SELF-OPENING TABLE
Pressing a button, set in the side of this bridge table, automatically opens all four of the legs at once.
ALL-METAL LAUNDRY CHUTE. A door in wall or floor of the bathroom opens to this laundry chute down which soiled clothes slide to a container in the basement. Photo at right shows arrangement of chute in the basement where clothes are removed.
PROPELLER RING RAISES PLANE’S SPEED That the speed of an airplane may be increased from thirty-nine to 140 percent by putting a ring around the propeller is the discovery announced by two Compton, Calif., inventors. The circular cowling is said to straighten out the air blast of the propeller and increase its effectiveness. Vanes within [...]
MOUNTING TOY PLANE A discarded set of toy chime wheels and an old airplane toy, if placed at opposite ends of a 3-ft. length of broomstick, will give a small boy many hours of fun playing aviator. It is best to mount the plane at such an angle to the stick that it will be [...]
STEEL CANOPY GUARDS STONE AGE BUILDING Government engineers have just erected the odd steel umbrella pictured above to shelter from the elements a twelfth-century pueblo watch-tower in Arizona. Archeologists consider the mud-walled structure the most important of its kind. The Stone Age builders bored two holes in the walls, so aligned that beams of the [...]
You have probably seen amusing little animal novelties made by twisting pipe cleaners together, hi most cases they are comical enough, but stiff and grotesque— almost childish. It is therefore a revelation to see, from the illustrations accompanying this article, what lifelike results can be obtained by one who is skillful at this pastime.—The Editor.
SCHOOL USES MACHINE TO MARK ALL EXAMINATION PAPERS School children of Ironwood, Mich., now have their examination papers marked and graded by robot scorers. In a test, a student is handed a list of questions with a choice of several possible answers, together with a supplementary card bearing numbers corresponding to the answers. He uses [...]
Powerful Ray Speeds Radio Program Across Half-Mile of City Buildings RADIO fans witnessed a twentieth-century marvel, the other night, when they listened to a radio program transmitted over a ray of light.
High in the tower of the Chrysler Building, in New York City, an orchestra played before a microphone. No land wire linked it to the broadcasting studio half a mile away. Instead, the blue beam of a 50.000-candlepower searchlight sped the music across intervening rooftops.
Because the idea of making the entire area a non-smoking zone would just be unthinkable. GUARD OIL FIELD WITH CIGARETTE LIGHTER An electric cigarette lighter, shielded from the weather by a small roof, is an odd sight at a corner of a Beaumont, Texas, oil field. So dreaded a hazard is fire here that workmen [...]
WITH its deep, mellow notes, the electric organ is fast gaining the musical limelight. As a rule, these instruments are large and costly. Yet, for the price of a new hat, you can build a duplicate of a small organ that was featured in a recent coast-to-coast radio broadcast.
By Robert E. Martin
SPELLBOUND at a microscope, Prof. Charles B. Lipman, University of California biologist, recently gazed at what he believed to be the first living creatures from another world ever observed. Tiny germs—some round, some rod-shaped—swarmed beneath the lens. Despite their minute size, they were as fascinating to a scientist as any hypothetical man from Mars.
If Prof. Lipman has correctly explained the germs' origin, they came to earth carried by a flaming meteorite from the voids beyond our planet! Here, after centuries of speculation, seems the first credible indication that life exists outside the earth. To test the possibility that living things might exist in other worlds, Prof. Lipman acquired a number of stone meteorites that had fallen on the earth. He proposed to grind these to powder and drop the powder in suitable culture media to see whether germs would grow. If so, evidence would be strong that the germs had survived the cold of the journey through space, the heat of the flaming meteor when it struck the earth's atmosphere, and the years the meteoric stone had rested on the ground or in a museum case. Of course it would be necessary to take extraordinary precautions to make sure the meteorite was uncontami-nated by bacteria from the earth.
Steel Shield for Policemen is Bullet-Proof Bullets crashed and ricocheted recently in an exciting test of a new shield for policemen at Chicago, Ill. Mounted on casters, the four-foot shield of specially hardened metal affords protection for one police officer in storming barricades or entering besieged houses in the face of gangster fire. As he [...]
THREE FACES ON ONE PORTRAIT Depending upon the position from which it is viewed, an ingenious slotted sign recently erected in Moscow, Russia, shows the portraits of Karl Marx, the father of socialism, Nikolai Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution, and Joseph Stalin, present head of Soviet Russia. On the face of the magic sign [...]
Recent Operations of a Sensational Nature Are Described for You in This Article, Fifth in Our Series Dealing with Modern Surgery
By Frederic Damrau, M. D.
