Bow Turns Flame Thrower for Oilmen
Waste gas fumes burning off from this flare tower at Nevis. Alberta, sometimes blow out, and the mechanical relighting device doesn’t always work. The oilmen keep a bow and a fire arrow handy and relight the flare by shooting a flame through the fumes. It doesn’t require any skill at archery—note this oiler’s unusual form.

“Woolworth Cow” Eats Wire Grass

ALEXANDER CALDER, New York sculptor and artist, recently gave an exhibition of his work at the Fifty-sixth Street Galleries. Although many fine works of art were shown, the amusing toy novelties of this versatile craftsman attracted the largest share of attention.

Using scraps that may be picked up around any home and every day articles purchased from the five and ten cents stores, Calder constructed many startling novelties. The “Wool-worth Cow” shown here was made of a wooden darning egg, a door bumper, coat hangers, bottle tips, rubber tips and wire.

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New Breed of Batteries Pack More Power

After 25 years of quiet, unspectacular progress, battery research is taking a great leap forward. A whole host of new types offer capacities 10 times those of the familiar lead-acid and dry cells

By W. STEVENSON BACON

Cascading from laboratories across the country are new batteries that can run your flashlights, radios, and appliances 10 times as long as ordinary cells—and snap back for more. There are batteries you can charge and discharge thousands of times, batteries that make electricity from air. And there is a new pint-size storage battery that will power what may be the first practical electric car.

• The attractive little three-passenger electric above, the Amitron just announced by American Motors, uses brand- new lithium-nickel storage cells developed by Gulton Industries. They’ve got tenfold the capacity of lead-acid cells, but will cost only 50 percent more.

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Wireless music for home entertainments

ENTERTAIN your friends with radio concerts, enjoy the fascination of radio as a hobby, make wireless a profitable part of your business, get news and market reports before they are published, take public speeches off the air. With a simple receiving set and a Radio MAGNAVOX you can do all this, and more, too, in your own home or office. The front cover of this magazine shows how easy it is, with a Radio MAGNAVOX.

Practically every variety of vocal and instrumental music from jazz to grand opera, news reports in plain English, and many other special features are radio broadcasted daily, free to anyone with the simple equipment to receive and reproduce them. Read the article in this issue.

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Whole library in a nutshell
This latest space trick might work well with earthbound libraries. The magnifying viewer on the astronaut’s knee holds 12,000 pages of microfilmed manuals, maps, and navigation data for use in the Apollo lunar spacecraft. The film is coded and indexed so a flip of a switch puts any page on the screen in 15 seconds.

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Navy Brain Answers with Pictures

By George H. Waltz, Jr.
PS PHOTOS BY HUBERT LUCKETT

COMPLEX problems can now be reduced to three-dimensional, easy-to-understand answers by “Typhoon,” the latest thing in electronic brains. Built by the RCA Laboratories for the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, the new computer is showing naval experts just how theoretical guided missiles will react in actual flight.

Up until the completion of the new $1,400,000 calculator a few months ago, the men whose job it is to create new and better guided missiles had to spend thousands of hours at complicated computations and many months at building full-size $100,000 test models. And when they were finished, there was no guarantee that the new missile would perform as expected.

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Motor Ambulance Carries First Aid to Injured Dogs

DOGS injured by autos on the roads near London, England, now are cared for by a motor ambulance. A veterinary gives first aid on the spot, and if there is hope of saving the life of the pet, it is placed on a thick bed of straw and carried to a kennel for further treatment.

The ambulance is ready for service day and night, and is summoned by telephone. All the farmers living near the roads in the district outside of London covered by this service notify headquarters as soon as they are aware that an accident has taken place, and the cyclecar immediately starts.

BASEMENT TOILET FLUSHES UP

TO OVERHEAD SEWER OR SEPTIC TANK.
NO DIGGING UP FLOORS. PREVENTS FLOODING.
Mcpherson, inc. box 15133 tampa, fla.

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10-mile Ascent Paves Way for Stratosphere Planes

Planes speeding through the thin air miles above the earth at speeds of 400 m.p.h.—power balloons floating20miles above the earth, deriving electric energy from outer space—these are some of the amazing possibilities pointed out by scientists who ascended 10 miles in a balloon.

A FEW days ago two Swiss balloonists, Prof. Auguste Piccard and his assistant Charles Kipfer, ascended more than 52,000 feet into the atmosphere in a hermetically-sealed metal gondola suspended from the largest balloon ever built. In the universal acclaim evoked by this amazing achievement, the startling scientific significance of the adventure has been somewhat obscured by the mere fact that a new altitude record was set. As far as the every-day life of the human race is concerned, altitude records are insignificant, but certain facts observed by the balloonists are likely to be of vital importance to every one of us.

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Heat Waves Set Off New Thief Alarm
THE heat from a burglar’s body, even the gentle warmth of his breath, may now be detected by science’s latest contribution to crime prevention, the “heat radio.”

The heart of the “heat radio” is a very tiny and very delicate thermocouple, which is mounted at the focal point of a large metallic reflector. This reflector, shown in the accompanying illustration, collects the feeble heat waves and concentrates them on the super-sensitive thermocouple.

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New “Light Piano” Using Photo Electric Cells Creates All Musical Sounds

ONE of the most amazing musical instruments ever known has been recently invented by Prof. Arthur C. Hardy of the department of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The device looks like a grand piano with a three octave keyboard, and it is not much larger than an ordinary card table. It is described by its inventor as: “an instrument in which beams of light and a photo electric cell have been utilized to produce entirely new musical sounds by optical means.”

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Waterproof Sand Exhibited

W/ATERPROOF sand constituted one of the many marvels of modern chemistry exhibited at a Chemical Industries Exposition recently staged in New York, N. Y. In a convincing test demonstration, water was passed through a series of curves in the chemically treated sand without becoming even partially absorbed.