be mentioned: steel, rubber, paper, cigar making, glass, paint, textiles, railroads, rolling mills, wire-making, mining, conveying, dyestuffs, chemical manufacturing, metal stamping, coal, etc.

When we come to a list of the arts that have been affected and benefited by electronics we begin to realize what a vast and profound human discovery has been made. Here we have: sound pictures, counting, grading, carrier systems, beam transmission, measurements, music, therapeutics, traffic control, machine control, metering, analysis (chemical and metallurgy), crime detection, geophysics, aviation, etc.

This may all sound very fine and very alluring to the ambitious young man who would throw his lot to it, but he will naturally ask: “What must I do to train myself for this work and how much will my services be worth to people who can make use of them?”

How to Acquire Training If the writer were to advise any young man in this matter of training, he would unhesitatingly recommend a general training in radio and he would specialize not in radio transmission or reception, but in the function of radio tubes and in the radio circuits that apply to amplification.

Here lies the great foundation work of electronics. In training of this sort, a young man will be able to equip himself with the great fundamentals of the electronic art.

Some day, of course, our colleges will recognize this young giant, but until they do, it is possible to receive very good training at radio schools.

And the salary? While much depends upon the individual, the writer would say that minimum salaries should run around $2,500 a year. They may reach as high as $10,000 for exceptional men who are able to save their employers a great deal of money by the application of electronic tubes and devices.

Electronic service men, naturally, cannot expect so much money for, after all, they are merely called upon to take care of something for which somebody else has been responsible. With this considered, the author does not see why a service man cannot demand a salary of $1,800 to $2,000 a year.

Looking forward to the time when large industries will have hundreds of electronic instruments in use, we can see where it will be necessary to have at least ten or fifteen electronic service men about a large factory.

We must not forget the genius in outlining the opportunities in this new art. He has the biggest chance of all. He will be the man who will help find many of the marvelous new applications that will be made in the coming years.

Today, as he looks into the future, he is limited only by his imagination. A new and wondrous world of magic is spread out before him and a hundred different industries are waiting to pay out huge sums to men who can show them how to apply electronic devices in ways that will save money and speed up operations.

Let them talk about radio, about television and the talkies, but the young man who can sense even dimly the storehouse of opportunity in this new field is the man of tomorrow.

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Scientific HIGHLIGHTS of Chicago’s WORLD FAIR

It looks like the Chicago Fair were built especially for M-M fans. It is replete with the kind of mechanical wonders shown here.

While you’re casually viewing this display of priceless jewels an armed guard is watching your every move. If glass is broken, tray drops into vault.

If, when visiting the Fair, you’re curious as to the temperature at the moment, all you have to do is glance around the horizon and this world’s largest thermometer is sure to come within your view to tell you what you want to know. A series of Neon tubes does duty as a column of mercury, the height being controlled by a master thermometer at the base. The figures and graduations are also outlined by glowing tubes.

Ever wonder what happens to the food you eat? This intriguing exhibit in Hall of Science illustrates while you wait the digestive processes that go on right in your own innards.

Motordrome at Fair is attracting thousands, who watch this daring young Miss circle the drome at breath-taking speed with full grown lion riding beside her in the car.

Amazing to spectators in electrical building is this robot. Talk into the telephone and he will do anything you command—almost. He’ll smoke, blink his eyes, shake hands, talk, stand up or sit down. In fact, he’ll even sing.

You can have a $20 bill free for the taking at this exhibit—providing you can take it without routing out the guards. Your success depends upon ability to get beyond electric eye beam.

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