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Lobbyist for Hobbyists

“You need a hobby,” warned the doctor. So Dave Elman dug up more than 500,000 pastimes—for other people.

By Fred Horsley

“PICK any noun in the dictionary, and I’ll name you a hobby for that word,” Dave Elman, the originator of radio’s Hobby Lobby, boasted as he leaned back in his office chair in midtown Manhattan.

“All right,” I said and opened up a small dictionary on his desk. “Here’s one for you—auk.”

“That’s easy. I’ve got that hobby right here in the office. Ned Hand of the American Museum of Natural History collects the remains of auks as his hobby. See those bones over in the corner? That’s your auk hobby.”

“Well, here’s a slippery one for you— eel.”

“Know a guy down in Florida who makes a hobby of electric eels. Spends all his spare time trying to find out just how much voltage one of those shocking fish can put out.”

“That’s not bad so far, Dave, but who do you know that makes a hobby of eggshells?”

“Believe it or not, there’s a lady out in Milwaukee who makes lovely pictures out of eggshells. She saves all her broken shells, then arranges them on canvas in pretty pictures.”

“I don’t think anybody could do much with an old potato besides putting it in a pot. How about potato?”

Dave pulled his chubby chin a second, then grinned like a cherub.

“‘Got just the man for you. Louis Strakes, a former Manhattan restaurant man. carves faces from potatoes. Does a fine job, too.”

“Well, Dave, this one is going to spoil your perfect score—zero.”

“Zero’s a tough word but even on nothing I can give you something for a hobby. I had an Army officer from Fort Monmouth, N. J., on my show not long ago. His hobby was not merely zero but absolute zero. He was trying to find out whether he could get anything all the way down to zero cold. Theoretically, that’s minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit. He hadn’t quite made it yet. but he was having lots of fun trying.”

I was surprised that anyone could make good on such a fantastic boast. Later, when I found that Elman had carefully catalogued more than half a million hobbies in the overflowing files lining his big Madison Avenue offices, it was no longer so amazing that he could name a hobby for any noun you picked out of the dictionary. If Elman used all the hobby material he has stowed about his offices, he could keep running his weekly radio program for more than 400 years without ever repeating a single hobby.

As if he didn’t have enough hobbies already on hand, every week some 4000 hobbyists send him not only letters but samples of their hobbies, which may be anything from soap bubbles to bombs. Being a considerate fellow, he doesn’t want to throw away some item a hobbyist has spent years creating or collecting. Dave’s problem now is not finding hobbies but figuring what to do about all the material that keeps filling up his hobby warehouse and flooding him out of his home and his office.

In Elman’s 49 years on earth he has collected some 550,000 odds and ends from other people’s spare-time activity. Yet he . would gladly give away this entire collection just to have seven worn-out toothbrushes again. For these long-lost molar scrubbers marked his debut in show business.

When he was six, the “doctor” in a medicine show stopping in Fargo, N. D., picked Dave from the sidewalk audience to demonstrate a miraculous tooth-powder that cured everything from rheumatism to fallen arches. Because of Dave’s successful demonstration he was hired to be the model for the show’s seven-day stand. Elman says his payoff was seven battered toothbrushes and “the awfullest gob of penny candy you ever saw in your life.”

After doing a number of small parts in the local theater, he was told to quit the theater or leave school. At sixteen he finally left school for a tent show. He has been a professional entertainer ever since, playing everything from showboats to burlesque before he wound up behind a microphone.

In 1937 Dave’s oldest boy, eight-year-old Jackie, suddenly died of pneumonia. For two weeks he was too upset by his grief to concentrate on anything but the tragedy of his loss. Finally Dave’s doctor told him he would lose his mind if he didn’t pull himself together. The doctor urged him to throw himself into a hobby.

“I went home and got out a book on hobbies,” Dave recalled. “I tried to skim through the first chapters, but I found my mind wandering again. The book was all about stamps, coins and the usual prosaic collecting hobbies. I got so disgusted with the boring stuff, I threw the book against the wall and swore I could dig up more interesting hobbies myself. I used to clip newspaper items that caught my fancy and put them in scrapbooks. I remembered seeing a story about a man whose hobby was angle worms. I started going through the old clippings. Next thing I knew, it was six hours later and I still hadn’t found the angle worm piece. Then I realized that for the first time since my son’s death, I had been absorbed in what I was doing—and that I had found my own hobby in other people’s hobbies.”

The following day Elman began hunting in earnest for newspaper and magazine stories about people with remarkable hobbies. The New York Times and the Herald Tribune gave him permission to search their morgues for more clues to absorbing pastimes. When he had collected some 300 stories on outstanding hobbyists, he got the idea for a radio program.

“I wanted a show that would stimulate the spare-time activities of others so that their lives would be fuller, richer and more meaningful. I wanted to put on that show real, normal people who were enriching their lives with purposeful but fun-producing hobbies—and I wanted to pass on their hobbies to others. That’s how Hobby Lobby started—with each hobbyist lobbying for his own hobby.”

After a tryout on WOR. Hobby Lobby soon changed from an experimental sustaining program to a nationwide commercial feature. Hobby Lobby became the first successful hobby show, although more than 500 had been tried and found wanting.

To make up a show, Elman and his staff screen the most likely letters in his weekly mail and check the office files for seven or eight unusual but varied hobbyists. After he has made a selection, he phones or wires the hobbyists and has them come to New York as his guests, at his expense.

The hobbies for which Dave lobbies on the air range from serious and profitable pastimes to such amusing trivialities as organizing a Union for Abused Husbands, or dreaming up a Rube Goldberg machine for pulling up pants.

But whether the hobby is silly or serious, Dave’s radio audiences seem to have almost as much fun as the hobbyists. His Hooper rating has been as high as 17. That means his listeners were estimated at more than 17,000,-000. His transcribed programs are rebroadcast not only in Canada but even in faraway Africa.

A lot of queer hobbies give satisfaction to no one but the hobbyist, who doesn’t think his particular avocation strange at all. Take Mrs. J. B. Clopton, an Alabama schoolteacher, who paints on cobwebs. She got the idea from reading about an European family who did that delicate artwork. It took Mrs. Clopton two years and several hundred webs to produce her first picture on a cobweb. She exhibited 17 of them to the studio audience, however, when she appeared on Hobby Lobby. According to Dave, those cobweb landscapes and portraits were really beautiful.

Annette Avers was a nice little girl in Portage, Wis. Like other nice little girls in her home town, she sometimes went to the store on errands for her mother. One day when Annette went to the grocery, however, her appearance nearly caused a riot. For on the end of her leash was not a playful puppy but an all too-serious-looking six-foot rattlesnake.

She was a little surprised at all the excitement because, after all, the big rattler was only her favorite pet, Elmer. He had even helped her learn to swim by letting her hang on to his tail as he wiggled through the water. Her father had given Annette her first snake on her very first birthday—not a rattler then but a harmless fox snake. She had loved snakes ever since. In 1940, when she was seven, she appeared on the Hobby Lobby with both hands full of her pets. Before that show, however, Dave took the precaution of building a stout screen between himself and little Annette with her snakes.

Hobbies often mean money as well as fun, as a lot of people on Dave’s show have demonstrated. That profit angle interests almost everybody—that goes for Dave, and me, too.

Blowing square soap bubbles sounds like one of Major Hoople’s goofier projects. Wallace Block of Buffalo, N. Y., who owns a photographic laboratory, claims such wacky bubbling is a practical commercial business. He blows triangular, cylindrical and square bubbles by using a special wire hoop or frame which he dips in the soap solution.

“These goemetrical soap bubbles, Mr. El-man, serve a very good purpose,” Block told Dave before the mike. “They’re used to test the explosive quality of gases. In laboratories they fill a soap bubble with gas, light it, and it explodes. If they used glass, it would shatter and that would be dangerous. But no one has ever been injured by a bursting soap bubble.”

Sometimes Dave comes across a man whose hobby is his fellowman. Such a hobbyist is Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the noted polar explorer. He appeared on Dave’s program to explain why he, an Admiral of the Navy, made a hobby of promoting world peace.

During his second Antarctic expedition, Byrd was alone for six months at the world’s most southerly outpost. There in the loneliness and darkness of the polar night he was poisoned by the fumes from a faulty stove. Death seemed inevitable as he lay helpless in his tiny shack beneath the snow. He thought of the world and its many troubles. He became convinced that war was the greatest folly of mankind. He solemnly resolved that if he lived through this ordeal he would devote all his energy to the cause of peace.

“When the great masses of the people of the world fully comprehend why another general war would end our civilization,” Admiral Byrd declared on Hobby Lobby, “I believe they will do something about it. . . the people of the world are 200 to 1 against war . . . the force for peace is the greatest force in the world … no nation can for long stand the unified condemnation of the world . . . From a practical standpoint, no nation could afford to be put into Coventry by the world …. And it can be done without bloodshed.”

But even with Dave’s best lobbying for the peace-loving Admiral, he couldn’t put over his hobby. For that program took place more than ten years ago—-on the brink of World War II.

Dave keeps on encouraging hobbyists, though, whether they are idealists like the Admiral or practical gagsters like the inventor of the pants-puller-upper. He even encourages his own personal pastimes whenever he gets a chance—fishing for marlin in the deep sea, or trout in the lakes—or playing around with photography. Last year he helped the neighborhood kids in St. Albans, Long Island, become sharp shutterbugs and junior geniuses in the darkroom. Dave’s real hobby, however, is neither fishing nor photography but playing lobbyist for other people’s hobbies. As the signature on his broadcast puts it: “Hello . .. Who? Hobby Lobby? It’s for you, ladies and gentlemen—it’s for you!”‘

Maybe something more muscular, like “Car-BO-Plane” (over-hyphenation and making one word ALL CAPS was very popular in these mags). Or maybe something personal like “The Skeeter” or “Skeetsmobile”.

