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Uncle Sam’s School for Sailors

WHEN you march through the main gate of the Naval Training Station at San Diego, Calif., as a raw recruit you leave the land behind. You will spend two months learning to be a sailor before you are assigned to the battle fleet but even though you are still on dry land, things are a lot like they are at sea.

In a couple of days you will know that a floor is really a deck and you’ll not make the mistake of calling a bulkhead a wall. You will ask whether the smoking lamp is lit instead of whether you may smoke and you will be telling time by ship’s bells instead of by hours.

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ARE YOU FIT to DRIVE an Automobile?

Modern cars have become engines of destruction in hands of unsafe drivers. Here is the story of what science is doing to rate drivers’ abilities and make streets and highways safe.

by JOHN C. HARPER

THIRTY thousand people—one every fifteen minutes—were killed by automobiles in the United States last year.

During the same period 850,000 others were injured—an amazing average of one casualty every thirty seconds of the entire year.

In the hands of the unsafe driver, the modern automobile has become a terrible engine of potential destruction. Speeds of 80 and 90 miles an hour are virtually standard in all present cars; yet a speed only slightly higher—100 miles an hour—was condemned last year by the rules committee of the Indianapolis Speedway as having “gone beyond the physical limitations of the track for safe driving.”

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Inventors Patent Odd Designs for Safer Airplanes
Unusual ships, straying away from accepted designs, are being tried in an effort to increase safety and simplify air travel. Some of the ideas are shown here.

Toy Train Delivers Rural Mail

“NECESSITY is the mother of invention.” An Oregon rancher, living a mile from the highway, proved the truth of this old maxim when he put the world’s smallest mail train in operation over a spur line between his home and the road to save his wife the trip.
The train, powered with small dry-cell batteries, makes the trip to the road every morning, pulling a tiny mail box. Upon arrival, it is stopped by a lever laid along the track.

TAXI PLANE Picks Up FREIGHT And Passengers for AIRLINER
HIGH speed taxi planes that can come and go from a giant “mother” air transport at
will are proposed as a means of providing fast, non-stop transcontinental air service. The smaller ship, released over a city, would land at the airport to discharge and take on passengers and freight, then soar upwards again to catch up with the slower airliner.
As may be seen from the sketches, the method of launching the taxi plane is very similar to that used by the U. S. Navy in handling pursuit planes on dirigibles. A trapeze crane lifts the small ship into the hull of the transport, where passengers may be transferred to roomy quarters on the airliner.

This reminds me of all those persistence of vision gadgets like clocks and hubcaps.

Autogiro Blades Form Screen for Floating Ads After Dark

DISPLAY advertising at night by means of a magic lantern suspended beneath an autogiro, with the rotating blades serving as a screen, is a German inventor’s latest medium for placing a product before the public eye.

The magic lantern assembly is placed in a torpedo shaped carriage equipped with vertical and horizontal rudders to keep it in perfect alignment with the autogiro flying above. It can be raised or lowered by means of a cable, for focusing the advertiser’s message on the blades. When landing, the projector is drawn up into the fuselage.

To insure perfect reproduction of the advertisement, the under sides of the rotor blades are specially treated. The autogiro has been found to be particularly adapted for this type of aerial advertising because of its ability to hover almost motionless in the air, while the blades revolve fast enough to form an uninterrupted screen.

HILL HOPPING A WORM DRIVE SLED

FROM California comes a radical innovation in motor driven vehicles, a worm drive ski-sled. Powered by a 35 horsepower engine, it negotiates the steepest, roughest inclines with ease, and on level snowfields has attained speeds of twenty and more miles per hour.
With a more powerful motor, considerably higher speeds are expected, and the initial success of the experimental model may lead
to an entirely new sport in the form of motor ski racing and jumping. In order to achieve the latter sport, it will be necessary to mount the runners on shock struts, both to protect the worm-drive blades and the rider. This would be a simple matter.
More practical vistas opened by this novel sled lie in its adaption to the needs of Arctic exploration parties in their long treks over snowbound wastes.

Plane Wing Carries 14 Men
SOVIET military aviators have converted an ordinary two-seater airplane into a troop transport carrying 14 soldiers by building a special compartment onto the bottom of the plane’s lower wing. The men lie in a prone position within the compartment and are fully protected from the wind.
In test flights the converted plane earned 14 men and gas spreading equipment with a total weight of 4,400 pounds at a speed of 111 m.p.h. The plane will be used in time of war to land special troops behind enemy lines, a military strategy resembling Soviet experiments with mass parachuting of troops. The plane can also be used to transport wounded soldiers to base hospitals.

Nickel Meter Stops Overparking
OKLAHOMA CITY is cashing in on its car- parking problem by charging all motorists a nickel to park for from 15 minutes up to an hour, depending on location. At each parking space on the curb is a nickel meter. When a nickel is inserted, a clock mechanism raises a red indicator for the allotted time. The traffic policeman, on making the rounds, passes out tickets where no indicator is showing.

Daring Bird-Man Soars At 10,000 Ft. On Homemade Wings

FOR three years Clem Sohn, parachute jumper of Lansing, Michigan, dreamed of the time when man might go aloft and soar like a bird. Recently his dream became a reality.

Clad with foot-webbing and home-made wings of airplane canvas, he bailed out of a ship at an altitude of 12,000 feet. During the first 2,000 feet of his fall, he kept his wings folded at his side while he tested his leg-webbing. Slowly, he opened his wings to check his descent, and for more than a minute he banked, looped, climbed and zoomed to right and left. At 6,000 feet he pulled the rip cord of his parachute and floated back to earth.

While aviation authorities who witnessed the stunt failed to see any practical value in man’s new “conquest of the air,” Sohn was already at work designing bigger wings and planning future aerial maneuvers.

God, are we really this lazy?
Oh wait, yes we are.

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For Shopping, Golf-And Fun!

OF COURSE the lady seen above will have to add a windshield, light, horn and a license plate or two if she wants to take her Ramble-Seat on the road. But around the marina, plant, resort or golf course, it’s ready for use as is. This nifty electric is sold by Ramble-Seat, Box 74786, Los Angeles 4. Calif. It comes in a variety of models, some rugged, some for use as powered wheel chairs. Optionals are available to meet state vehicle codes. For maneuverability and versatility it’s hard to beat.—John and Irene Lenk

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Aero-Drive Desert BUS Replaces Camels
PROTECTED from tropical sand storms, desert travelers of the future may be able to whiz across the Sahara in monster 100-passenger aero-drive buses following radio beam highways. Camel caravans
would be out-moded bythe standard of comfort possible in the proposed buses.
Preliminary details of this whirring, bouncing giant of the sands call for propulsion entirely by air, with a 2500 h.p. aviation engine and pusher propeller mounted atop the roof. Most unusual feature of the desert bus is a series of spherical tires on each side which would provide good traction over the shifting sands. Directly back of the propeller is a steering fin which controls the direction of the ship.