.… Or Put An Outboard Motor On Your Bike…
AN ATTACK on the trans– portation problem from a different angle has been made by G. E. Griffin, of Vass, N. C, at left. Mr. Griffin has attached a 3/4 h.p. aircooled outboard motor to his bicycle, the shaft geared by friction directly to the rear tire. He reports that the arrangement works very well, can do 30 m.p.h. or even better, and doesn’t appear to wear the rear tire badly at all.
.Soviet Engineers Building 80-foot “Glider” Boat
SOVIET engineers are constructing a “glider” speedboat for service on the Black Sea. The boat will have two hulls and carry 150 people at a speed of over 40 m.p.h. Four aviation motors of 675 horsepower each will power the novel craft, which will be 80 feet long with a width of 40 feet. A model of the boat has been placed on public exhibition in Paris, France.
.MYSTERY RAYS “SEE” Enemy Aircraft
AMERICAN and German War Departments announce simultaneously new rays capable of “seeing” enemy aircraft through fog, clouds, or dark, at distances of up to fifty miles. First tests in this country are being held at the Lighthouse Station near Highlands, N. J., by the War Department, the details of the invention being closely guarded by military police.No larger than a penny match box is the German mystery ray machine, a highly-perfected ultra-short wave radio transmitter.
Groups of these transmitters, mounted along the border of a country and adjusted to send their “feeler” beams into the sky at a fixed angle, could be used for air defense. The 5 to 15 centimeter long beams act much like invisible light rays, and are reflected back to earth by aircraft.
Groups of ultra-short wave receivers stationed some distance from the transmitters would pick up one or more of the beams reflected. With each transmitter sending out a different type of signal, something like the interrupted signal produced by a dial telephone, and each receiver connected to the central switchboard, the distance and height of the plane could be calculated automatically and almost instantly by a machine built to interpret optical and trigonometrical formulas. With this data, air defense guns could be aimed accurately at the unseen targets.
This is pretty sweet.
.Hotel Guests DIAL for Radio Programs
HOMESICK foreign guests at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel can now listen to radio programs from their own country, or perhaps even from their home town. At their service is the greatest all-wave radio receiver in the world—a set which can bring to each of the 2,200 suites of rooms programs from any one of the powerful broadcasting stations in the world. These programs are oftentimes heard with the same volume and clarity as are local stations.Some rooms have a unique dialing system, which permits guests to select any station they desire from a printed daily list of world-wide broadcasts, or even hear their favorite phonograph records. In other rooms there are controls on the modernistic loudspeaker, which give to guests a choice of six broadcasts. Amplifiers build up the strength of weak signals more than a hundred billion times.
.Radio Listens In On Phone Calls
AN ELECTRICAL eavesdropper, the invention of a Washington, D. C, man, Samuel S. Hixon, permits the listening in on phone conversations without connecting to the line. The device, operating on the radio principle, is capable of picking up conversation from phone wires within a radius of twenty-five feet without tapping lines.
Yeah, well, she’s pretty smart, for a girl.
.Kansas Girl Genius Operates Television-Radio Station
CONQUERING fields in which very few men have ventured eighteen-year-old Eleanor Thomas of Kansas City, Mo., is assistant engineer of Television station W9XBY. Finding the life on a college campus too prosaic Miss Thomas, a mathematical genius for a girl, decided to leave and enter an engineering school.Throughout the course the young woman excelled in her studies and upon her graduation she was appointed to the position she now holds. She is the youngest member of her sex ever to pass the difficult examinations for a first class operator’s license from the Federal Communications Commission.
.SAID THE ELECTRICAL MOUTH TO THE ELECTRICAL EAR . . .
“Joe took father’s shoe bench out. She was waiting at my lawn.”If you were passing through the Bell Telephone Laboratories today you might hear an electrical mouth speaking this odd talk, or whistling a series of musical notes, to a telephone transmitter.
This mouth can be made to repeat these sounds without variation. Every new telephone transmitter is tested by this mouth before it receives a laboratory or manufacturing O.K. for your use.
This is only one of the many tests to which telephone equipment is subjected in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. And there is a reason for the selection of those particular words.
It happens that the sentence, “Joe took father’s shoe bench out,” and its more lyrical companion, “She was waiting at my lawn,” contain all the fundamental sounds of the English language that contribute to the intensity of sound in speech.
Busily at work in the interest of every one who uses the telephone is one of the largest research laboratories in the world. The outstanding development of the telephone in this country is proof of the value of this research. In times like these, the work of the Bell Telephone Laboratories becomes increasingly important.
The Bell System is doing its part in the country’s program of National Defense
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
.MILLIONS for MOVIE IDEAS
By Frank Lloyd
Paramount Producer-Director
THERE is upward of one million dollars waiting for you in Hollywood if you can find a satisfactory way of projecting motion pictures in three dimensions. There’s another million for some device which will create a universal focus for a camera. Possibly you could drive an even better bargain.
But before you start, remember that the best brains in the industry have been struggling with the ideas for years and nothing worth-while has been found. Hundreds of letters come to the studios, containing both shrewd suggestions and fantastic ideas, and still the search goes on. Scores of patents have been issued on both subjects and yet nothing good enough seems to have turned up.
.Brainy wafer
There are 64 complete electronic memory circuits on this chip of silicone (shown for size comparison on the nib of a pen). The circuits, which can transmit electronic signals in as little as 3-billionths of a second, are used in the buffer memory of IBM’s newest computer, System/360 Model 195.
This looks like one of the first self-serve soda machines.
Machine Supplants Soda Jerkers
NOW comes the mechanical soda jerker. Drop your money in the slot, punch the button for the flavor you want, and the machine, shown below, does the mixing and shaking, delivering soda in a package.
From Stannous:
this would probably be worth a fortune!
Here’s a couple of soda machine sites:
http://gameroomantiques…
http://soda-machines.co…