What do you think?

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The Car-Boat That Flies

Skeets Coleman’s three-way gadabout will be a performing fool and as easy to pilot as a ’56 car.

THE GREAT advances in aircraft design of the past 15 years have had little effect on the looks or performance of the small private planes now being built; you could have landed any of them at a small airport in the mid-30′s without scaring anybody. But with Skeets Coleman’s Aeromarine design the field of private plane building may begin to catch up with the times.

The Aeromarine, which is still in the workshop stages, will be a high performance plane that can be operated from land or water or driven like an automobile—making it ideal for the all-around week-end sportsman.

Compared to the many hybrids of this type that have preceded it, the Aero-marine has a convincing, unified look that you would expect from a man of Coleman’s background and that takes it clean out of the Rube Goldberg class. Its modified delta wing structure in particular reflects Coleman’s recent experience as test pilot on the Navy XFY-1 Convair Pogo, the vertical takeoff fighter. For his achievement in making the first-ever flights in this radical type of plane Coleman won the 1955 Harmon Trophy.

In his design Coleman has concentrated on creating a go-anywhere airplane—which meant cutting down on its performance as a car or boat. As a car it will be a power tricycle with a top speed of 50 mph. Power for humming down the highway will be fed to the rear wheels of the landing gear; steering will be through the single front wheel. As a boat—well, it’ll float fine. If you want to go up the lake for more bait, why not let down the hydro-ski under the hull and make a short hop of it?

But as a plane the Aeromarine is expected to show considerable class. It will have a range of 800 miles on 80 gallons of gas, a top speed of 225 mph. Cruising speed, with five aboard, will be 200 mph. It will take off with a run of 800 feet, land at 57 mph. Simple controls and instruments, plus the stability and no-stall characteristics of the delta wing, will make flying easy for anyone.

One device designed just for the amateur pilot is a miniature delta wing mounted on a fulcrum on the nose of the Aeromarine. This “radiator ornament” will tell the pilot at a glance if his plane is in a safe altitude in relation to airspeed and wind—the most important thing to know when flying a delta wing.

An extremely advanced feature for high lift on takeoff and landing will be a system for sucking boundary air off the leading edge of the wing. This will be an aid rather than a necessity; if the system conks out it will still be quite simple to land or take off safely. •

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Trouble Busters

You toss them a tough problem and they toss back a tender solution.

BY MARGOT PATTERSON

“NO POTATOES,” the grocer said grimly.

“No potatoes?” the housewife exclaimed with emotion. “Why, I must have potatoes! My family needs potatoes!”

“Sorry, lady,” the grocer said. “There’s a shortage. It’s on account of the rot.”

Until 1938, this little scene was re-enacted annually all over the United States. Bacterial soft rot baffled shippers. It would spread through whole carloads of potatoes, causing losses of millions of dollars. Finally, the shippers put the problem in the hands of the Armour Research Foundation.

The Armour men promptly brought forth a new dryer. A conveyor belt carried the potatoes through a hot-air blast which dried and altered their skin condition and prevented penetration of the bacterial invader. This technique cut the frightful annual loss.

Armour Research Foundation makes a business of solving other people’s problems. It will tackle headaches in any worthy field and tell you why your machines break down, how long a suit of clothes will last, the quickest way to assemble the parts of a watch, how fast your heart will beat if you jump from a plane at thirty thousand feet, or, if you like, the behavior of lubricants under the tremendous hydraulic pressure of 1,500,000 pounds to the square inch.

A bright idea, a lot of enthusiasm and very little cash launched it in 1937. The idea was a simple one. Giant corporations had their own laboratories to solve their problems but the small businessmen, faced with similar problems, were out’ of luck. They couldn’t afford to maintain even one technician. So the Foundation was started with the idea of giving the “little man” a break.

With a scanty supply of equipment and the blessings of the Illinois Institute of Technology, three willing young scientists set themselves up in three rooms of an ancient apartment house and asked for tough problems to solve. People laughed, but once the Foundation started it boomed. Tales of the unique organization spread, and new clients beat a pathway to the ugly red brick building on Chicago’s South Side, as Harold Vagtborg and his associates licked one tough problem after another.

Business came from far and wide. And not only small business. Executives of large corporations were frequent visitors. Where their own laboratories had failed they were willing to try anything. The Foundation almost always came up with the right answer. Amazed and grateful, these executives showered the young men with equipment and materials.

Today 200 scientists carry on their work in several well equipped buildings. More than 1,500 clients have been served. The astonishing number of 4,000 research tasks have been undertaken, saving millions of dollars for private industry and the Government.

There is very little of the orthodox about the Foundation. Its members read all there is to read about a subject, then toss aside the textbooks and tackle the problem from the beginning. This open-minded approach speeds the solution and keeps the Foundation from old and futile lines of thinking.

“For years we have been told that such and such is so. But is it so? Let’s prove it, or try to.”

When the Foundation finishes a research task for a client the theories, methods and patents on it belong exclusively to that client. None of his competitors has access to the findings. If he makes a fortune from the discoveries, well and good. The organization is run on a non-profit basis, asking nothing but a modest service fee, agreed upon in advance. The staff estimates the approximate cost of materials, tools, equipment, salaries and overhead, and this is the fee it charges.

Sometimes a baffling problem can be settled in ten minutes and sometimes a dilemma that looks simple on the surface will take a year of careful study. Teamwork is the keynote of the Foundation’s success. The Armour Associates don’t believe in “too many cooks spoiling the broth.” If two heads are better than one, then three are better than two. Round table discussions—fact finding from many angles—go on daily. Often new tools and new methods must be invented to deal with a problem that won’t yield to known methods. When this happens, the man with the idea doesn’t hesitate to call upon metallurgists, electrical experts, mechanical engineers, chemists, or any other staff members. The answer may end up looking like something out of Rube Goldberg, but it works. Their group research means speedy results. And better ones than the lone genius in the garret can produce.

The staff is a collection of able young scientists. Its director and executive members are all in their thirties. They are constantly on the lookout for up-and-coming youngsters completing their technical training. They say that young blood and young ideas go hand in hand, and young ideas keep the Foundation on its toes and make it the success it is.

Plain horse sense solves many a problem, as in the case of the leaking fountain pen. Business executives who traveled by plane were apt to find that they had a pocketful of ink when the trip was over, because at high altitudes the air pressure was too low to keep the ink in the pen. It wasn’t long before a manufacturer brought this problem to the Foundation. The Armour technicians tackled it with exhaustive care. They made every test and experiment. Then, suddenly, the answer struck them: Why not give the pen two reservoirs, one connected to the other? At low altitudes the ink would stay in the main reservoir, at high altitudes it would leak into the secondary one.

But horse sense doesn’t work all the time. Complicated problems need a great deal of time, study and sometimes new equipment. Certain tiny parts used in watch making had been causing the makers of watches a heavy annual loss. At one point in their manufacture the parts had to be subjected to heat. No matter how much care was taken, all but a fraction of them were ruined in every trial. They would stick together, fuse into a solid mass and become worthless. The industry, both here and abroad, looked on this waste as inevitable and just added the cost to the price of each watch.

Dr. C. N. Challacombe, the Armour staff physicist, found the answer within a month. He dreamed up a novel method of heat treatment with a more satisfactory furnace-atmosphere control, and built it. The new equipment produced perfect parts in trial after trial.

“How can we reduce the amount of tin in tin cans?” manufacturers asked. The young scientists studied the subject as if it were something new under the sun, as if the conventional hot-dipping steel sheet method did not exist. The real question was, “How can steel be tin plated with the smallest amount of tin?” They came forth with electroplating by induction heating. This method saves from one-third to one-half the amount of tin used in the hot-dipping process.

The president of an office machine manufacturing company went to see the Armour men. One of his machines was too noisy. Two or more of them in the same room made a clatter like hail on a tin roof.

The staff studied the vibrations set up in the machine in relation to the shapes and sizes of its different parts. New sound-absorbing materials and a change in the design of certain parts reduced its overall noise 94 percent.

To walk through the Armour Institute is to see a miniature cross section of American industry. Open that door on the left and you’ll see rows of chocolates coming out of an embryo candy factory. Walk to the next room and you’ll see cement being made in a model rotary mixer. Up a little farther, just beyond the working flour mill, an enormous smelter melts steel with ultra-short radio waves.

Don’t open that door, unless you want to freeze in a temperature of 67 degrees below zero in the teeth of an artificial 200-mile-an-hour gale. It’s the thermal chamber, where they turn weather off and on. Just now it’s being used to duplicate stratospheric conditions for the testing of equipment. Come back next week and it may be a typical tropical day in there.

The Foundation doesn’t limit its research to solving other people’s problems. Sometimes it gets curious about how this and this would affect that and that and goes ahead and develops things in its own right.

This is how they perfected wire recording, which allows hours of music to be recorded on a small spool of wire and played over and over without wearing. Five miles of the wire used weighs only a pound, and it can be bent, twisted or even heated to high temperatures without affecting the recording. There is no comparison between this method and the clumsy record system now in use. It is superior in almost every respect.

During the years ahead, the success of our economic system depends in part on whether small companies can compete with the industrial giants. We can reach full employment only if these small companies can keep pace technologically, only if they can win and hold their business in competition with the giants. Scientific research on a fee basis—the Armour system—is the answer.

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the music goes ’round and ’round

People who like phonograph music are getting dizzy trying to keep up with three different systems of playing three sizes of disks.

By Robert Hertzberg

BUYING phonograph records used to be a simple and painless operation. You could walk into any music shop and say, “I want a few of the latest dance tunes for a party.” You’d depart in a few minutes with a neat bundle under your arm. But not any more!

