CHRISTMAS AT MACY’S
As becomes the world’s largest store, it is prodigious, furious and for cash only In the last four weeks before Christmas, R. H. Macy of New York, the world’s largest store, goes through a kind of retailing blitz. On the day after its Thanksgiving parade (opposite page), which initiates New York’s Christmas season, an augmented staff of more than 14,000 sets furiously to work to sell everything in sight to an average 250,000 daily customers.
Macy’s is not merely the physically biggest store in the world, selling the greatest variety of items (400,000); it is also the world’s largest drugstore, bookstore, furniture store, liquor store, fabric and china store, for its departments handling these items all under one roof are bigger than any other store specializing in them.
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Cars Behind the Iron Curtain
Here are the new autos Russia and satellites are building—Detroit has no cause for alarm.
ZWICKAU P 70 assembled in the East German Audi plant has 2-cylinder. 2-cycle, 22-hp engine. Claimed top speed is 62 mph. Gas consumption 33 mpg. Car features Duroplast body and pan-carried spare tire which automatically drops when the lock is turned. Trunk is also accessible inside car.
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BLOWGUNS ARE HIS BUSINESS
Chuck Weisbecker has turned the silent Jivaro weapon into the latest California sport.
AT 14 Chuck Weisbecker began his blowgun career with a long brass tube and a sharpened bicycle spoke. While with the Marines in the Pacific he made another lung-powered airgun and went after bats, snakes and lizards.
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Of course, it’s all the slutty secretary’s fault! I’m sure he’s just disgusted that she feels the need to harass him like that.
Magnetic Secretary
SECRETARIES who prefer to sit on their boss’s laps while taking dictation may not like this new office aid, but for more efficient business it holds promise. The mechanical secretary is a little thirty-pound gadget called the Peirce (spelling correct) magnetic wire recorder. As the boss talks into the mike, his voice is transferred into electrical impulses. These are changed into magnetic impulses which magnetize a fine steel wire. When played back, the magnetic impulses revert to electrical impulses and are amplified into high fidelity soun
NEW IN THE AIR
VANGUARD 2C is new VTOL (above and at right) with ducted fans in wings, pusher prop in tail. Cruising speed is 165 mph.
KAMAN DRONE helicopter carries two torpedoes weighing 1,000 lbs. for 110 miles.
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Behold the Computer Revolution
By PETER T. WHITE National Geographic Staff
Illustrations by National Geographic Photographers BRUCE DALE and EMORY KRISTOF
MY WIFE IS MAD AT COMPUTERS. “Those awful machines,” she calls them. “How they mess up our credit card accounts! Imagine sending a bill for $232.24 every month for four months after you’ve paid it!”
But I’m not mad. That mixup was settled after five months; and we never did feel as computer-harassed as some Americans, notably the Kansan repeatedly reminded that his department store bill was “overdue in the amount of $00.00.” At last he too managed to pacify the computer— with a check for $00.00.
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A-POWERED TRAINS IN GLASS TUBES
They’ll give airliner speeds plus weather-free reliability.
By Frank Tinsley
THE train of the future, whipping passengers vast distances through continent-girdling tubes at speeds and in comfort far surpassing that of modern air travel, is no longer merely a dream in the minds of our more imaginative designers and engineers. This old idea (New York’s first working subway train was sucked through a tube) has been brought well within the realm of probability—and the hero of this advance is, as has so often been the case in the history of technology, a new material.
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THEY INVENTED A NEW HAT
TWO University of Southern California lads named Bob Tierney and Tom Morey started out to create a super surfboard of glass fiber and honeycomb paper—a heavier version of the kind used to make those Christmas bells. The surfboard broke in two, but they still had a lot of the honeycomb to play with. One day a friend took a disc of it, pulled it down over his head. Pouf! An amusing hat.
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