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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Well, we do have flat-screen computers you can write on that fit in a briefcase, but I’m still waiting to take my 250 MPH car to a business meeting in another domed city. Perhaps by the end of the year.
40 Years in the Future
By James R. Berry
IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wow, it’s pretty hard to imagine a time when copper was cheaper than paper.
Write Letters on Copper “Paper”
ARIZONANS have thought up a clever idea for getting rid of the surplus copper mined in the state. They are making the metal do duty as paper, and writing business and personal letters on it. The sheets are one-thousandth of an inch thick, and according to testimony make very substantial material for typing. Below is shown a steno inditing a letter on one of the copper sheets of business stationery.
This is a weirdly disjointed tale of William Beebe’s Dr. S. H. Williams attempt to find a “lost world” full of dinosaurs in what is now Guyana. Beebe makes constant reference to his guide/pack mule as “my black” or “my faithful black” yet never mentions the man’s name. He also gets quite upset with his Indian guides because they were only willing to travel with him a certain distance from their homes. Obviously this meant that he was really close to finding his “lost world” and they, being the cowardly savages that they were, refused to get any closer for fear of dinosaur attack. After all, how could they abandon him after he’d so generously provided them with colored beads and calico?
Then there is this:
“Well, the little boat was chug-chugging merrily along when all of a sudden a chicken which we were keeping on board for future reference seemed to experience an unguarded moment. For with a tremendous swishing of feathers it flew overboard.”
Keeping a chicken for “future reference”? Is that a euphemism for “future consumption”? Or did he periodically examine it just to affirm that yup, it’s still a chicken?
Update: I read the intro to this completely wrong. The explorer was Dr. S. H. Williams not William Beebe. Sorry for the mix-up.
Braving Jungle Perils to Seek the Lost World
By JAMES NEVIN MILLER
In the heart of the British Guiana jungle there rises a huge plateau upon which, legend has it, there exists today scores of prehistoric reptilian monsters. The story here presented is that of a scientist’s thrilling search for the lost plateau.
A STRANGE story about yellow Indians; mice that look like kangaroos; eels able to give a man a substantial electric shock; armies of ants that number millions and march in regular formation for over six hours continuously while driving all animal life before them; rivers chock-full of weird-looking parasites; and waterfalls at least five times higher than our own spectacular Niagara, is told by Dr. S. H. Williams, naturalist of the University of Pittsburgh. Read the rest of this entry »