“Phonograph records? Yes, sir,” the clerk now says. “Would you like 10- or 12-inch records for a 78-r.p.m. turntable, or 7-, 10-, or 12-inch records for a 33-1/3 r.p.m. machine, or 7-inch records for a 45-r.p.m. player? The prices range from 60 cents to $4.85.”

If this jumble of figures doesn’t make you dizzy, a demonstration of the three different turntable types certainly will. And after you have seen and handled the six different records, in colors ranging from bright red to somber black, you may decide to cancel the party and go to the movies instead.

The slightly delirious record industry is a big business. Last year, about 15 million owners of phonographs bought approximately 250 million records. RCA-Victor and Columbia Records, the two biggest producers in the industry, are engaged in an undeclared but active “trade war” with this juicy market as the prize.

For as far back as most of us can remember, the standard phonograph turntable speed has been 78 r.p.m. A player of any make would take records having a diameter of 10 or 12 inches. These sizes have maximum playing times of 2-1/2 and 5 minutes per side, which are adequate for popular selections and dance music but, of course, much too limited for long classical works. To eliminate the bother of changing disks manually when a symphony was being played, manufacturers brought out automatic record changers. Some of these machines must have been designed by disciples of Rube Goldberg. They are weird contraptions with flailing arms and complex gear trains, they have a tendency to wreck the records, and they’re out of order about half the time.

Last year, Columbia Records, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Columbia Broadcasting System (keep that little fact in mind), made a big splash with the first really important improvement in phonograph records in almost half a century: a new 12-inch record that turns at only 33-1/3 r.p.m. and plays for a maximum of about 22-1/2 minutes. Coincidentally, it brought out a 10-incher that runs for 13% minutes and a 7-inch baby that last 5 minutes. The smallest one is thus equivalent to the old 12-inch, 78-r.p.m. disk.

“What about those 45-minute records I read so much about?” you ask. The 12-inch, 33 -1/3 -r.p.m. disk is the 45-minute record, played on both sides. That expression “45-minute record” was used a bit loosely in the initial advertising and publicity. You had to read down into the fine print to learn that the figure represented two sides, not one. At that, more than a third of an hour of uninterrupted music is a lot of music, and Columbia’s LP (for long-playing) Microgroove records were a quick success.

The word Microgroove explains the secret of the new disks. As you probably know in a general way, a phonograph transcription consists of a wiggly spiral cut into the face of a flat plastic disk. A sensitive needle, attached to a tone arm, follows the grooves and translates the undulations into impulses, which are increased in volume and reproduced by the amplifier section of a radio or by a separate phono amplifier. In 78-r.p.m. records, the grooves run between 85 and 100 to the inch, the needle point is about three thousandths of an inch thick, and the pressure of the pick-up against the record is between one and three ounces. In the LP records, the grooves hit between 225 and 300 to the inch, the needle tip is one thousandth, and the pick-up pressure is about a fifth of an ounce.

The tone quality of the LP disks is generally regarded as superior to that of the older records. A notable feature is absence of scratch noise, a result of the very light needle tracking.

Right off the bat. you can see that the new records won’t work on an old machine. Columbia was all prepared for this. When the records were announced, Philco had a new player and a tone arm to go with them. Fortunately, no revisions had to be made in the amplifier circuits. Any owner of a high-grade phono-radio combination could tie in a 33-1/3 r.p.m. turntable in a matter of minutes.

And it was a simple matter for manufacturers to rush out two-speed equipment fitted with dual tone arms or single arms containing separate pick-ups that could be switched in and out at will. This was a wise move, because there are millions . . . probably billions . . . of perfectly good 78-r.p.m. disks carefully preserved in albums, and their owners have no intention of throwing them away just for the sake of new records that play longer. Existing automatic changers could readily be adapted in manufacture to the two-speed turntables because the physical dimensions of the 12-inch LP records are identical with those of the 12-inch 78-r.p.m. disks. Only four LP records, changed and flopped automatically, can thus provide three solid hours of music—providing the changer doesn’t decide to chuck them across the room into the fireplace.

Just when the two-speed turntable and the LP records began gaining momentum, RCA-Victor threw a small atomic bomb into the happy picture in the form of a new 7-inch record that turns at 45 r.p.m. and has a 1-1/2 inch center hole instead of the 1/4-inch opening found in all other records. Its grooves run between 250 and 275 per inch and the needle size and pressure are the same as for the LP disks. The playing time per side is 5-1/3 minutes.

People in and out of the radio industry rushed to criticize RCA-Victor for bringing out another “nonstandard” record. A point not generally appreciated, but deserving a lot of attention, is that with the record itself the company introduced a new automatic player of highly ingenious but simple construction. The entire changing mechanism is enclosed in the stubby center post or spindle, with no outside arms, levers, carrying pans, or anything else. The spindle takes a stack of ten records, giving a total of more than 50 minutes of playing time. The records drop into position quickly and quietly. Anyone accustomed to the erratic and sometimes spectacular behavior of ordinary automatic changers will be intrigued by the effortless functioning of this new device. Its simplicity makes it especially valuable for children’s use, for dance parties, etc.

The 45-r.p.m. records themselves have a construction feature not found in any others. The label area, immediately around the spindle hole, is thicker than the playing surfaces; so the latter cannot rub against either each other or the top of the turntable. This undoubtedly makes the disks last longer and give better music during their life. Most ordinary records have to be discarded long before their grooves actually wear out because they get so scratched up.

The advent of the RCA records caused the New York newspapers a few months ago to give front-page prominence to reports of a “record war” between that company and Columbia. This surprised no one because the Columbia Broadcasting System, which owns Columbia Records, has been feuding with the National Broadcasting Company, which is owned by RCA. The head of Columbia records issued a long and somewhat angry statement denouncing RCA; RCA officials said nothing and went right ahead with a million-dollar campaign to put their new system over.

Turntable manufacturers lost no time in. revamping their products to accommodate the 45-r.p.m. disks. By the time this issue of Mechanix Illustrated appears, there will be on the market dozens of three-speed players, with double tone arms, that will handle any records now sold. If you want to play some of your old favorites, you shift the speed lever to 78, push in a 1/4-inch spindle, select the three-mil pick-up, and load ‘er up. If you want to go high brow and listen to Brahms or Shostakovich for a couple of hours, shift to 33-1/3, leave the 1/4-inch spindle in position, select the one-mil pick-up, and pretend you’re in Carnegie Hall. If there’s a special new number on a 45-r.p.m. disk, shift to 45 on the turntable, plug in the special 1-1/2-inch adapter spindle, and let it roll.

If you’re perfectly happy with your prewar phono-radio combination and don’t feel inclined to invest money in a new two- or three-speed player, you won’t be missing a thing. Both Columbia and RCA have announced that 78-r.p.m. duplicates will be made of all new recordings.

Columbia and RCA-Victor advance excellent reasons for their choices of record speeds. Mostly, they’re very technical and are tied up with the distortion effects that occur at different speeds in relation to the diameters of the grooves. As far as quality of reproduction is concerned, I doubt if one listener in ten thousand could detect any appreciable difference between the two makes. When you get down to it, the RCA 7-inch 45-r.p.m. record, playing five minutes, is virtually identical with the Columbia 7-inch 33-1/3-r.p.m. “Long-Playing” disk, which also runs five minutes; RCA just doesn’t use the term long playing, because a five-minute record certainly is not a long-playing one. The 13-1/2- and 22-1/2-min-ute Columbia records are something else. For classical music, they undeniably are wonderful. Personally, I am of the opinion that RCA-Victor isn’t much concerned about the high-brow trade and figures that it can do plenty of business with the many more people who go for the popular stuff. Pay your money and take your choice!

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HE TURNS TIN CANS INTO MONEY

One bright idea turned a rusty pile of cans into a shining fortune for Angelo Tersini, Tin Can Tycoon.

By John W. Aberle

ANGELO TERSINI, tin can king of Santa Clara, Calif., got his start salvaging tin cans in a garbage dump and selling them to scrap dealers. Wondering where the cans came from in the first place, he traced them back to the fruit salad canneries where canned pineapple from Hawaii was mixed with fresh fruit.

Tersini paid to put his trailers at each cannery’s dumpchute to collect the cans. Next he built a machine to cut out the seams and edges and make flat tin plate. This he sold abroad through an exporter in San Francisco and to breweries for bottle caps.

When World War II ended Tersini could have sold his tin can business and retired a wealthy man. His export market for tin had disappeared but breweries were taking all of his tin for caps and clamoring for more. But by then he was also in the distillery business, having bought a plant where he was converting waste cannery fruit into brandy. When the bottom dropped out of the brandy market, and breweries switched to bottle caps made from new tin, Tersini lost his fortune trying to turn his distillery into a syrup plant. Meanwhile, he was buying 150,000 used tin cans each day, intending to resume the sale of tin plate abroad. When he met his exporters in San Francisco, they shook their heads. There was no longer a foreign market. Tersini went home to look at a mountain of 9,000,000 rusty tin cans that no one wanted.

Tersini had once toyed with the idea of making plant nursery pots. He knew that nurserymen were dissatisfied with the ugly salvaged gallon cans they were using. They did nothing to help sell plants. Cans had to be cut in order to remove plants, and empty, they were piled on top of one another, taking up costly storage room.

Cut-throat competition was the rule in the plant container field. To wedge into this market Tersini knew he had to make a better pot at the same price.

Unable to sleep one night, he happened to think of a pile of buckets he’d seen telescoped into one another. A moment later he had Duke Triplett, his chief mechanic, on the phone. “Meet me at the plant in half an hour,” Tersini said.

It was then one a.m. By four the next afternoon they’d developed a machine which tapered the can by pressing sharp indentations in the bottom half. The final product looked much like the ridged paper cup one finds beside water coolers. The pots slipped easily into one another. The indentations kept dirt from clinging to the sides. A sharp tap on the bottom and out would come the plant, surrounded by firmly packed earth, The pot could be used over and over.

