World's oldest plastic will shield health and machines.
THE PET idea of self-styled camouflage experts early in the war was to build warplanes of glass so that they could not be seen. Glass airplanes never flew, but glass is being used, because of its strength, in airplanes, artificial arms and legs, bulletproof armor, arctic clothing, boats and canoes, fertilizer, surgical bandages and fillings for teeth. One large glass company now is producing glass in more than 4,000 different forms and has experimental projects covering some 300 more potential uses.
By HAL BORLAND
IN CHICAGO there is a steely-faced banker who would rather duck into his cellar on a sunny Saturday than shoot 19 holes of golf. In Hollywood there is a movie actor who prefers tinkering with old clocks to night-clubbing along the Strip. In Boston there is an auto mechanic who passes up the movies to sneak back to the shop and whittle bronze into chessmen. All over America, the breed of male who keeps the cellar light on half the night is increasing.
Who are these artists who scorn the conventional pastimes, and why do they do it? To be blunt: Are workshoppers wacky? Most of their wives think so, and some of their best friends are sure of it.
But what is a workshopper, anyway?
Gliding out of a fog and into fair visibility, a C-47 prepares to land at the Navy's Landing Aids Experiment Station, Areata, Calif. The flames burning off the mist are part of a new fog-dispersion system called ELMER—a refinement of Britain's wartime FIDO.
At a central control board, an operator turns on lights and fog-chasing burners at Areata. ELMER has cut the costs of landing a plane in a fog to $150 as compared with the $4,000 average expense of using FIDO.
ELMER, in full glory below, is a line of tri-nozzle heads that atomize Diesel oil under high pressure and shoot curtains of flame into the air on both sides of the runway to vaporize the fog. A hot-wire setup provides instantaneous ignition of the oil.
How Nylon Yarn is Made NYLON, silk’s young but overwhelming rival, is spun out of air, water and coal. The drawings at the right take the raw materials through the process that chemists worked out in the 1930s to produce the tough, lustrous thread. About 90 percent of this yarn is used today in the [...]
This year's mechanical marvels are sturdier, more realistic —and more expensive.
