Interesting article on the history and development of the lowly tin can. Also, if you have not yet been introduced to the techie crack that is the National Association of Manufacturers Blog, by all means, check it out. Every Saturday they post a video tour of a different factory or manufacturing process. One of my dreams has always been to make a Factory Tour tv show (without John Ratzenberger and all the promotional sound bites). Anyway, they have an excellent video showing the entire manufacturing process for tin cans here and it is very, very cool.

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ROMANCE Of The TIN CAN

CUT all the tin plate used annually to make the tin cans of America into a strip one foot wide and you can wind that strip around the earth fourteen times.

Or, to visualize it another way, take the five billion odd square feet of tin plate into which we put our fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, beer, paint, oil. candy, cheese and tobacco each year and it would be a simple matter to can the moon. You’d have the biggest cheese can ever made, and still have a lot of tin plate left over.

The vastness of tin can production has brought this familiar article into the lives of nearly every American family, for it is in this country that the greatest volume of tin cans is produced. A good year will find between eight and nine billion cans for the food racks of this country and this is the business that accounts for the major percentage of cans.

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Tired Of TV?
A certain New York executive was, so he took his 19 in. receiver, remounted the front on a swivel and now he and his friends find the set much more stimulating.

For 1956 that is actually an impressively small camera.

World’s Tiniest TV Camera
Telecasting of programs by means of a TV camera palmed in the operator’s hand is forecast as a result of the recent development of a new electronic device in West Germany. As shown in the photo (left), the video pickup is smaller than many microphones. Heart of the instrument is a miniature tube called the ‘Mini-Resitron.”

This camera works in pretty much the same way as conventional, larger TV “eyes,” converting optical images into electrical signals. Operation depends largely on a sensitive layer of semi-conductor material developed by Prof. I. Walter Heimann. The inside of the camera is an amazingly compact array of tiny components and intricate wiring. Subminia-ture tubes and other parts are clustered around the “Mini-Resitron,” while a flexible metal hose is wrapped around the cable that leads from the camera.

Still in the experimental stage, the new unit will probably go into production some time later this year.

Camera Gives Print in a Minute

NOW you can snap a picture and see it only a minute later. The camera that does this is an entirely new type. It’s the first production model of the Polaroid Land Camera (PS, May, ‘47, p. 150). It costs less than $100.
The camera uses a special film that gives you eight pictures. Each one costs just a little more than you’d pay for drug-store processing of ordinary prints of this size.
Contained in the roll of positive paper are eight tiny capsules of jellied reagent. When you advance the film after snapping a picture, a capsule is opened as it passes between two rollers. The jelly simultaneously develops the negative and forms a print. You pull out the print after a 60-second wait. For extra prints, you make another exposure or copy the original.
One control sets both shutter speed and lens opening. Numbers from 1 to 8 in an opening above the lens show whether the camera’s set for bright sun or poor light conditions. The camera has flash contacts.

This is actually a really good idea. Most fans have really irritating and balky aiming mechanisms. Where can I buy one of these?

Fan in Place of Light Bulb Makes Lamp Produce Breeze

You can turn a desk lamp into a ventilating unit with a recent German invention. It’s a compact fan that screws into any light-bulb socket. The three propeller blades are plastic and the device comes in a variety of colors.

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Black Light and the Criminal

Ultra-violet rays, now readily accessible to law enforcing bodies, adds another weapon to the arsenal of the government’s war on lawlessness.

THE use of filtered ultra-violet light for crime detection and identification purposes has been made available by the presentation of a comparatively low cost, yet powerful, efficient and portable black-ray quartz lamp. Specially formulated dark-colored Wood’s glass filters in the front of lamp hold back the visible light emitted by the mercury arc and allow only a concentrated beam of invisible ultra-violet, or “black light,” to pass. This ray cannot be seen by the eye, even in the dark or semi-dark, yet its radiations are absorbed by a wide variety of substances and instantly re-emitted as visible light of constant intensity and color.

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Machine Speeds Pretzel Bending

THERE are more crunchy pretzels to munch when you sip long, cold drinks this summer, thanks to a new automatic pretzel-twisting machine that rolls and ties them at the rate of 50 a minute—more than twice as fast as skilled hand twisters can make them. Developed by the American Machine & Foundry Co., of New York City, the pretzel . bender is helping to meet the increased demand of pretzel lovers, who eat millions of pounds each year. On this and the following page is the story of how pretzels march from raw dough to baked twist.

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Safety Belt Devised For Car
DESIGNED to hold passengers firmly in their seats in event of a crash so that they will not be thrown violently against the car interior, a newly developed safety belt for automobiles may eliminate injuries attributed to this cause.

And it only weighs 7lbs!

The Lens That Focuses Itself
Ever shoot an out-of-focus picture? Then you’ll be interested in the newest lens from Nikon. It focuses as automatically as your eye, and just as fast. You can just point and shoot at fast-moving subjects from athletes to zebras without giving focus a thought. As long as you keep your subject within the sensing circle in the center of your viewfinder, you’ll get sharp pictures. Any drawbacks? Sure. The lens is k big (11 inches long), heavy (it weighs six pounds including the batteries that power the autofocus mechanism), slow (f/4.5), and you won’t be able to buy one until next year.—A. J Hand

How does it work? Like this:

Light reflected from the subject passes through the first group of lens elements and is split by a ring mirror. Some of the light passes through the lens to the film plane. The rest is reflected down to the autofocus mechanism where a condensing lens forms an aerial image. The position of this image will vary according to distance of the subject. A contrast-sensing set of four photocells inside the autofocus system moves up and down the shaft of focused light. Every time the photocells pass through the point of focus (also the point of highest contrast) they send a pulse to the logic circuit. At each up-and-down cycle of the four cells, a clock pulse is fed to the logic circuit as well. A third pulse indicating the current focus of the lens also is transmitted to the circuit. The circuit takes the three pulse signals and converts them to a time signal. The time signal corresponds to the distance between the sharpest image position and the current focus position. An analog circuit and power amplifier actuate a servo motor that shifts the movable lens elements to bring the lens into focus. All this takes place several times a second—scanning, computing, and refocusing.

Devise Tiny Walking Radio

A NOVEL radio transmitter is used by representatives of the Columbia Broadcasting System to conduct roving interviews. The device consists of an antenna and radio frequency oscillator mounted in a cane, a microphone on a wrist strap, batteries in a money belt, and an audio amplifier and modulator in a binocular case. Working range is one mile.

Deaf Hear Through Head Bone

AN INVENTION for hearing by the conduction of sound through the bony structure of the head instead of through the outer ear was successfully demonstrated recently before the engineering society in New York.

How the contraption is worn is illustrated in the photo below. The heart of the instrument is a special transmitter worn on the clothing which intercepts the words spoken to the deaf or partially deaf person. This transmitter is connected to the oscillator which presses against the bony part of the cranium when the listening is to be done. Ordinarily, however, the oscillator is worn like a necklace around the throat as illustrated in the photo below.

Seedless Watermelon Produced by Student

Watermelons without seeds are produced by chemical treatment of watermelon blossoms, in a process perfected by Cheong Yin Wong, graduate student at Michigan State College, East Lansing. In the photograph, Wong holds a piece of seedless melon in his right hand.