Tersini obtained a patent on the idea and in high hopes went to the banks for capital needed to re-equip his plant. “How about security?” they asked. He pointed to the 9,000,000 tin cans—and got a horse laugh. He finally got a loan on his wife’s jewelry and used the money to design and build machinery no one else had heard of.

The first year there were headaches galore. While the crimped pots slipped easily into one another, it took two tow trucks to pull them apart. Growing plants made the narrow bottomed pots topheavy; a little joggle and they tipped over. Again Tersini and Triplett put their heads together and came up with a rolling machine that knocked out dents in the pot and put in a lip near the top. They re-designed the crimping die to make the base wider.

Tersini pulled the first dozen pots off the line before they were painted, made a stack of them, then jumped on the top one. They didn’t jam—the lip had done the trick. He filled one with dirt, stuck a heavy iron upright in the center, put the pot in the back of his pickup truck and drove all over town. It didn’t tip over. The topheavy problem was licked.

Just as Tersini’s Pacific Nursery Pots got rolling in 1952, a fire burned him out. “We were too crowded anyway,” Tersini said philosophically. Relocated in a roomier plant, Tersini began to develop new lines of specialized plant containers.

Tersini’s Plantainer—a portmanteau word combining “plant” and “container”—sells at $45 to $50 per thousand compared to the $35 figure for the old style nursery pot. At first there was sales resistance. “Price too high,” customers said. But when plants in the attractive Plantainers out-sold those in plain cans by as much as ten to one, resistance stopped.

Tersini keeps a watchful eye cocked on the whims of nurserymen. When several wanted their pots painted a special color, he obliged.

Not long ago, the sales agent received a letter from a grower: “What you guys should make is a nursery pot that uses less dirt,” it began. Result was the Squattie—one inch shorter than the gallon size Plantainer. The user saves one yard of expensive bedding soil with each 2,000 pots.

The Rosetainer was an answer to growers’ demands for a medium-sized container to house deeper-rooted rose bushes. To make this, flat scrap tin is shaped into a two-gallon can.

Pacific Nursery Pots, Inc., also makes a container for larger shrubs out of the 30-pound egg cans they buy from bakeries.

Tersini has never pretended to be a cost accountant, but he can size up an expensive situation in a jiffy. More important, he figures a way to correct it. Take the problem of storing nine million tin cans. Unless heaped up into the air, they cover a lot of expensive real estate.

Tersini was grumbling about that one day as he watched the pile reach its peak at the top of a 20-foot conveyor. He reached down, picked up some loose cans and started to toss them on the pile. “Wonder if a machine could do this,” he thought. On the back of an envelope, he sketched a Rube Goldberg device. It showed an inclined conveyor dumping cans into a hopper attached to a long tube from which cans were being ejected. Compressed air supplied the propelling force. Mechanics built it just that way.

Today, Big* Bertha—named after the German gun of World War I—hurls 11,000 cans to the top of a 200-foot pile every 15 minutes. Her barrages are fired during the summer when canneries are going full blast. Forty specially-designed trailers moving day and night, keep her supplied with ammunition.

Tersini sums up his business this way: “We get cans at a time when they can’t be used, make them into nursery pots when there isn’t a market, and sell them when we can’t collect.”

What he means is this: As nurserymen plant during the autumn and spring, there’s no immediate market for pots. To have stock when buying occurs, production must continue. But even then, there’s no payment until after the plants are grown and sold.

This long credit wait, Tersini says, puts him in the position of a man trying to raise chickens without eggs. To get eggs—working capital in this case—he’s worked out a deal with Nursery Metal Pots, Inc., his sales agents. They advance him money against future purchases. Most seasonal businesses with a similar problem borrow against their raw materials inventory. But banks still take a dim view of tin cans.

Last year Pacific Nursery Pots, Inc. made shipments to every large state, the Hawaiian Islands, Guam, and Australia. Sales were $300,000. The company paid $50,000 for its cans.

Sometimes visitors to Tersini’s plant kid him about being the world’s Tin Can King. He glances at his mountain of cans and grins: “I’ve jumped into a lot of things in my lifetime, but when I figured a way to make a beat-up can into something useful, I hit the jackpot. I didn’t have to go to Las Vegas to do it, either— it was in my backyard all the time.”

Interested onlookers may observe that few people—even in isolated areas where there is no city trash collection— have piles of 9,000,000 tin cans in their backyards. The Tersini Story bears out the old theory that spectacular successes grow out of spectacular headaches. •

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Nutty Inventions Paid Me A Million

by RUBE GOLDBERG
Famous Cartoonist as told to Alfred Albelli

Four hundred inventions a year, all of them of exceedingly “nutty” brand, qualify Rube Goldberg, the famous cartoonist, as one of the country’s most prolific and best paid inventors. The fact that his inventions never get beyond the pen and ink stage doesn’t prevent him from “cleaning up” from them.

“How did you get that way? How do you do it? How do you get away with it? How do you get them to fall for your stuff? How are you, anyway?”

There you have the barrage of questions which are popped at me every day of my life, including days when the game is called on account of rain. It’s a good thing a humorous cartoonist has got a sense of humor. Or I might borrow from that jolly English expression and say, “It’s fortunate my humor is not bad.”

For that segment of the citizenry which has been blissfully unaware of my existence all these years, let me say that my profession, by extreme choice, is that of cartoonist, having brought into this world such specimens as Boob McNutt, Foolish Questions, I Never Thought of That, and the type of cartoon which presents a series of contraptions working in successive order to make up an invention to solve man’s earthly difficulties.

This latter brainchild has proved my most gold-bearing device. In this field I have been able to turn ink into gold by a few strokes of my pen.

In black and white, I consider myself the most prolific inventor in America today. I figure I turn loose about 400 inventions a year. And mine are not simple pieces of apparatus, either. As I gaze upon an invention, done in ink, of course, of an appliance which a husband may wear at the dinner table, I would guess that a first class engineer would have to spend a whole month in a machine shop before he could make the living and breathing duplicate.

This bit of mechanical folderol which I am now perusing looks like a strait-jacket which is strapped around a man’s body after he is seated at table. Jutting out from its sides are prongs and clampers which permit him to eat his soup with his right hand, hold his bread in his left, while the other gadgets are automatically pouring the coffee, putting two pieces of sugar in the cup, then the cream, holding the plates for the next course aloft, and directing things and the wife in general.

You’ve got to admit that’s an invention that any man could use. Especially when he gets home from a heavy day’s work and is famished and his fraulein fetches the fodder at a snail’s pace. To slap together that “Quick Lunch” machine for everyday use would run into money. So the farthest it gets is in print. My invention in ink goes out to about ten million newspaper and magazine readers.

Most of the time I wrestle with very human problems. I spent a long time inventing an instrument for removing olives from long-necked bottles. Then there was another one for retrieving soap which slipped away from you in the bath-tub. I’ve got to admit, however, that there’s one stickler that I haven’t been able to overcome yet. That is, how to get your nickel back from a telephone coin box after you’ve failed to get a number.

I don’t suppose I could make any one believe that I draw up all those crazy inventions without having had a knowledge of mechanics and having spent considerable time in the engineering field. If the truth must be told, my own private mechanical series started in the flesh with a course in the College of Mining at the University of California.

I went through a lot of processes myself and I came out of the other end a full-fledged mechanical engineer. I got a job in the City Engineer’s office in San Francisco at $100 a month. My job was mapping sewer pipes and water-mains. And when you folks out front there behold my mechanical jig-a-ma-jigs with a lot of pipes in them, you can remain calm and be certain that I know what I’m talking about.

Back in those lean, unfruitful and obscure days I didn’t see any prospects ahead better than a raise into the next higher rung, which meant $150 a month. Today my pipelines which are fearfully lacking in the geometric refinements of those dimmer days, return to me an annual flow of $50,000.

Naturally, I couldn’t have just thrown away my board and drawing tools back there in the engineer’s office and turned cartoonist. There had to be the elements, the talent and ability to draw as well as the keen perception to select material for a possible market. Well, in the first place I was a born artist. At any rate, the ability to sketch and draw was latent and just had to be coaxed to come out.

The one who lies behind the secret of my success, if I may indulge in the frank admission of my self-esteem, is Charles Beall, a sign painter of San Francisco who was the one to ferret out my artistic potentialities, as they are sometimes called. I started out as a pupil and apprentice to Charlie Beall when I was 11 years old.

I got so excited about Mr. Beall’s attempts to bring out my art that I went in extravagantly for interior and exterior decorating, drawing sketches inside as well as outside the house, much to my parents’ displeasure, as well as my own. Although Mr. Beall settled down to a modest sign-painting business, he was considered quite an artist. He devoted three years of his spare time teaching me the rudiments of drawing.

As the last gesture under his wing I drew an old violin, in pen and ink. It attracted wide notice. At least I thought it did. I would not have traded that drawing for a Corot, and any art connoisseur will tell you that’s going some. My “Old Violin” was hung in the Board of Education rooms of San Francisco for a great many years. Finally, I guess it got tired of hanging there, or probably somebody got tired, and today it may be seen hanging proudly in my father’s home.

From that day on I could be found wistfully staring out of windows, fashioning sketches in my imagination and dreaming of triumphs yet to be. I remember when I first took up mechanical engineering how everything was automatically translated in my mind into sketches and not into mathematical formulae. Toward my senior year at the University of California I began to fall away from serious types of drawing and drifted into the field of caricatures.

The climax, the all-surpassing turning-point came in my last year at college. I had always penetrated to the funny side of scientific works. The course in analytic mechanics amused me most that way. The apparatus which they constructed in that course was baffling and almost supernatural. The professor himself seemed like some one superhuman. He was a tall, gangling, wizened crony with a red beard and an Adam’s apple that kept bobbing all the time he talked. He also wore gold-rimmed glasses. Most of the time he looked like he was a part of the machinery.