LIFE-SAVING by surgery, the most dramatic phase of modern medicine, now includes the removal of whole organs from the human body. This is one of the most recent daring advances in the technique of the operating room.
Miracles of this kind, performed again and again, have proved you can live without a stomach, with one of your lungs entirely removed, with a kidney gone, and even with part of your brain taken away by the surgeon's knife!
At the famous Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn., two years ago, a man nearly seventy years old, had his entire stomach removed. Afterwards, he could eat anything he could before and he could digest it better.
RUBBER SLAPPER OUSTS THE POLICEMAN’S CLUB Rubber slappers have taken the place of wooden clubs familiarly known as billies, in the hands of Indianapolis police. Invented by Chief of Police Michael Mor-risey, of that city, the new weapon is a flat, heavy block of rubber with a slot for the fingers It is declared more [...]
THIS remarkable article tells you how the ingenuity and skill of motion picture directors solve the hard emblem of putting on the screen the forms and noises of animals that have been extinct thousands of centuries
by Andrew R. Boone
FROM the slime of tropical mud flats, the ghost voices of prehistoric monsters have reached the screen. Hisses and grunts of the pterodactyl and brontosaurus; roars from a tyrranosaurus, largest of the dinosaur family; groans and roars of an imaginary giant ape are reproduced by mechanical contrivances.
Kong, the ape, crashed through the heavy growth of an unknown forest, uttering fierce growls and beating his breast in rage. As the scene unfolded in silence before a small group of us in a tiny projection room, the studio sound experts discussed ways and means of re-creating his awful voice and the solid thumps of clenched hands against the massive chest.
Fairly ironic ad for a tobacco company… it’s fun to be fooled …it’s more fun to know Here’s a trick used in cigarette advertising. It is called “Coolness.” EXPLANATION: Coolness is deter-mined by the speed of burning. Fresh cigarettes, retaining their full moisture, burn more slowly … smoke cooler. Dried-out cigarettes taste hot. Camels are [...]
How JIG-SAW PUZZLES Are Made by the Million PUTTING jig-saw puzzles together is the latest craze to sweep over America. It has replaced the cross-word puzzle, the Tom Thumb golf course, and in many places has ousted contract- bridge. On this page are photos showing the steps in the manufacture of the millions of jigsaw [...]
USE SEESAW TO START STOPPED HEART A life-saving seesaw has been invented by a University of California scientist to revive those whose hearts have stopped, as the result of certain kinds of accidents. While oxygen is forced into the lungs and heat is applied to the body, the patient will be rocked steadily up and [...]
Use Old Automobiles to Furnish Power
Out of work and unwilling to remain idle, men in Pennsylvania have formed small groups and are working coal mines on their own, selling the output in neighboring towns. To supply the necessary power, they have rigged up old automobiles. The one at the right, geared to a shaker, is used to sort coal.
By Arpad KIRNER
French Engineer and Scientific Explorer
A SLENDER white thread, a rope of asbestos, rose straight above my head to the edge of the cliff. Below me were boiling lava and billowing fumes. Dangling at the end of the rope.
I was being lowered 800 feet into the mouth of an active volcano!
A steel helmet protected my head from flying rocks. My suit, my shoes, my gloves, were all made of asbestos. Strapped to my back, were oxygen tanks that enabled me to breathe amid the fumes. I was realizing a scientific adventure which I had planned for years.
My friends thought I was crazy when I announced my intention to explore the crater of an active volcano, to descend the depths of its enormous pit, to photograph the infernal vent-hole while it fumed and grumbled, to go where explosions rapidly follow one another and where phenomena, still mysterious, constantly occur.
ROBOTS STAGE REALISTIC PRIZE FIGHT Mechanical men stage an exciting boxing contest in a new game invented for amusement resorts. Two contestants play the game, each controlling one of the boxers with a hand wheel. Animated by a system of electro-magnets, the figures swing their gloves up, down, or sideways and duck with surprising realism. [...]
I have no idea if this worked, or if it was even real, but it sure does look cool. Recently Boston Dynamics has made a robot pack-mule that is somewhat similar. Here is a later article in Mechanix Illustrated with little tanks that look somewhat similar. HORSE OF STEEL RUNS ACROSS FIELDS A MECHANICAL horse [...]
LIGHT PRINTS TIME ON CLOUDS Once engaged in the development of a death ray for possible military use, H. Grindell-Matthews, British inventor, has developed a new gun for projecting light rays. A motor carriage supports the cannon-like projector, which is designed to throw signs upon clouds miles away, and is an improved model of one [...]
