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Trouble Busters

You toss them a tough problem and they toss back a tender solution.

BY MARGOT PATTERSON

“NO POTATOES,” the grocer said grimly.

“No potatoes?” the housewife exclaimed with emotion. “Why, I must have potatoes! My family needs potatoes!”

“Sorry, lady,” the grocer said. “There’s a shortage. It’s on account of the rot.”

Until 1938, this little scene was re-enacted annually all over the United States. Bacterial soft rot baffled shippers. It would spread through whole carloads of potatoes, causing losses of millions of dollars. Finally, the shippers put the problem in the hands of the Armour Research Foundation. Read the rest of this entry »

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the music goes ’round and ’round

People who like phonograph music are getting dizzy trying to keep up with three different systems of playing three sizes of disks.

By Robert Hertzberg

BUYING phonograph records used to be a simple and painless operation. You could walk into any music shop and say, “I want a few of the latest dance tunes for a party.” You’d depart in a few minutes with a neat bundle under your arm. But not any more!

“Phonograph records? Yes, sir,” the clerk now says. “Would you like 10- or 12-inch records for a 78-r.p.m. turntable, or 7-, 10-, or 12-inch records for a 33-1/3 r.p.m. machine, or 7-inch records for a 45-r.p.m. player? The prices range from 60 cents to $4.85.”
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HE TURNS TIN CANS INTO MONEY

One bright idea turned a rusty pile of cans into a shining fortune for Angelo Tersini, Tin Can Tycoon.

By John W. Aberle

ANGELO TERSINI, tin can king of Santa Clara, Calif., got his start salvaging tin cans in a garbage dump and selling them to scrap dealers. Wondering where the cans came from in the first place, he traced them back to the fruit salad canneries where canned pineapple from Hawaii was mixed with fresh fruit.

Tersini paid to put his trailers at each cannery’s dumpchute to collect the cans. Next he built a machine to cut out the seams and edges and make flat tin plate. This he sold abroad through an exporter in San Francisco and to breweries for bottle caps. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nutty Inventions Paid Me A Million

by RUBE GOLDBERG
Famous Cartoonist as told to Alfred Albelli

Four hundred inventions a year, all of them of exceedingly “nutty” brand, qualify Rube Goldberg, the famous cartoonist, as one of the country’s most prolific and best paid inventors. The fact that his inventions never get beyond the pen and ink stage doesn’t prevent him from “cleaning up” from them.

“How did you get that way? How do you do it? How do you get away with it? How do you get them to fall for your stuff? How are you, anyway?”

There you have the barrage of questions which are popped at me every day of my life, including days when the game is called on account of rain. It’s a good thing a humorous cartoonist has got a sense of humor. Or I might borrow from that jolly English expression and say, “It’s fortunate my humor is not bad.”
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Rocket’s Flight Kept In Sight

Gun-mounted camera eye keeps movie record of V-2 missile as it speeds into space at 3,500 miles an hour.

By Martin Mann

POPEYE is a seeing machine. Popeye can see things yon can’t see. His big glass eye can follow a V-2 zooming 3,500 m.p.h, and tell you just what it does at the 100-mile peak of its flight. But even Popeye is no match for enemy guided missiles—he could not spot an attacking rocket soon enough to sound the alarm.
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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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New Electrical Wonders Work Living Room Magic

How do they work? Take a look inside the wireless TV control, switchless lamp, cordless clock.

By Martin Mann

AMAZE your friends! Just look at the TV and make it change channels or silence the commercial—while your hands are in your pockets. Make a lamp light when you wave your hand and mutter abracadabra. Lift the electric clock, its second hand sweeping merrily —but look, no wires!

Magic? Yes, sir. But not the kind you laboriously rig up yourself. These are new commercial marvels, available in stores around the country.
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That shoe tester looks like it has been taken right out of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

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Torture Tests Tell The Truth

Ingenious Machines in the National Bureau of Standards help bring to light unknown facts about peas, pants, pots and paints.

by James N. Miller

EVERY time you visit the dentist, break in a pair of new shoes, buy an electric light bulb, heat your home, drive an automobile, wind your watch or weigh your groceries, you are directly or indirectly affected by the work of scientists located in an enormous network of laboratories in an obscure section of Washington, D. C. This is the National Bureau of Standards, where a group of technical men seem to live in a complicated mechanical world that appears far afield from that of Mr. Average American Citizen. This Bureau of Standards, without the slightest exaggeration, is the nation’s and probably the world’s, greatest quality testing laboratory. Every day, in almost every conceivable way, it performs monumental tasks which help make life healthier, safer, happier, more comfortable and more convenient for every one of us.
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Push-Button Manor
Jackson, Mich.

By Arthur R. Railton

REMEMBER those wartime dreams of lazy living in postwar homes with push buttons to do all the work? Well, like most of us, you’re probably still getting by in a house where the only push button rings the doorbell. But there’s at least one fellow who is making those dreams come true.

Emil Mathias of Jackson, Mich., traces his mechanical aptitude back to his youth when he harnessed the wind to grind the family’s weekly supply of coffee. A small windmill, some gears, a shaft or two, all went together to create a power coffee grinder that Mathias still remembers as one of his favorite devices.
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Swimming Students Learn Strokes From Machine Teacher
ON a casual glance at the contraption shown in the photo at the left, you would think it one of Rube Goldberg’s latest inventions. But you’re wrong, for it’s a machine to teach perfect swimming strokes. The student rests in a belt cradle as shown, while his feet and hands connect with handles in the mechanical arms. A system of gears and levers to which the guide arms are connected serve to compel movements that conform to correct outlines as set forth by swimming experts.

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WORKSHOP WIZARD on the Stage

By William J. Duchaine

RUSSELL E. OAKES of Waukesha,

Wis., has been “making things” ever since he was big enough to wield a jackknife. Away back when makers of electric drills offered lathe attachments, Oakes had the yen for power tools. So he started equipping his shop, suffering occasional pangs of guilt over such an “extravagance,” and never dreaming he was laying the foundation for one of the most unusual careers in the U. S.
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Electronic-Music Maestro

YOU’RE a radio repair man, why don’t you build me an electric organ?” If Burton Minshall heard that suggestion once, he must have heard it a thousand times from his wife, Madalene. As a matter of fact, Madalene nagged her husband so often about an electric organ that Burton decided to do something about it and end her nagging.

He began by saving odd parts like vacuum tubes, sockets, chokes and assorted pieces of wire and cable. He found an old reed organ in a junk shop which he bought for a song. Then he chopped it up and salvaged its physical movement. When he found another old, worn-out reed organ, he saved the five octave keyboard.
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