One particular morning the professor presented us with a mechanism by which he could determine the weight of the earth. It was a mangled and complicated system of test-tubes, retorts, levers, dynamos and other instruments which, I frankly admit, I never deciphered.

The professor rapped for attention, I distinctly remember, and as we all looked on breathlessly, for fear that this might be some infernal machine, he announced to us in solemn accents that the engine before us was a barodick. I could have laughed right out, because it didn’t mean a thing to me, and yet it was the funniest thing I have ever seen in motion.

I never got over the barodick. Ten years had elapsed and one day the vision of that goofy contraption returned to me. The idea burgeoned into a grand reality, but that’s skipping ten years too lightly. Let us go back a little and get a view of the trials and tribulations of the rising cartoonist.

That job in the City Engineer’s office blew up after three months. Shortly afterward I thought I had to go in for mining engineering seriously, but I got one glimpse down into a mine shaft and then and there my nerves told me I was an artist. I subsequently got a job on the San Francisco Chronicle at $8 a week. I drew pictures for the paper every day for three months, and not one of them was ever published.

Finally I landed in the sports department and I drew fight pictures which got into the paper. Then the San Francisco Bulletin lured me away from the Chronicle; there was so much favorable talk about the Rube’s fight sketches. Then I looked for other horizons. New York was elected.

I was 23 when I reached New York. I had resolved to strike out on my own. Five editors today can enjoy the privilege of saying that they threw me out of their offices when I first got to town. I was footloose for only twelve days when the very perceiving editor of The Mail took a chance on me, and vice versa.

The first series of my cartoons which clicked was the Foolish Questions number. I hit on that one quite accidentally. I had drawn a picture of a man who had just fallen out of a five-story window. As he lay in a heap on the sidewalk a lady chanced to come along and she inquired, “Are you hurt?”

In astonishment, he looked up and replied, “Oh, no. I’m just taking my beauty sleep.”

That started the Foolish Question rage. I doped out all I could. But I was a mental-midget compared to the thousands which poured in from my new army of followers. I figure I received 50,000 Foolish Questions —and I was foolish enough to answer them. Of course, those answers appeared in syndicated cartoons, which was all part of the mysterious process of turning ink into what it takes to keep the wolf away.

It was just about ten years ago that I decided to use my knowledge of mechanical engineering in my career as a cartoonist and artist. The combination has not been a barren pastime from a financial standpoint since it brought me some measure of fame and about $500,000, more or less. There’s a lot of magic hidden in a bottle of ink if you know how. Right now I’m busy on a very special invention. I’m trying to contrive an apparatus that will do all my drawing for me, but then it might take all my life savings to manufacture it!

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Rocket’s Flight Kept In Sight

Gun-mounted camera eye keeps movie record of V-2 missile as it speeds into space at 3,500 miles an hour.

By Martin Mann

POPEYE is a seeing machine. Popeye can see things yon can’t see. His big glass eye can follow a V-2 zooming 3,500 m.p.h, and tell you just what it does at the 100-mile peak of its flight. But even Popeye is no match for enemy guided missiles—he could not spot an attacking rocket soon enough to sound the alarm.

Popeye—as this Rube Goldbergish invention is unofficially known—is a 16-inch-wide parabolic mirror, amplifying lenses, and a movie camera, all mounted on top of a sawed-off 90-mm. antiaircraft gun so that it can follow the fast-moving rockets. Despite its fantastic appearance, Popeye has a serious purpose: to find out what happens to high-altitude rockets after they are fired. It will be used on all kinds of rockets—the new ones made in USA as well as the V-2.

This new telescope, officially known as “Type IV Tracking Telescope,” joins an imposing battery of optical and electronic “watchers” at the Army Ordnance Department’s proving ground at White Sands, N. M., that already includes smaller telescopes, ballistic cameras, phototheodolitcs, radar, telemeters, and Doppler equipment.

Like Popeye, they are all trying to find out, for every vital second of a rocket’s meteoric flight, where the missile is, when it’s there, and what it’s doing there. These devices are not designed to spot attacking missiles, although one researcher suggests that a big telescope might be fitted with a heat detector (a bolometer or thermocouple) instead of a camera and be used to locate incoming missiles by the heat from their rocket jets.

Astronomers already use such a system to track stars automatically. It would work fine as long as the missile approached along a straight line of sight from high altitudes. But no telescope can see through the earth. An attacking missile might come in to the target at a low level, hidden by the horizon until the last 50 miles or so. At 3,500 m.p.h, a rocket covers those 50 miles in less than one minute!

But the array of observing instruments at White Sands will provide the basic facts needed to make better rockets. They will also benefit other branches of science, for the data gathered should reveal much about the temperature, density, and similar characteristics of air in the mysterious region 100 miles or more above the earth. All these things must be known before men can fly there.

One reason we don’t have space ships yet is that we don’t know how a speeding rocket twists and turns and tilts. If the scientists knew, they might be able to design better controls that would keep the rocket straight. Popeye will tell. Its camera snaps a picture of the rocket 16 times every second. After the flight, experts project each picture on a screen, and measure how much the rocket moves around between consecutive photographs.

The camera also records dials that show time and the angles of elevation and azimuth. The time dial is governed by the ultraprecise “ticks” of a vibrating crystal in a clock located in the control trailer. As a further check on time, radio signals sent every second from the launching site operate a neon glow lamp in the field of view of the camera, making a dark “pip” on the edge of the negative. From all this information on the film, technicians can calculate the speed and path, or trajectory, of the rocket. Explosions and the operation of parachutes and other special equipment also show up on the film.

The telescope itself is similar to those used by astronomers. A 16-inch parabolic mirror gathers light and focuses it on an angled mirror that reflects it to one side toward the camera. Before reaching the film, the image is further enlarged by a set of amplifying lenses that can be adjusted to give an effective focal length as great as 80 feet. The recording cameras are standard Mitchells or Akeleys, like those used in Hollywood studio and newsreel work, modified for their rocket-photographing job.

Popeye watches the rocket flights from an 8,000-foot mountaintop 40 miles away from the launching area. If the telescope were much closer, the technician who “aims it would not be able to move fast enough to follow speeding V-2s as they take off. The high-altitude location also has another advantage, since it eliminates much of the shimmering caused by the normal movement of the air near the ground. This shimmering—the same thing that causes mirages in a desert—is the reason stars twinkle when seen with the naked eye. As there is less of this effect in the rarefied air atop high mountains, such locations are favored for big telescopes.

Even more accurate than Popeye at tracking the path of a rocket is “dovap,” a radio tracking system also developed by Army Ordnance’s research laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. It uses the Dop-pler effect, the change in the frequency of a radio wave caused by movement of the transmitter or receiver. The faster the transmitter moves, the more the frequency changes.

This same thing happens to all kinds of waves—light and sound as well as radio. The wailing sound of a passing train’s whistle, for instance, is caused by the Doppler effect. The frequency (pitch) of the Sound from the whistle goes up as the train approaches and down after it has passed. In this case the whistle is the moving transmitter and your ear the stationary receiver. Records of frequency changes give a measure of the speed of the transmitter.

The dovap equipment used at White Sands sends a steady radio signal to a combination transmitter-receiver located just behind the war head of the V-2. This transceiver picks up the signal, amplifies it, and sends it back to a ground receiver. The ground receiver compares the signal from the rocket with the original signal sent out from the ground transmitter. The difference between the two signals, called the Doppler frequency, is recorded on automatic instruments.

Each cycle per second of Doppler frequency received means the V-2 has moved in that second half a wave length farther away from the ground station, or about 6.25 feet in the case of dovap’s 77,000 kilocycle signal (it becomes a bit more complicated when the ground receiver is separated some distance from the ground transmitter, as it is at White Sands). Thus, if the Doppler frequency is 800 cycles per second, the V-2 must be moving 6.25 x 800, or 5,000 feet per second.

A complete record of the Doppler frequency spots the position of the rocket within a few feet and measures its velocity within three-tenths of a foot per second. This information is fed into Aberdeen’s “Eniac” computer (PSM, Apr. ’46, p. 83), which turns out in seven minutes 2,500 numbers indicating more than 800 positions along the path followed by the V-2 (ordinary computing methods would require several weeks of work for the same job).

Other instruments in the battery of observing devices at White Sands measure the same things in different ways. Many types of radar sets follow the flashing rockets. Some have telescopes attached for final, precision adjustment of the aim of the beam. Others are held on their target by a small beacon transmitter in the rocket itself, so that the radar receivers get a strong signal. Phototheodolites, which are essentially movie cameras with big telephoto lenses and accurate direction indicators, furnish the same sort of record as the big telescope, but can follow the rockets only about 50 miles.

Other instruments already in use at White Sands include special cameras and several telescopes smaller than Popeye. And Ordnance researchers are already planning another new telescope, still bigger than Pop-eye, to follow new rockets that will far outdistance the V-2.

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From Cook Stoves to Tanks . . . They Roll from the Automobile Factories

By SCHUYLER VAN DUYNE

THE Detroit genius for industrial organization is sorting out the sudden chaotic avalanche of defense orders with its customary frantic and incredible orderliness. It is responding to the fabulous impetus of something like a billion and a half in armament orders assigned by the U. S. Government to the automobile industry. The vast industrial center, already a huge magnet, drawing raw materials and manufactured parts selectively from many parts of the country, is being called upon suddenly for all its reserve power. Its standard products, such as automobiles, trucks, and their accessories, were in extraordinary de-mand, but now there are imperative pleas also for airplane, marine, and tank engines; for the airplanes and the tanks themselves and for antiaircraft guns, cook stoves, ammunition components, refrigerators, Diesel engines, and a conglomeration of other articles.

