view additional pages

No Scents in this Business

By Thomas K. Worcester

Colorado couple earns up to $3,000 a year in novel sideline of raising skunks to sell as pets.

SKUNK pelts bring good money but a Lyons, Col. couple finds that the fur sells better when attached to live animals.

Through a venture which started as a small sideline business, Ken and Ardetta Barris now raise more than 100 skunklets a year for sale as pets to motorists who stop at their farm on the road to Colorado’s famous Rocky Mountain National Park. Ken and Ardetta became interested in skunk-raising several years ago after reading an article on profitable “polecat” culture.

In 1951 the Barrises ordered two pre-bred female skunks from a commercial breeding farm. That year, and every year since, they have been able to sell all the skunks they could raise.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

Flops of Famous Inventors

Edison, Ford, De Forest, and Bell Patented Strange and Useless Things

By GEORGE LEE DOWD, Jr.

DROPPING gently to the ground like a giant autumn leaf, a Pitcairn autogiro, or “windmill plane,” landed at the Newark, N. J., airport one afternoon a few weeks ago. More than 8,000 persons saw it descend almost vertically and then touch the field without rolling a foot.

The crowd, however, had not come merely to see the autogiro perform. It was attracted chiefly by the presence on the field of Thomas A. Edison, who visited the airport for his first sight of a “flying windmill.”

After expressing his admiration of the machine and his amazement at what it could do, Edison told airport officials that he once had invented a helicopter.

That was in 1908, long before the first measurably successful vertical flying machine had been designed, and just twenty-two years before a prominent aircraft concern built its first helicopter. In 1910, a U. S. patent was issued on the invention.
Read the rest of this entry »

Japanese Runners Wear Mitten Shoes
Accustomed in daily life to wearing sandals held on by straps passing between the first two toes, Japanese athletes run marathon races in odd shoes with divided tips. The big toe of each foot has a separate compartment, making it resemble a mitten.

WAR IN TOYLAND. German raiders who venture to make a landing on the Kentish coast of England will get a warm reception from this miniature armored train. Behind a puffing pint-size locomotive it patrols the narrow-gauge line of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railroad, which in peacetime carried bank-holiday pleasure-seekers to coast resorts for a bit of sea air. Crouching in the tiny armored cars, British Tommies man machine guns, eager to pot any Jerry wot shows ‘is bloomin’ fyce.

This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part One
Part Two

view additional pages

This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part One
Part Three

view additional pages

This article is huge (50 pages) so I’ve broken it up into three parts.
Part Two
Part Three

view additional pages

The Magic Worlds of Walt Disney

By ROBERT DE ROOS

Illustrations by National Geographic photographer THOMAS NEBBIA

ONE AUTUMN EVENING in 1928, a new actor appeared at the Colony Theatre in New York in a movie called Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon ever produced with sound. He had ears bigger than Clark Gable’s, legs like rubber hose, a grin wider than Joe E. Brown’s, and a heart of gold. His name was Mickey Mouse.

Beginning that night, Mickey and his creator, Walt Disney, grabbed the world’s funny bone and have never lost their grip.

The New York Times praised the new film as “ingenious.”

“A wow!” cried the Weekly Film Review.

Thus was born history’s most influential mouse. Mickey led the way in the development of anima-tion as a new art, to the exploration of the world of animals and faraway people and of their adventures and geography.
Read the rest of this entry »

TAIL LIGHT ON THE HEEL
Pedestrians may walk in safety along an unlit road at night, with a new tail light strapped to one heel. Under the rays of an automobile headlight, its reflector flashes a warning red signal to the driver.

Dictaphones Save Time of Stock Checkers Taking Inventory

By assigning five men equipped with dictaphones to the job of inventorying its 350-odd grocery stores regularly, the Safeway Stores on the West Coast has given its store personnel 12 extra nights off a year. A checker from the central office covers two stores a night, speaking into a microphone hung around his neck, as he moves along between the rows of goods, calling out the location of each shelf and the quantity, container size and price of each item. Usually eight cylinders are enough for each store, and after the record has been transcribed, the disks can be lathed down and used over again.

Wrist Watch for the Blind

A wrist watch that tells time in the raised characters of Braille is made by Longines-Wittnauer. To learn what time it is, the wearer lifts a spring cover that allows him to touch the hands and the dots on the dial. When the cover is released it snaps shut automatically, thus protecting the face of the watch.

Operation in Real-Time . . .
In the field of missile development, there’s only one commercially available digital computer capable of real-time performance — the famous Univac® Scientific. It’s the ideal system for flight simulation and for on-line data reduction. It solves complex problems from purely sensed data at speeds that are compatible with real-time control.
Read the rest of this entry »

view additional pages

SEX WORRIES of TEENAGE BOYS

DR. KIRKENDALL is Professor of Family Life Education at Oregon

State College. Author of “Sex Education as Human Relations” and many other writings, he is recognized as one of the outstanding authorities in the field of sex education.

This article is the first in a series which Dr. Kirkendall will write from time to time on sex worries and concerns of adolescent boys. The information was obtained through a combination research – counseling procedure which Dr. Kirkendall has used for a number of years. He developed a check list of worries and concerns which he has since given to hundreds of individual boys whom he has met in high school and college classes. After each boy has marked the check list, Dr. Kirkendall has discussed the indicated worries or concerns with the boy. Thus the information and illustrations in the article come from dealing at firsthand with the problems of adolescent boys. Dr. Kirkendall received financial support for his study from the E. C. Brown Trust.
—The Editors
Read the rest of this entry »