REPTILE SNAPS OWN PICTURE WITH FLICK OF THE TONGUE
Too fast to be seen by the human eye, the long tongues of chameleons and toads dart in and out as they eat. Their tongue tips are tacky and the food, usually small insects, sticks to the tips and is thrown back into their mouths. To photograph the action, London Zoo technicians designed a trigger device that fires a Dawe electronic flash lamp as the tongue hits the food
Top, stopped by an exposure of two mil-lionths of a second, tongue of chameleon is fully extended as it darts after food. Below, a toad gets his dinner. Right, the circuit used in top pictures. For photos of toad, two copper plates were used, one for the toad and the second for the food. Tongue completes circuit by touching food plate. Current was too minute to be felt.

Pocket-Size Exposure Suit
Exposure, one of the biggest trials of airmen downed at sea, is curbed by an inflatable rubber suit small enough to be rolled into a pocket in the collar of a Mae West jacket. It weighs less than three ounces and provides air insulation against cold and damp. The suit is being tested in England and may soon be adopted as standard equipment for Royal Air Force crews.

Advertising Emblems Glow Weirdly In Cathode Ray Tubes
IN ONE of the most unusual of modern forms of advertising, trademarks mounted at the anode position of giant cathode ray tubes are painted in cold light of great brilliancy and dazzling color by electronic bombardment. Displayed in store windows, the tubes demonstrate to shoppers one of the many feats of the electronic tube, and at the same time display a business emblem.
Gilbert T. Schmidling, inventor of the first true cold light, coats these emblems with different chemicals, each giving off a certain color of cold light under electronic bombardment. Over 400 different shades, all of great brilliancy, have already been produced. Any number of colors may be obtained in one tube by using the different chemicals.

Women Stars Wrestle Under Water
ONE of the world’s strangest athletic events was held recently when Dolly Dalton, Canadian champion, engaged Dixie Taylor, southern women’s champion, in an underwater wrestling match at Silver Springs, Florida. The remarkable clearness of the water enabled spectators to follow every-move of the contestants. Good wind is essential for this strenuous sport.

It may look commonplace now, but in 1938 this was cutting edge. This is the ancestor of all those “hybrid” devices everyone is so fond of today. Whever you snap a picture with your camera phone, or make breakfast with your mp3 playing waffle iron, remember, it all started with the toilet shelf.

Tank Unit Creates Odd Shelf
PLACED on top of a toilet water tank, a new unit provides extra shelf space for bottles too large to place in a medicine chest. The unit is adjustable to various sized tops
and can be installed without tools and without marring the finish of the top.

This is pretty neat though it seems that you could just punch more than one hole for a question and get the answer right…

Scale Corrects Examination Papers
WHEN a Kentucky professor discovered that nearly 75 per cent of all students’
examination papers were incorrectly marked, he invented a robot examination corrector which automatically corrects 75,000 questions an hour without an error.
Prof. Noel B. Cuff of Eastern Kentucky State Teachers College is the inventor of the robot, called the testometer. The meter is used in true and false or in the multiple choice examinations in which the student is given a perforated card, the holes to be punched bearing the number of the question asked.
The perforated card is then placed on the testometer, and wherever the correct answer has been punched, a 1/4-ounce weight drops through the hole onto the scale. The total weight registered is the student’s mark.

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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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I love this: “…products of his versatile mind and stubby fingers.”

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Boy Genius Builds Complete Electrical Laboratory

by ORMAL I. SPRUNGMAN

From odds and ends of discarded equipment 13-year-old Franklin Lee has built a remarkably complete scientific laboratory. A few of his many successful electrical projects are described in this article.

NIMBLE fingers, an inventive mind, and. the urge to experiment have brought to 13-year-old Franklin Lee, Granite Falls, Minn., electronic wizard, a scientific research laboratory that would do credit to a college student of science.

In the well-lighted interior of his garage workshop powerful homemade electric motors turn lathes and grindstones. Standing by in one corner, ready for instant use, is an electromagnet capable of lifting a hundred pounds. Transformers of different sizes and voltages hum merrily in their baths of cooling oil, while in one corner metal glows white-hot in a homemade electric arc furnace. From discarded electrical equipment, auto parts, and odds and ends of cast-away materials Franklin built them all.

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Yes, at Bell Labs we’ve been disemvoweling you since 1956!

An intrstng exprmnt
in spch
Some day your voice may travel by a sort of electronic “shorthand” when you telephone. Bell Laboratories scientists are experimenting with a technique in which a sample is snipped off a speech sound —just enough to identify it—and sent by wire to a receiver which rebuilds the original sound. Thus voices can be sent by means of fewer signals. More voices may economically share the wires.
This is but one of many transmission techniques that Laboratories scientists are exploring in their search for ways to make Bell System wire and radio channels serve you more efficiently. It is another example of the Bell Telephone Laboratories research that keeps your telephone the most advanced on earth. The oscilloscope traces at right show how the shorthand technique works.
BELL TELEPHONE LABORATORIES
World center of communications research Largest industrial laboratory in the United States

This is the coolest boat model I’ve ever seen. You can ride around in it!

German Boys Build Scale Model Liners for Sea Cruises
EXPERT marine constructionists, between the ages of 9 and 16 are being developed in one of the most novel trade schools of the world at Potsdam, Germany. Under the tutelage of experienced marine engineers, the youths receive a thorough technical training in building exact replicas of real steamships on a scale of one to twenty.
Grades are given according to the aptitude and intelligence shown in building the model vessels. The plans from which the youth work are the same plans, scaled down, of such ships
as the Normandie and the Queen Mary. At the end of the school year, advanced students build models that can actually go to sea.

Battery Is Size of Paper Clip
Not much longer than a small-size paper clip is a new type of silver oxide-zinc battery. It uses a pile-type construction instead of plates. In dry-charged condition, it is capable of shelf storage for months.
The battery is activated by injecting a hypodermic needle into the top of each cell. Designed by the Raleigh, N.C., Engineering Laboratories of the American Machine & Foundry Co., under contract with the Air Research and Development Command, it will power special electronic gear where weight and size are important.

Cycle Engine Gives 50 m.p.h. Speed to Wheel Chair
A THREE-WHEELED chair built around a motorcycle engine brought Norman Tapper, 23-year-old Californian whose legs have been paralyzed since childhood, to Indianapolis almost a month before the start of the 500-mile auto race. The motorized chair was parked at the gate of the Speedway, to make certain of a good position on the day of the race.
Tapper asserted that this novel wheel chair, which he built himself from motorcycle and automobile parts, reached 50 miles an hour on the long drive from California to Indianapolis.