Mass production in all lines was the demand. It would seem to be enough to strike any group of industrial engineers dizzy. Dizziness is more or less a normal state, however, for an industry accustomed to redesigning its major output every year, and the Detroit industrialists proved themselves tops. They turned out to be steadiest when spinning madly.

There were factories to be built whose individual dimensions are reckoned in fractions of a mile. The grandparents and the great-uncles of the machines which were to turn out the new products had to be found or manufactured in widely separated parts of the country, assembled and put to work so that their grandchildren and grandnephews and nieces would be ready for installation when the factories were completed. There were materials to be ordered in stated quantities for delivery at set dates so that the vast jig-saw puzzle would fall progressively into place and when the final rivet and the last nail was driven in Detroit, machines and materials would come marching into each building.

Between last summer and this summer fourteen acres of farmland sprouted the gigantic mushroom of the Chrysler tank • arsenal, a vast structure of steel, glass, and brick which is a trifle more than a quarter of a mile from wall to wall. Atmospheric haze dulls the vision of the spectator seeking the details of the farther end.

Freight trains enter the building at one side and unload at the head of sub-assembly lines which stretch like the bars of a gridiron crossways of the plant. Huge grotesque machines with arms and angles reminiscent of Rube Goldberg or a non-objective painter stand in ranks beside the sub-assembly lines, which terminate in three assembly lines on the far side of the building where the tanks take form, five of them in each eight-hour shift.

Another spectacular achievement was the Ford defense plant, literally a hothouse growth. Work on it was started September 17, 1940. Detroit winters forbid masonry construction, but Detroit genius was not to be balked. An engineer who had encountered a similar difficulty on an assignment in northern Russia inclosed the entire job in a shelter of fiber board and tar paper and installed steam heat. Twelve hundred men worked three shifts a day in it and by April the first of 4,236 Pratt & Whitney twin-row, radial, air-cooled engines were coming off the assembly lines. Now the 1,750 and 2,000-horsepower engines are taking to the air.

Similar miracles were wrought by Packard, Studebaker, Hudson, General Motors, and other industrial wizards. Minor miracles were being performed all over the country by the makers of machine tools whose powers had been invoked by Detroit. That industry had doubled in size in a year, constructing for its own use more machines than it had turned out in any of the years between 1931 and 1934.

The Detroit manufacturers always have been in the market for completed parts and knew the necessity of scheduling such orders in advance. Every year Buick buys 2,200 separate production items and General Motors has 20,000 industrial and supply firms on its list of sub-manufacturers. The purchasing and associated engineering staffs always have maintained the closest relations with these sources of supply and hundreds of their members were assigned at once to the job of stepping up and broadening production. They have kept to their schedule.

General Motors’ Allison Division, currently making more than 400 12-cylinder, liquid-cooled, 1,000-horsepower plane motors a month in its defense-built Indianapolis plant, and anticipating 1,000 a month by December, put into effect a vast “farming-out” program to achieve this goal. Its purchasing agents distributed major sub-orders to plants in 65 communities, which in turn buy from hundreds of other firms.

Studebaker, with a $33,-600,000 order for Wright Cyclone 1,700-horsepower air-cooled radial engines, sublet 60 percent of the work to other firms, keep-ing 40 percent to be handled in its three new defense plants. Packard, almost ready to start production of 9,000 Rolls-Royce 1,000-horsepower plane engines— 6,000 of them for England— in new buildings valued at $35,000,000, is depending upon 70 suppliers for parts and materials. Chrysler’s tank arsenal will draw upon the products of 117 companies.

It is one of the basic wisdoms of Detroit’s know-how. Even Ford, which boasts the closest thing to a self-contained industrial plant at its gigantic Rouge works, calls upon many outside parts suppliers and, like General Motors, buys from every state in the country. The British only recently adopted the idea with their “bits-and-pieces” program, but not before several too-highly centralized plants had been blasted by aerial bombs.

Germany was more provident. As early as 1937, sealed crates said to contain machinery for making toys after a few easy lessons were distributed to German farmers, who were told to store them for future use. With the invasion of Poland, Nazi officials appeared and ordered the crates unpacked. Out came drill presses, automatic screw-cutting machines, small drop forges, and similar machine tools with which the farmers, after their easy lessons, were soon making airplane fittings, bomb doors, and other parts for Messerschmitts and Heinkels and Junkers. That was farming out, Nazi style.

A recent estimate showed that the automobile companies have shouldered a total of $737,900,000 worth of plane-engine contracts for this country and Britain, nearly a fifth of all on order. Allison’s order is for $234,000,000, Packard’s for $217,000,000, Ford’s for $122,000,000 and Buick’s for $91,000,000 for the Pratt & Whitneys. Continental Motors’ is for $40,000,000 for Wright 400-horsepower Whirlwinds converted for use in tanks, and Studebaker’s for $33,600,000 for the Wright Cyclones. Any or all of these orders may be vastly increased before you read this.

Two major plane builders, Martin and Consolidated, placed their Government-selected bombers on display in an empty Detroit plant, where 1,400 manufacturers from all over the country studied them. Most reported that they could supply some of the parts.

As a result, Chrysler was given orders for the two forward sections of the twin-engine Martin B-26 fuselage, which it is building in the Graham-Paige plant. Hudson is making the rear section and small parts. Goodyear, pending plant construction, is making the wings in its gigantic “air dock” at Akron, where a special ceiling had to be built to prevent condensed moisture from “raining” on the work.

General Motors’ Fisher Body Company is expanding its Memphis, Tenn., plant for construction of the North American-designed B-25 bomber, a type similar to the Martin. Ford is rushing an $11,000,000 factory near Ypsilanti, Mich., for complete four-motor Consolidated B-24 bomber airframes.

Detroit reaches down into its bag of tricks and comes up with new wonders like the Allison aircraft and Packard marine engines. Another engine tapped for defense duty and as adaptable is the product of the Cleveland Diesel Engine Division of General Motors. Actually, it is not so much an engine as it is two cylinders. One is comparatively small, with only 71 cubic inches displacement. The other is large—567 cubic inches. Just these two are made by the company. Yet they are the power packages for engines ranging in horsepower from 15 up to 1,600, and they can power anything from portable lighting plants to the biggest submarines.

Uncle Sam has ordered Diesels using these cylinders to the tune of $140,000,000, principally for the Navy. The engines are about one quarter the size and weight of the Diesels that powered American submarines in the First World War. They more than double the cruising range of the earlier submarines, and their weight, space, and fuel economies step up the value of Navy tugs, patrol boats, fuel transports, and other vessels. Many believe that these amazing two-cycle, relatively high-speed Diesels—installed in large numbers in a single hull—will power a radical new American battleship.

Some 13,000 military vehicles a month are being built by the automobile industry, with 195,000 already delivered and 60,000 others scheduled for early delivery.

In addition to 5,900 passenger cars and 27,000 motor cycles, the vehicles ordered are 4,500 quarter-ton scout cars from Ford, Bantam, and Willys; 69,000 half-ton pick-up and reconnaissance trucks from White; six-ton and heavier units, from Autocar, Bied-erman, Chevrolet, Corbitt, Diamond-T, Dodge, Federal, G.M.C., International-Harvester, Mack, Marmon-Herrington, Reo, Sterling, and Walters. Practically all military trucks are four-wheel drive, many are six, and others are half-track. The total does not include 37,800 trailers for 2-1/2-ton trucks, being built by Nash.

And the defense articles of Detroit stretch on and on: gun and torpedo parts for the Navy, bomb and shell components, field kitchens, field range cabinets, antiaircraft fire-control apparatus, instruments, aviation spark plugs, radio parts. For many of these, the industry’s parts and equipment makers account. Typical are the Briggs, Fisher, and Murray car-body builders, the huge wheel and brake-drum makers such as Kelsey-Hayes Wheel, Budd Wheel, and Motor Wheel, and the Bendix Products Division of Bendix Aviation.

The War Department is watching with an eye to the future the Detroit research laboratories. Most startling appears to be the simultaneous development in each of the Big Three laboratories of new airplane engines to develop from 1,500 to 2,400 horsepower. All three projected engines are liquid-cooled, in-line types. Ford’s is a 12-cylinder, V-type power plant with an exhaust-driven supercharger, and fuel injectors instead of carburetors. In construction, the cylinder liners, crankshaft, and other major parts will be made by a new “centrifugal-casting” method which is claimed to be faster, cheaper, and to produce stronger parts than conventional forging and machining methods now employed.

Chrysler and General Motors are more secretive. Reports are current, however, that Chrysler’s engine will make better mechanical use of extremely high-octane fuel than any engine yet devised. The G.M. design is a conversion of the Allison, using four banks of cylinders arranged in a W instead of two in a V as at present.

Engineers in one General Motors plant designed a multiple drill that bores out six machine-gun barrels at once—a feat not even the old-line gun makers had accomplished. A Chrysler research group designed a new plane landing gear which could be built faster than present types. The list of defense orders placed with the industry looks like a dozen pages from your telephone book, and the cost figures mean about as much. Because new contracts are coming in so fast, totaling their value is next to impossible. Some recent official figures out of Washington put the industry’s defense contracts at $1,076,082,000, but it is estimated that they are by now above the billion-and-a-half mark, with no end in sight. That’s a lot of money to pay even for Detroit’s know-how. Yet no one has complained but Detroit, where the only thing they’d rather do is build new and better automobiles.

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New Electrical Wonders Work Living Room Magic

How do they work? Take a look inside the wireless TV control, switchless lamp, cordless clock.

By Martin Mann

AMAZE your friends! Just look at the TV and make it change channels or silence the commercial—while your hands are in your pockets. Make a lamp light when you wave your hand and mutter abracadabra. Lift the electric clock, its second hand sweeping merrily —but look, no wires!

