Highways of the Future
By E. W. MURTFELDT
PICTURE a 15,000-mile network of twelve-lane motor speedways spanning the nation—three of them linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, six more crisscrossing the country north and south —and you will have an idea of the vastness of a spectacular highway plan proposed by Senator Robert J. Bulkley of Ohio. Requiring twenty-five years for completion, the mammoth gridiron of superhighways would change long-distance driving from a motorist’s nightmare of snarled traffic into a reality of fast, safe transportation. It would represent an impressive start toward an era of scientifically constructed speedways, and crashproof cars of radical new design to run upon them, foreseen by leading experts for the not-too-distant future.
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ALL ABOARD FOR OUTER SPACE!
Is this the ship that will take us to earth’s first manned satellite?
By G. Harry Stine, Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer, White Sands Proving Grounds
ON May 24, 1954, a Navy Viking rocket thundered 158 miles into space.
As recently as February 1949, a V-2/ WAC-Corporal “Bumper” rocket soared 250 miles into the sky over New Mexico’s White Sands Proving Grounds.
Just last year, an Air Force pilot flew the Bell X-1A rocket plane “above 80,000 feet” and at more than twice the speed of sound.
We have built rockets which have gone beyond the earth’s atmosphere and returned; they have reached altitudes where the remnants of the atmosphere around them were a better vacuum than that in a radio tube. We have sent men to altitudes where their blood would boil if they were not protected by a pressure suit and a pressurized cabin.
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Yeah, well, she’s pretty smart, for a girl.
Kansas Girl Genius Operates Television-Radio Station
CONQUERING fields in which very few men have ventured eighteen-year-old Eleanor Thomas of Kansas City, Mo., is assistant engineer of Television station W9XBY. Finding the life on a college campus too prosaic Miss Thomas, a mathematical genius for a girl, decided to leave and enter an engineering school.
Throughout the course the young woman excelled in her studies and upon her graduation she was appointed to the position she now holds. She is the youngest member of her sex ever to pass the difficult examinations for a first class operator’s license from the Federal Communications Commission.
MODERN MIRACLE
SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY: WEALTH FROM WASTE
by John E. Pfeiffer
This is the first of a series of articles on the romance of synthetic chemistry in which science has solved the mystery for turning waste into wealth.
“Don’t throw that away!” This is the battle cry of the great synthetic chemical industry which makes everything from hair-brush handles to T.N.T. from stuff that was once just waste. If you want to buy some perfume, the odds are that the bottle will contain odors extracted from coal tar, once a nightmare to factories who paid people to get rid of it.
But today, whether it’s waste gas, tar, or peanut shells, the chemists want it to sell back to you again in the form of motor fuel, photographic film, or pipe stems. What men do with rubbish would turn the most efficient housewife green with envy and the whole thing only started late last century.
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BARBERING, BANK ROBBING AND BARTENDING
If your thirst for knowledge is not quenched by ordinary colleges or schools, there are other halls of education open to you.
A suite of offices located somewhere high in the cement jungle of New York City houses one of the most amazing—and most hush-hush—institutions of learning in America. None of the building’s other tenants have the faintest suspicion that it’s a school. The elevator jockeys don’t know and neither do the cleaning women or even the owners. In fact, only a handful of persons is aware of its very existence.
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Why is it that the gorilla speaking like he’s in a minstrel show?
I tol’em and I tol’em!
Yes, I did
“Being chief engineer on one of these red hot
projects ain’t hay and the big gripe is that no matter
what goes wrong I can’t fix it. That’s why at the start
when the confusion is still gently confined to the breadboard
you should call in Sigma. Confusion is an old story to
those boys. — actual unsolicited testimonial by I. M. A. Ape, Sc.D., chief engineer, Simian Products Company, Kivu Heights, Africa.
OK, now that you’ve had the hard-sell, we do have a relay that we’d like to talk about. It does some difficult jobs very well. Here are the basic specifications:
SIGMA SERIES 22
Miniature [.not sub-miniature] sensitive double pole sensitive relay. Excellent combination of small size and high performance.
If you are interested, we’ll be glad to send you a bulletin sheet on the Series 22, or a complete catalog if you prefer.
How Comic CARTOONS Make Fortunes
The “funnies” you read every day bring $8,000,000 a year to a small group of 200 cartoonists. How they rose to the top and how you can enter their select circle is told here by leading comic artists.
THAT laugh you had today over your favorite funny strip is worth money— $200 to $1,000 a day to the cartoonist that made you chuckle.
His pen and ink characters are part of a great $8,000,000 industry that is far from overcrowded and that is practically depression proof.
Of the 200 successful cartoonists today the majority were not “born artists.” In many cases they were not artists at all, but just fellows with a knack for sketching who thought of a good idea or a funny character that “made a hit” with an editor and eventually with newspaper readers.
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Amazing! If the President wants to talk to an admiral at Pearl Harbor the call can be connected in under 10 minutes!
The WHITE HOUSE Talks to the WORLD
WHAT might properly be called the “number one” telephone in the nation is listed in the Washington phone book as National 1414. This is the official home of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Better served is he by telephone than any other person in the world. Better by far than any President we’ve ever had.
At any moment, day or night, Mr. Roosevelt can select any one of 150 phones and talk with friends, official emissaries of our government, in fact, anybody in almost any nation in the world. Sixty different countries are now linked by telephone service. These countries have an aggregate of over thirty million telephones, according to official estimates, of which some eighteen million are on the North American continent and over ten million in Europe.
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Filling in the Hudson to Rebuild New York
by ALFRED ALBELLI
PLUG up the Hudson river at both ends of Manhattan . . . divert that body of water into the Harlem river so that it might flow out into the East river and down to the Atlantic ocean . . . pump out the water from the area of the Hudson which has been dammed off … fill in that space . . . ultimately connecting the Island of Manhattan with the mainland of New Jersey . . . and you have the world’s eighth wonder—the reconstruction of Manhattan!
That is the essence of the plan proposed by Norman Sper, noted publicist and engineering scholar. It is calculated to solve New York City’s traffic and housing problems, which are threatening to devour the city’s civilization like a Frankenstein monster.
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