That wide tank on the left looks like it would break in half at the slightest bump and it looks like that truck on the left would have a pretty hard time pulling that huge armored trailer.
Inventors Offer Thousands of Ideas to Help Beat the Axis
WAR inventions are flooding the National Inventors Council and the U. S. Patent Office. At the Council’s headquarters in Washington, D. C, 45,000 suggestions have been received during the last year. And 3,000 of them have been adopted—one out of 15, an amazingly high proportion that pays tribute to American inventive ability. Results have well justified the effort of sorting valuable new ideas from equally well-meant schemes that prove unsuitable for various reasons.
Read the rest of this entry »
The headline double meaning had to be intentional, right?
How to handle your car when you’re loaded
There are times when even the best suspension system can’t cope with your car’s rear-end sag.
When you tow a recreational vehicle. Or a horse trailer. Or a boat. Or a snow-mobile. Or any off-road vehicle.
When you overload the rear end of your car, or wagon, or pick-up-truck—with people, luggage, tools, samples or equipment.
The sensational new Scovill Load-Tamer works with your air shocks to keep your car on the level. No more sag. No more drag. You accelerate better, corner better, steer better. Your headlights aim properly. Your tires wear better. In short, you get a safe, reliable, comfortable ride.
Read the rest of this entry »
This computer contains 13,000 relays, each rated to perform for at least 100 million operations. If the transistors in your CPU were this reliable it would last less than 100 milliseconds.
Inside the Biggest Man-made Brain
Navy’s new calculator has steel bones, silver nerves, paper impulses, and can make mistakes.
By Stephen L. Freeland
THE LARGEST brain in the world today is a mammoth electrical mathematician being built at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory for the U. S. Navy Proving Grounds at Dahlgren, Va. But its reign as king of the robots will be brief.
Work already has begun on faster, better calculators based on the lessons learned in creating this machine, known as the Dahlgren Calculator, or Mark II, just as this one was designed to be the big, tough brother of Mark I, which was built for Harvard during the war by the International Business Machines Corp. (PSM, Oct. ‘44, p. 86). Mark II, however, will not be retired. Even Mark I has many years of useful labor ahead. There is plenty of work waiting for all the big calculators now in existence and on the drawing boards. Mark I is still churning out answers to abstruse mathematical problems 24 hours a day, and Mark II will be taken to Virginia next month to begin an equally strenuous career.
Read the rest of this entry »
The census department had some serious technical chops in 1950. Census workers were given maps and aerial photos of their districts so they could find all of the residences. The punch card counting machines seem pretty advanced as well with data validation circuits that would reject, for example, a two year old with six kids. I wonder how many kids they considered it alright for a two year old to have?
COUNT OFF, AMERICANS…
By Richard F. Dempewolff
For A house-to-house canvass that will make all the brush salesmen in the world look like an army of pikers, wait until you see the one that gets under way April first. Yup, it’s time for the 1950 decennial census, Uncle Sam’s national inventory of noses—the biggest quiz show, most mammoth tabulating phenomenon and most accurate poll in history.
It’s a job that has taxed the ingenuity of a harried Census Bureau every zero year since 1790. At that time 17 U. S. marshals and 600 assistants knocked on colonial doors, asked five questions of whoever answered, then tacked their lists on the walls of local taverns, so that people who’d been skipped could add their names or Xs when they dropped by for a flagon of ale. Results were mailed to the President.
Read the rest of this entry »