Magic? Yes, sir. But not the kind you laboriously rig up yourself. These are new commercial marvels, available in stores around the country.

Take that TV trick. A more mystifying act of electronic wizardry never helped a TV salesman con a shopper out of several hundred bucks. The gimmick is a remote-control unit small enough to fit in your pocket. When you push a button, the TV set changes channels. Another button lets you silence the commercials.

This eerie control works, we found, even if held behind your back, in your pocket, or at the other end of the room from the TV. You don’t have to aim it at the receiver.

It has no wires, no tubes, no batteries, no electricity at all. The manufacturer, Zenith, solemnly assures that “it emits no radiation harmful to human beings.”

We took one apart, and by gosh they’re right. It won’t even harm dogs or cats. Inside the case are some metal rods, similar to the tuning forks that piano tuners use. The push buttons release tiny hammers that strike the rods and make them ring, in ultrasonic tones so high in pitch that they cannot be heard. These sound waves vibrate about 40,000 cycles per second, twice as high as the shrillest note people can hear, and too high even for dogs—we tried it.

The television receiver that dances to this silent music has a microphone to pick up the ultrasonic tones, and a five-tube electronic brain to amplify the signal and figure out what you want done.

The five-tube brain separates the signals according to their frequency. The muting signal goes to a tricky relay that turns a toggle switch off if it’s on, on if it’s off. The station-changing signal works another relay that, in turn, puts an electric motor and gear train to work turning the selector knob.

Rube Goldberg himself might have invented that one. You can show off this kind of wizardry for $250 up.

The “switchless” lamps really have switches, of course. They’re new kinds that don’t look at all like switches. The trickiest is called Touchtron. You touch your hand to the lamp base and the light goes on; touch again and the light will go off.

The secret is a vacuum tube, relay and condenser inside the lamp base, plus a metal ring that looks like decoration around the lamp. The tube stays on all the time but burns only 10 cents’ worth of electricity a year. Ordinarily it will not let enough current pass through to throw the switching relay. But when you touch both the lamp base and the metal ring, your hand completes a circuit. This decreases electrical impedance, the tube passes more current, the condenser fires, and the relay switches the lamp on (or off). There is no shock hazard.

Another new switch adds convenience to three-way lamps, the ones with bulbs that go low, medium or bright. Called a drum switch, it fits on any narrow part of the lamp body; it is not part of the socket and you don’t have to reach under the shade to work it. It also operates in either direction—no more switching through the whole cycle to get the brightness you want.

The GE drum switch and the electronic Touchtron are available on numerous brands of commercial lamps, but neither is yet sold separately in hardware stores for homemade lamps.

If you want a lamp that lights without any attention at all from you, a little plastic box does the job. Plug box into wall outlet, lamp into box, and the lamp goes on at dusk, off at dawn.

This magic box contains a photoelectric cell, a small wafer that conducts electricity well when light shines on it, not so well when no light hits it. During daylight, it passes enough electricity to hold open a relay, so that current cannot reach the bulb. When daylight dims, the photocell blocks current flow to the relay coil, the relay contacts snap shut, and the lamp lights. The photocell must be mounted at a window facing outdoors, but the lamp can be anywhere that its cord will reach.

Automatic switches of this type have long been used to control street lights. The home unit is now made by Fisher-Pierce Co., Boston 85, and costs $15.95.

The cordless electric clock uses the kind of magic that comes to real money. The clock costs 8195, plus tax, and it won’t keep better time than a four-buck kitchen clock with wires. But its eerie operation really triggers your take-it-apart instinct. Only after considerable prodding from PSM would General Electric declassify the details.

The wireless clock is wireless—it’s radio-controlled. It does not depend on signals from ordinary radio stations, but on the 60-cycle electromagnetic waves that are always radiating from ordinary wiring and appliances.

Inside the clock case is an antenna-just like the ones in small radios—that picks up the 60-cycle radiation and feeds it to an amplifier. But a whole raft of amplifiers couldn’t boost the airborne signal enough to drive even the flea-power clock motor. That’s where the trick comes in.

The amplified 60-cycle signal controls the frequency of a battery-powered local oscillator. Now the oscillator frequency may vary, but the power-line frequency picked out of the air won’t. So the two mesh, and the oscillator locks in with the 60-cycle radiation from the air.

The oscillator output drives a synchronous clock motor. That way the clock motor, although battery-operated, gets 60-cycle power just as precisely regulated as the house current that runs ordinary electric clocks.

What will they think of next? The electronic wizards are busily contriving still newer magic to pop the customers’ eves. The trick we’d like to see is a TV control—with or without wires—that not only picks out the programs but also tells you in advance whether or not the show is going to be any good.

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Torture Tests Tell The Truth

Ingenious Machines in the National Bureau of Standards help bring to light unknown facts about peas, pants, pots and paints.

by James N. Miller

EVERY time you visit the dentist, break in a pair of new shoes, buy an electric light bulb, heat your home, drive an automobile, wind your watch or weigh your groceries, you are directly or indirectly affected by the work of scientists located in an enormous network of laboratories in an obscure section of Washington, D. C. This is the National Bureau of Standards, where a group of technical men seem to live in a complicated mechanical world that appears far afield from that of Mr. Average American Citizen. This Bureau of Standards, without the slightest exaggeration, is the nation’s and probably the world’s, greatest quality testing laboratory. Every day, in almost every conceivable way, it performs monumental tasks which help make life healthier, safer, happier, more comfortable and more convenient for every one of us.

Look at what the Bureau has done for the dental profession, for instance. Dental amalgam fillings have been used for more than 100 years, but it is only during the last 30 years that the dentist has been accurately advised on its two greatest defects: excessive shrinkage and flow. The dental research program at the Bureau of Standards has attacked these defects, made official ratings of manufacturers’ products and because of its support, defective amalgams have practically been driven off the market.

The Bureau maintains the national standard of light. It gives technical advice on the performance characteristics to be included in Federal specifications for lamps and it tests lamps for the Federal Government, which uses them on an enormous scale. During the past fiscal year over 4,000,000 incandescent electric lamps were inspected before shipment, and more than 6,800 samples selected from these lamps were life-tested at the Bureau laboratories. Six thousand bulbs are tested annually on the “life testing” racks.

Whenever you buy a roll of wallpaper for your home or apartment, chances are that the Bureau of Standards, somewhere along the line, had a hand in the situation by establishing standards which give consumers practically all the information wanted concerning the quality of wallpaper based on weight, color fastness, grounding and printing. Detailed requirements are also set forth for printed, plain and embossed papers, including width of printed pattern and coverage of a single roll.

If your home is comfortable in winter, you should be grateful to technicians at the Bureau. From time to time studies are being made of all manner of house heating appliances including radiant gas heaters, thermostatic valves for radiators and fire hazards of domestic heating systems. One of the strange facts recently revealed is that painting of radiators has a marked effect on the amount of heat they will deliver to the room. When painted with bright metallic paint, such as aluminum and bronze, they supply less heat to the room than when painted with ordinary paints.

A remarkable machine in one of the Bureau laboratories tests the wear of carpets. This device produces the bending, slipping, twisting and compression of the pile that takes place when a carpet is walked upon. The durability of a carpet was found to be increased materially by increase in density or height of pile and by the use of underlays. Incidentally, this same type of machine is being used in a number of carpet manufacturers in improving their processes and products.

Fever thermometers are used in almost every household. The Bureau has established the official test methods and most of the specifications, and these are now incorporated in a commercial standard. Fever thermometers for household use generally are tested only by the manufacturer, but the tests are based on standards maintained for clinical thermometers used by the Federal Government. The Bureau renders an important nation-wide service to the consumer through the direct or indirect standardization of devices used in weighing or measuring commodities purchased by over-the-counter buyers. It promotes uniform action in weights and measures ad-ministration throughout the country and serves as a clearing house for information on the subject.

Glass for glazing doors and windows is usually either polished plate glass or so-called sheet glass. The first is characterized by its plane surfaces which do not distort reflected images and which eliminate distortion of objects when they are viewed through the glass at any angle. The second has a relatively smooth but characteristically wavy surface and objects viewed through sheet glass will be somewhat distorted, especially when the line of sight makes an acute angle with the glass surface.

It is quite probable that the quality of your raincoat depends upon tests made at the Bureau laboratories. One experiment in particular should interest you. It consists of a cycle of treatment of waterproofed fabrics, such as ducks and drills. Practically every conceivable condition of actual use is simulated, including light exposure, wetting and drying and crumpling.

When laundered cotton fabrics are dried outdoors during the winter, particularly in New England, they frequently undergo excessive deterioration of a type called “winter damage.” An investigation of the trouble in a Bureau laboratory showed that this was due to sulphuric acid formed in the damp fabric by oxidation of atmospheric sulphur dioxide and that the damage could be remedied by using a small amount of calcium carbonate in the final rinse water.

Women’s stocking have an annoying habit of wearing out or ripping at inconvenient times. Small wonder then that, at the request of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a hosiery testing machine has been developed at the Bureau. This simulates the forces acting on a stocking at the knee and at the places where garters grip the hosiery. It alternately pulls the stocking crosswise and lengthwise, just as if a lady were wearing it. After a few pulls a poor stocking will show runs and lose its shape. A good stocking will withstand many pulls.

If ever you visit the Bureau laboratories, by all means take a look at the remarkable shoe-testing machine. As the spokes of an enormous wheel, containing six shoes, turn, a pair of shoes presses and rubs against a moving belt. This wears and strains the upper leather, linings, stitches and heels of the shoe, just as if a person were wearing it. Within a short time a shoe has “walked” many miles on this machine.

The Bureau sometimes extends its research activities into the field of sports. It recently announced, for instance, that its measurements of the liveliness of the American and National League baseballs showed no difference of any practical significance. Some National League balls are more lively than some American League balls and some are less lively. There are slight variations in liveliness of balls of either league, just as there are slight variations in weight within the official limits of 5 to 5-1/4 ounces and slight variations in circumference within the official limits of 9 to 9-1/4 inches.

