From Cook Stoves to Tanks . . . They Roll from the Automobile Factories
By SCHUYLER VAN DUYNE
THE Detroit genius for industrial organization is sorting out the sudden chaotic avalanche of defense orders with its customary frantic and incredible orderliness. It is responding to the fabulous impetus of something like a billion and a half in armament orders assigned by the U. S. Government to the automobile industry. The vast industrial center, already a huge magnet, drawing raw materials and manufactured parts selectively from many parts of the country, is being called upon suddenly for all its reserve power. Its standard products, such as automobiles, trucks, and their accessories, were in extraordinary de-mand, but now there are imperative pleas also for airplane, marine, and tank engines; for the airplanes and the tanks themselves and for antiaircraft guns, cook stoves, ammunition components, refrigerators, Diesel engines, and a conglomeration of other articles.
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How Radar Sentries Will Guard AmericaHow Radar Sentries Will Guard America
With a centrally controlled network like this, says the author, we could insure ourselves against an atom war Pearl Harbor.
By Frank Tinsley
ELECTRONIC watchdogs may save you from atomic destruction!
Just one sneak atom-bomb attack on a single target city would cost thousands of American lives and millions of dollars in vital property. Our only guarantee against such an atomic catastrophe is the creation of a system of overlapping search radars to warn us against approaching disaster.
The advent of 1000-mph raiders and long-range guided missiles cuts the margin of precious warning time. Our sentries must be posted far afield or the confusion caused by large numbers of missiles launched simultaneously could cause a breakdown just as the British spotting system was disrupted by V-2 attacks during World War II.
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Novel War Tank Resembles a Rolling Ball
ROLLING over the ground like a giant ball, a high-speed “tumbleweed tank” proposed by a Texas inventor is a new addition to modern war machines. A spherical hollow steel driving cab is inclosed by a rotating outer shell consisting of two cup-shaped halves fitted with circular traction cleats.
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Keeping the Army Busy in Peace Time
Aircraft, Wireless, Poison Gas and Even Cavalry Horses Put to Work to Aid Industry and Agriculture
WHAT does the army do in peace time besides getting ready for another war? For one thing it has converted war’s deadliest poison gas to such varied uses as repelling bank burglars, quelling riots and curing colds. It has kept the battle planes flying to locate forest fires and spray the boll weevil of the cotton fields with insecticides. The gas mask has been improved and is used by firemen, mine-rescue workers and employes of chemical plants. The best of the cavalry stallions have been placed at the disposal of farmers to breed a better type of work horse.
Strangely enough, the most horrible and de
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All the world trembles in fear at the sight of fierce American weaponry.
Well at least all the babies and midgets do.
BABY CANNON ADDED TO U. S. FIELD ARTILLERY
Latest addition to the artillery of the United States Army is a midget cannon, just large enough to take a .22-cal-iber cartridge. It is built exactly to scale, one inch to 100 inches, and reproduces, in all essential details, the larger guns. It enables artillerymen to practice sighting, elevating, and firing, without the expense of costly, large-caliber ammunition. By calculating the trajectory of the projectiles, the gunners’ work is simplified.
See! Little British dolls attach French bears all the time! That’s why you need Ford Instruments.
Duh.
about weapons systems
…AND FORD INSTRUMENT COMPANY
Aiming a gun or a rocket from one fast moving plane and hitting another supersonic craft is beyond human capabilities. The elements of speed, ballistics, range, direction etc., must be taken into account and the aiming point computed in milliseconds.
From its earliest days, Ford Instrument Company has been specializing in weapons systems — ranging from directors and drives for heavy naval guns to rocket launching computers, AA gunfire computers and aircraft weapons systems. Complete familiarity with the military requirements of accuracy, dependability and combat-ruggedness makes Ford-designed and Ford-built instruments among the finest our armed services have at their command.
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Why Don’t We Build… Voice Bombs
Dropped from bombers over hostile territory, midget tape recorders suspended from balloons could speak messages of propaganda directly to enemy soldiers.
By Robert Hertzberg
IT is an hour before dawn. Exhausted from long nights and days of continual battle, enemy troops are enjoying a brief respite, sleeping fitfully in their foxholes.
Suddenly the night air is shattered by a voice thundering from above. In a few minutes hiding places are emptied as the bewildered soldiers, startled into alertness, seek to identify this strange, new apparition. They listen as the voice speaks in their native tongue.
“Oppressed citizens of the dictatorship, this is the voice of friends advising you to surrender. Unless you turn on the cruel masters who forced you into a senseless war—unless you lay down the arms you have taken up against us—we will be forced to destroy you with our superior numbers and deadly weapons. Be smart—live! You outnumber your superiors a hundred to one—obey their treacherous orders no longer! Surrender! You will be treated fairly …”
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This doesn’t sound like a very safe idea…
MASKS TESTED WITH REAL POISON GAS
Tempting death daily is the lot of a few daring men in a London laboratory, where a steel-walled chamber containing an appreciable quantity of real poison gas is reported in use to test the air-purifying canisters of military gas masks. Masked experimenters sit outside the deadly chamber, and breathe through hoses that terminate in the canisters within. A white-coated physician stands near to render first aid, in case the poison-absorbing chemicals should fail to function. Only in this way can new types of equipment be tested.
War Tank on One Wheel OPERATED BY ONE MAN
SUDDENLY, through the drifting smoke of a hard-fought battle, rush weird, one-man fighting tanks. They have the appearance of disk wheels and roll like hoops across the battlefield. Pouring out machine-gun fire, they leap over trenches, vaulting across on strange steel crutches to pursue the disorganized enemy.
Such is the startling vision foreseen by a New York inventor. He has just obtained a patent upon a unicycle-type tank which he believes will revolutionize battlefield tactics.
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