When Inventors Pull Boners…
Many gadgets didn’t succeed at first. Some initial attempts were amusing and others nearly ended in disaster.
By Douglas Greene
IF the invention you have struggled with for so long has kicked you, literally or figuratively, in the face, take heart. You are not alone. Be thankful, at least, that it wasnt your 280-pound tank that ran amok in the living room, nor was it your burglar alarm that worked so faithfully it trapped its own inventor.
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Strange Facts about Power Age
WHAT has the power age done for America? Experts now give the United States credit for performing half the useful work of the world. This means that Americans, with the help of science and invention, accomplish as much work as 1,875,-000,000 people in other parts of the world, or that one-sixteenth of the world’s population now performs as much work as the other fifteen-sixteenths. This is not a chance guess, but is based on a recent world survey by Prof. T. T. Read, of Columbia University.
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Machine Measures Thought but Is No Mind Reader
Thoughts, as well as actions, can speak louder than words, according to Dr. Milton Metfessel, of the University of Southern California, when they are hitched up to an ingenious device he has just invented. Those thinking processes which go on so silently within people’s heads are, he says, actually the expression of powerful forces at work, nerve impulses flashing from one end of the brain to the other along complex networks of nerve fibers.
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That’s actually a kind of cool idea.
CIGARETTE IS LIGHTED BY SCRATCHING END
Cigarettes that light themselves without matches have been made before, but this novelty in a new form has just been introduced by a San Francisco manufacturer. Ten cigarettes are packed in a box, each provided with a tip of yellow composition. Scratched like a safety match, upon a special surface of the box, a flare results that lights the cigarette.
A strong wind does not interfere with the lighting, according to the maker. He claims his composition is free of objectionable taste in burning, overcoming the principal problem of other inventors who have sought self-lighting cigarettes.
Play Tag with Dynamite!
IF YOU had the job of handling fifty-seven varieties of death in a day, could you keep your nerve? Could you avoid the one mistake that might blast you to kingdom come? Here is the thrilling story of experts who risk their lives to make high explosives safer for everyone to use.
By EDWIN KETCHUM
CANNONS boom and underground blasts rock the earth at one of the world’s strangest laboratories— the U. S. Bureau of Mines’ experimental station at Bruceton, Pa. Here “explosive engineers” risk death a dozen times a day, handling nitroglycerin and deadlier substances, in an effort to find a blasting agent that miners, farmers, and highway engineers may use in safety.
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All Ready, Lift! Brains only Need for Strength Feats
FEATS of strong men all remind us—” no, that’s wrong as far as quoting poetry is concerned! What we do want to say is that brains — not strength — is the prime need for all these stunts we see performed almost every day.
Take the case of a small 100-pound girl. She can resist the efforts of the strongest man who strives to lift her from the floor by getting him to place both his hands on her waist. Unnoticed and quite unconsciously her right hand rests on his left wrist and her left on the jugular vein region of his neck. With a slight outward pressure of the left hand and a gentle pressure downward with the right, the strong man’s strength is deflected.
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