The headline makes it sound like this article is about computers, but actually it’s about the birth of the electronics industry at a time when you couldn’t even get a degree in electrical engineering.

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.

Preserving Our History in a Tomb

“CRYPT OF CIVILIZATION” WILL RE-CREATE OUR DAILY LIFE FOR PEOPLE OF 8113 A.D.

THE YEAR is 8113. Spired cities built by the ancient people of the twentieth century have long since crumbled to dust. Of the airplanes and automobiles in which they traveled, not a rusted scrap remains. Their perishable tools, utensils, books, magazines, and newspapers have vanished completely. What learning they possessed is but dimly known. But where Oglethorpe University once stood, in what was Atlanta, Ga., a band of archaeologists has just unearthed a door of stainless steel. They break it open—and find themselves in a treasure house of the past. Pictures and records, perfectly preserved through the ages, tell them in every detail the long-forgotten story of what life was like in 1938.

This piece and it’s companion article, 40 Years in the Future were published in the November 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

You also might want to see the editors introduction to the first issue, then called Modern Mechanics.

40 Years Ago

AUTHOR Donald G. Cooley with Weston Farmer was co-editor of Modern Mechanics, later to be renamed Mechanix Illustrated, when the magazine was first published in November 1928. Mr. Cooley subsequently became full-time editor of MI before embarking on a career as a free-lance writer. Today Mr. Cooley is recognized as one of the foremost medical writers in the world with a number of highly regarded books bearing his name.

THE bank building in Robbinsdale, Minn., a sleepy suburb of Minneapolis, bore a sign on its brick exterior: Home of Fawcett Publications— More than 2,000,000 Readers a Month. It was a three-story building without elevators. A long flight of stairs that reversed itself at a landing where a pert redhead ran the switchboard brought you to the third floor, an expanse that bustled, buzzed, rustled, clattered and often echoed a belly-laugh as half a hundred editors, associates and secretaries went about their business.