WHEN you see stage and movie actors present the same play, you notice how much the stage action is limited by its few possible changes of scenery. To remove this handicap, a New York inventor proposes a combined stage-and-movie show, in which movies intermittently "double" for living actors.
By EDWIN TEALE
COVERED with dust and dumped higgledy-piggledy into a box of odds and ends, one of the first cameras ever used in the United States was discovered recently in a New Jersey attic. Almost 100 years ago, it produced some of the first "tintypes" seen in this country.
To commemorate the one hundredth birthday of photography, which the world is celebrating this year, Robert N. Dennis, a New York amateur, bought and renovated the ancient daguerreotype machine. Through its lens, he is photographing skyscrapers and other modern wonders undreamed of in the days of Louis Daguerre.
Hoodlike Gas Mask Protects Babies Three years of research have solved the grim problem of fitting babies with gas masks, according to the British designer of the model illustrated in use below. Rubberized gasproof fabric completely incloses an infant from the waist up in a capacious hood with a large cellulose acetate window. A hand […]
Calling Card Introduces Salesman—and Product Calling cards made of metal introduce salesmen for a new zinc-alloy product to prospective customers. Paper-thin, each card bears on the reverse side data on the composition and properties of the metal, while the card itself illustrates the precision that is now attainable in zinc-alloy die casting. A pressure of […]
I’m wondering what kind of emergency this would be good for? I suppose you could be camping somewhere when suddenly out of nowhere you get hit by a flash flood. You could all jump on your mattresses and float to safety. Or you could tow it behind your fishing boat… Mattress Doubles as Life Raft […]
This thing terrifies me, but at least he’s got a seat belt. It’s better than this one, or this one. Baby Goes for Car Rides in Homemade Armchair No conventional sling-type infant’s chair for automobile use would satisfy the baby-son of Lester Bresson, of Torrington, Conn., so Father constructed the armchair shown at the left. […]
By JOHN E. LODGE
THROUGH his powerful telescope atop the guard house at Venice, Calif., Myron Cox observed the figure of a young woman swimming slowly in the breakers. "Feet down, elbows out," he muttered. "Better get that baby."
Captain Cox, chief of the life guards who protect 10,000,000 bathers along the ocean beaches of Los Angeles, Calif., every year, raced down the stairs and grabbed up a hollow paddle board.
This guy is pretty good. Burnt-Match Portraits Made as Novel Hobby Making portraits with burnt matches is the unusual spare-time hobby of H. E. Moulds, a hairdresser of Worthing, England. Building up the faces of his subjects by placing matches side by side, Moulds uses the burnt ends to provide the shading for hair and […]
Homemade Chair Has Seventeen Aids to Comfort COMFORT-LOVING Bill Porter, East St. Louis, 111., handy man, takes no chances on having to get up for anything once he’s settled in his easy chair. For the chair, which Porter designed and built, is equipped with seventeen convenient accessories, including a radio, bookcase, electric fan, shoe-shining and […]
What movie does this remind you of? Piano Students Use Giant Keyboard WHEN Arthur Zahorik, a high-school music teacher in Milwaukee, Wis., tells a student to “run up the scales” he means it literally. For on the classroom floor stands a two-octave model of a giant piano keyboard, with white keys a foot wide, upon […]
I think that’s just a giant match. Match Dwarfs World’s Smallest Electric Motor Completely dwarfed in comparison with an ordinary kitchen match, a Lilliputian electric motor constructed in Switzerland by Ferdinand Huguenin is said to be the smallest in the world. Rated at five thousandths of a watt and driven by a two-volt battery, the […]
Puppets Made from Light Bulbs ELECTRIC-LIGHT bulbs and radio tubes form the basic materials with which Alfred Wronkow, of New York City, fashions the amusing caricature figures shown above. For the “social-light” wedding scene pictured, Wronkow used common household items to dress the principals and attendants at the fusing of “Claire Coppertop,” a dainty twenty-five-watt […]
Wow. Particle detectors have gotten a bit bigger in the past 70 years or so. Check out this picture of the new ATLAS detector going online at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Here’s a cool movie about it too. Particles of Smashed Atoms Traced by Special Camera Sixty-six separate photographic plates are employed in […]
By KENNETH M. SWEZEY
WATER, light, flame, music, and fireworks, synchronized into a vast extravaganza, are providing new entertainment thrills nightly as one of the most spectacular outdoor attractions of the New York World's Fair.
This Lagoon of Nations display centers in a giant fountain which rises from an oval lake two blocks wide by four blocks long. Water, geysering in beautiful patterns from 1,400 nozzles, is painted in constantly changing rainbow hues by batteries of powerful electric lights from below. At climaxes in a performance, towering gas flames roar through the columns of scintillating water, from more than a hundred jets. Showers of fireworks burst overhead. Stirring music thunders an accompaniment to the display from the heart of the fountain.
Tank Walks Tight Rope of Bridge Piles Like a Gargantuan beast stalking along a giant’s tight rope, an armored Russian tank is pictured in the unusual photograph above crossing a stream by rumbling over the tops of the piles of a dismantled bridge. The shot was made during the filming of a motion picture built […]
INVENTORS PROPOSE STRANGE PLANS TO BRING THE OLD DUTCH MILL UP TO DATE
IS THE windmill coming back? With strange, unconventional types, inventors are seeking to adapt it to a modern age. Their experiments may bring new success in man's effort for 800 years or more to harness the wind for power.
Centuries ago, people milled their flour, sawed wood, and pumped water with the picturesque European windmills whose enormous "sails" swept from earth to sky. This country contributed the smaller and more practical narrow-bladed type that pumps water on farms today. A new miniature design shaped like an airplane propeller charges storage batteries for radios and for lighting rural homes.
A MONSTER magic lantern that uses living models for its subjects, instead of films or slides, is making its debut at the New York World's Fair. Just as a post-card projector displays small opaque objects, so the new device, called a "magna-scope," throws a highly enlarged image of a man's face upon a translucent screen. Meanwhile, a microphone picks up the voices of the subject and operator, and the audience hears them through a loudspeaker, so that the effect is that of a talking motion picture projected as fast as it is produced.
Air-Raid Vault Uses Chain of Gas Masks Like smokers grouped around a Turkish bubble pipe, users of a new French air-raid shelter inhale from a common source. Tubes connect their masks with a single pipe leading from a battery of oxygen cylinders, as shown above. Thus they are constantly assured of pure air to breathe, […]
Tests for Balance O.K. High Heels A METAL pencil has just written upon smoked paper a vindication of high-heeled shoes for women. Testing their effect upon body balance, Dr. Walter Mendenhall, of Boston, finds that girls wearing the much-maligned footgear can often stand more steadily than barefoot subjects. The telltale pencil, attached by a headband, […]