Next time you bitch about trying to get your video blogging software to work, check out what this guy had to scrape together to get an amateur TV station running in 1949. He built a garage full of equipment and had three giant antennas.

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Radio ‘Ham’ Builds TV Station

California amateur sends voice and picture over transmitter made from $500 worth of war-surplus parts.

By Andrew R. Boone

PULSING through the California skies from a weather-beaten back-yard shack, the image of a beautiful brunette flows into television receivers around San Francisco Bay. The boys who have seen her call the vision Gwendolyn.

Reproduced by a collection of secondhand tubes and war-surplus video equipment, Gwendolyn represents the first standard TV image broadcast successfully and repeatedly by an amateur. Soon, from the same station, W6JDI-TV, radio ham Clarence Wolfe, Jr. hopes to televise live images.
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Words I never thought I’d say: “Wow, that girl in the Iron Lung looks sexy!”

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Metal Lungs Give Life

DEATH stands at the hospital bedside, waiting. Beneath the covers, a gasping youngster rights for breath. He is a’victim of infantile paralysis. Slowly, cruelly, the dreadful fingers of paralysis clutch at the chest muscles which pump the breath of life through his body. Soon those muscles will cease to function and the youngster will cease to breathe.

But death has not reckoned with the mechanical ingenuity of man.
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Here’s the easy, effective way to trim down waist, abdomen, hips, thighs!

New Inflatable Air Shorts provide pneumatic support plus massage to help you slenderize where you need it most!

This may well be the easiest, most comfortable trim-down method you’ve ever tried. All you do is slip into these astounding new slenderizing shorts and inflate them with the little hand pump we provide. Then merely do a few simple exercises, housework or any usual daily activity. What happens after that is likely to amaze you. The puffy, snug-fitting pockets of air which surround you actually work to provide gentle pneumatic support plus effective massage while they generate additional body heat.

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Metalized Window Curtain Aids in A-Bomb Protection

Heavy canvas window curtains, specially treated, are designed to give partial protection from the effects of an A-bomb blast. The curtains are metalized with aluminum and lead. They will help protect persons inside a building from flying glass, radioactive dust and flash burns, according to the manufacturer. They are said to be effective at distances beyond 2600 feet of the explosion. When not in use, the curtain rolls against the upper part of the casement like a window shade.

That is some pretty amazing camouflage there. Why, I almost mistook them for trees. Trees with binoculars and handguns….

Soldiers Wear Camouflage
The men in the above picture are not inhavitants of Mars. They are only British soldiers, wearing camouflage in their helmets during a mimic battle.

Really interesting article from the 40’s about combating VD. Both in terms of medical treatment (the new wonder drug penicillin) and in terms of health education (removing the taboo from talking about VD). It’s also really interesting to see the how little has changed in regards to the balance between curing illness and “promoting sexuality”. This quote from the article:

Not all experts see this as an unmixed blessing. Dr. John Stokes, syphilologist of the University of Pennsylvania, is worried about the effect on morals. “If extramarital sexual relations,” he has said, “lead neither to significant illness nor unwanted parenthood, only a few intangibles of the spirit remain to guide children of the new era from an outmoded past into an unbridled future.”

Is very similar to this one regarding the recent HPV vaccine

“Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV. Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.” – Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council

The basic idea being that people should be punished for having sex outside of marriage.

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The New Attack On Venereal Disease

Tent shows, hill-billies and a new drug are some of the weapons which may relegate syphilis and gonorrhea to the text-books in a few years

A carnival tent show in a Michigan State Fair (top photograph and opposite page) and a little bottle of creamy white liquid (above) are the new shock troops in a two-front war against venereal disease. Between them, they may wipe out this scourge of mankind within the next ten or twenty years.
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Black Light and the Criminal

Ultra-violet rays, now readily accessible to law enforcing bodies, adds another weapon to the arsenal of the government’s war on lawlessness.

THE use of filtered ultra-violet light for crime detection and identification purposes has been made available by the presentation of a comparatively low cost, yet powerful, efficient and portable black-ray quartz lamp. Specially formulated dark-colored Wood’s glass filters in the front of lamp hold back the visible light emitted by the mercury arc and allow only a concentrated beam of invisible ultra-violet, or “black light,” to pass. This ray cannot be seen by the eye, even in the dark or semi-dark, yet its radiations are absorbed by a wide variety of substances and instantly re-emitted as visible light of constant intensity and color.
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Machine Speeds Pretzel Bending

THERE are more crunchy pretzels to munch when you sip long, cold drinks this summer, thanks to a new automatic pretzel-twisting machine that rolls and ties them at the rate of 50 a minute—more than twice as fast as skilled hand twisters can make them. Developed by the American Machine & Foundry Co., of New York City, the pretzel . bender is helping to meet the increased demand of pretzel lovers, who eat millions of pounds each year. On this and the following page is the story of how pretzels march from raw dough to baked twist.
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Britain Demonstrates “Sombrero” Flame Thrower

Dubbed the “ack-pack,” Britain’s new flame thrower has an odd-shaped fuel tank that looks like a Mexican sombrero strapped to the soldier’s back. The weapon is shorter than most flame throwers of previous design. A length of flexible hose connects the fuel tank with the gun.

Safety Belt Devised For Car
DESIGNED to hold passengers firmly in their seats in event of a crash so that they will not be thrown violently against the car interior, a newly developed safety belt for automobiles may eliminate injuries attributed to this cause.

Helmet Helps Smog Study

The lady under this plastic headpiece is getting a dose of smog, made up of smoke and fog. Photoelectric cells attached to glassless goggles record blinks due to eye irritation. She reads a book to produce uniform reactions. The test is part of a study being made by Stanford Research Institute to find out more about the smog that often blots out Los Angeles’ sunshine.

And it only weighs 7lbs!

The Lens That Focuses Itself
Ever shoot an out-of-focus picture? Then you’ll be interested in the newest lens from Nikon. It focuses as automatically as your eye, and just as fast. You can just point and shoot at fast-moving subjects from athletes to zebras without giving focus a thought. As long as you keep your subject within the sensing circle in the center of your viewfinder, you’ll get sharp pictures. Any drawbacks? Sure. The lens is k big (11 inches long), heavy (it weighs six pounds including the batteries that power the autofocus mechanism), slow (f/4.5), and you won’t be able to buy one until next year.—A. J Hand

How does it work? Like this:

Light reflected from the subject passes through the first group of lens elements and is split by a ring mirror. Some of the light passes through the lens to the film plane. The rest is reflected down to the autofocus mechanism where a condensing lens forms an aerial image. The position of this image will vary according to distance of the subject. A contrast-sensing set of four photocells inside the autofocus system moves up and down the shaft of focused light. Every time the photocells pass through the point of focus (also the point of highest contrast) they send a pulse to the logic circuit. At each up-and-down cycle of the four cells, a clock pulse is fed to the logic circuit as well. A third pulse indicating the current focus of the lens also is transmitted to the circuit. The circuit takes the three pulse signals and converts them to a time signal. The time signal corresponds to the distance between the sharpest image position and the current focus position. An analog circuit and power amplifier actuate a servo motor that shifts the movable lens elements to bring the lens into focus. All this takes place several times a second—scanning, computing, and refocusing.