The laboratory apparatus used is an adaptation of a machine developed by the Carnegie Institute of Technology for measuring the liveliness of golf balls. It consists of an air gun which fires a wooden projectile representing the bat against the ball which is “teed” like a golf ball. The ball and projectile are caught in swinging pendulums which measure their speeds.

The gun was taken to the ball park and used as a robot batter to drive out home runs. It was easily possible to knock the ball over the fence. Numerous measurements of distance were made under the same conditions in so far as possible. The average distance was the same for the American and National League balls within one foot, namely 367 feet for the conditions used. Individual shots went from 320 to 410 feet, the exact distance being largely due to the effect of variable winds.

How’s the brake lining of your car? The brake testing machine automatically performs the following cycle of operations: the motor starts and accelerates the shaft, flywheel and brake drums to any desired speed up to 600 revolutions per minute (representing 60 miles an hour, car speed); the current is shut off and one of the brakes is applied, bringing the shaft to a stop in a certain time which is recorded automatically on a chart; a small motor turns a valve, cutting out the brake that has just functioned and connects the other to the line; the main motor starts again accelerates the shaft as before, the current is shut off, the second brake is applied and the time to stop is recorded as before. This cycle is repeated automatically at any desired interval (usually once a minute) for as long as necessary.

Within the past three years X-ray voltages have been more than doubled, there being several dozen X-ray plants in this country operating at 400,000 volts and some half dozen at voltages from 600,000 to 1,200,000. With this increase in voltage, entirely new measurement problems have arisen, the solution of which is awaited before these new radiations can be safely utilized to their ultimate limit. To meet this demand the Bureau has recently installed a 500,000-volt X-ray plant to provide a starting point on the problem, although it is generally recognized that they must ultimately have at least twice that voltage to keep abreast of the clinical demand for X-ray standards. Bureau measurements up to 400,000 volts have been carried out and it appears possible for the first time in history to standardize accurate dosage up to these limits.

Recently the Bureau announced an improvement in the system, of radio airplane landing aids first introduced by the Bureau to aviation back in 1931. This improvement brings the system in line with modern requirements and greatly increases its flexibility. The Bureau’s system differs from other instrument landing systems in that it provides positive guidance of the airplane in the vertical as well as in the horizontal plane down to the point of contact with the airport runway. Guidance in the vertical plane is accomplished by means of a radio landing beam, produced by an ultrashort wave transmitter located at one end of the airport. The airplane, approaching from beyond the other end of the airport, follows a curved beam to the airport surface.

In this country experimental installations made at College Park, Md., Newark, N. J., and Oakland, Calif., have demonstrated the possibilities of the system. Literally thousands of “blind” landings in airplanes provided with hooded cockpits have been made. Two of the nation’s leading airplanes are today studying improvements in the system” with a view to fitting it to the needs of large passenger planes.

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Push-Button Manor
Jackson, Mich.

By Arthur R. Railton

REMEMBER those wartime dreams of lazy living in postwar homes with push buttons to do all the work? Well, like most of us, you’re probably still getting by in a house where the only push button rings the doorbell. But there’s at least one fellow who is making those dreams come true.

Emil Mathias of Jackson, Mich., traces his mechanical aptitude back to his youth when he harnessed the wind to grind the family’s weekly supply of coffee. A small windmill, some gears, a shaft or two, all went together to create a power coffee grinder that Mathias still remembers as one of his favorite devices.

Ever since that day, about 25 years ago, he’s been figuring out ways to make electricity and mechanics do more work around the house. He still recalls with a smile another youthful venture. It was an electric doorbell chime. Five pie pans and a magnetic clapper were the raw materials. Hooked up by young Mathias, they provided a reasonable facsimile of today’s fancy-sounding door chimes. And that was a quarter of a century ago.

Today, he and his wife and son live in a neat, six-room house where just about anything can be done by pressing a button. To make this possible, Mathias has strung 7000 feet of wire and installed innumerable switches, relays and motors. He uses low-voltage current, reducing the fire hazard and expense. Incidentally, his electricity bill is not much larger than that for an ordinary household, despite the many push buttons.

To the casual visitor, the Mathias house looks no different from any other comfortable American home — until Mathias touches a switch and things begin to happen! Everything is hidden away between floor joists or walls. There are no dangling wires. You wouldn’t suspect the presence of scores of mechanical servants that await your command.

But just step into the nerve center of the system, a closet in Mathias’ bedroom, and you realize that this house is unlike any you’ve ever seen! The walls of the closet are lined with paraphernalia. Switches, relays, clocks that turn on things, clocks that turn off things, thermostats, transformers, rectifiers, yards of wire connecting everything to something else! To the uninformed, it’s an electrician’s nightmare, but to Mathias it all makes sense. Everything has a practical function. There’s no Rube Goldberg scheme in the place.

Mathias believes that half the fun of having something is making it. Every one of his mechanical servants is his own design and construction. He admits he could have bought commercial models in many cases, but where’s the fun in that?

Take that elevator I’m building on the basement stairs,” he explains. “I could buy one of those home elevators, but that would eliminate most of the fun. So I’m building one myself.”

When the doctor said Mrs. Mathias should cut down the number of trips up and down stairs, Mathias went to work on the elevator. He got a few lengths of square door track, like the kind barn doors slide in, and bolted them to the side of-the stairway. A rectangular steel platform, just large enough for one person to stand on, is the “cage.” Its supporting brackets slide smoothly inside the door track. Push-button switches on the safety railing at waist height control the reversible motor that operates the elevator. Push one button, you ride downstairs to the basement. Push the other and you ride up!

Step into the bedroom and Mathias flips a wall switch. The draperies close automatically over the two windows. A surplus bombsight motor in the basement does the work. He throws another switch and the windows close. The radio in the living room can be turned on and off from the bedroom (and from the kitchen and basement as well). Extension speakers bring the sound to you wherever you are.

Clocks in the closet shut the radio off at 10 o’clock each night and turn it on at 6 a.m. On Saturdays and Sundays, the radio stays on until 11 and resumes at 8 in the morning. A special switch cuts out the shut-off clock, if Mathias wants to listen to programs after the usual sign-off hour.

When Mrs. Mathias sits down at her dressing table she doesn’t have to fumble with the twin lamps to turn them on. She merely pulls out the center drawer a fraction of an inch and the lights go on. A microswitch in the drawer does the trick.

The house and garage are protected by a burglar alarm that goes on automatically at bedtime and shuts itself off in the morning. If anybody opens a door in the house or garage during the night, the yard lights go on and a buzzer sounds in the bedroom. An interphone picks up any sounds in the garage and pipes them into the bedroom.

Scattered around the house are fire alarms — simply spring-type clothespins held open by a thin thread. Should fire break out, the thread burns through, releasing the clothespin jaws which close a circuit, sounding an alarm.

Should it rain during the night or when the Mathias family is away, there’s no chance of water damaging the plaster or furnishings. Beneath a downspout is a small metal cup that tips down when filled with water, operating a switch that closes the windows!

The garage doors are opened and closed remotely from a light post alongside the driveway. Mathias simply puts a key in a lock in the post, turns it and the door opens. Inside the garage he throws another switch and the door closes. Or he can open and close the doors from the kitchen. A 1/4-horsepower motor in the garage ceiling does the work.

Press the doorbell button and you automatically turn on the porch light. If there’s nobody home, the light goes off in three minutes. A thermostatic switch is hooked into the light circuit. When you ring the doorbell, a relay turns on a small light bulb under the bellows of the thermostatic switch. It takes three minutes for the heat from the bulb to expand the thermostat enough to open the switch, turning off the light.

Mathias is a bit apologetic about the incompleteness of his push-button house.

“We’ve lived here only two years and it takes time to do everything,” he explains.

In the house he lived in previously, Mathias had a complex system for checking locked doors nightly. Mrs. Mathias had challenged her husband to eliminate the nightly chore of walking around trying every door to make certain it was locked.

Taking up the challenge, he came up with the solution. A simple light circuit was set up to run through every exterior door lock in the house. When the bolts were all latched, the current ran through, lighting the lamp in the bedroom. If one was unlocked, the circuit was broken and the light failed to go on when he turned on the test switch. He’s planning to add this to his new house and it will include the garage doors.

“There’s always something for me to do,” Mathias says. “I’m working on an automatic lawn sprinkler that will turn on the water during the night for any preset time. And I have almost finished work on a remote control that will enable me to tune the radio to any station from any place in the house.

“But what I really want to get working on is a mechanical waitress for our basement picnics. We have a long table and when there’s a crowd here it takes too much time and effort passing food from one end of the table to the other. The way I figure it, electric trains running on tracks in the center of the table will do the job. There’ll be switches at each plate and if you want more salad, you press the button and the train rolls up with the salad bowl.”

Push-Button Manor will never be quite finished.

Swimming Students Learn Strokes From Machine Teacher
ON a casual glance at the contraption shown in the photo at the left, you would think it one of Rube Goldberg’s latest inventions. But you’re wrong, for it’s a machine to teach perfect swimming strokes. The student rests in a belt cradle as shown, while his feet and hands connect with handles in the mechanical arms. A system of gears and levers to which the guide arms are connected serve to compel movements that conform to correct outlines as set forth by swimming experts.

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WORKSHOP WIZARD on the Stage

By William J. Duchaine

RUSSELL E. OAKES of Waukesha,

Wis., has been “making things” ever since he was big enough to wield a jackknife. Away back when makers of electric drills offered lathe attachments, Oakes had the yen for power tools. So he started equipping his shop, suffering occasional pangs of guilt over such an “extravagance,” and never dreaming he was laying the foundation for one of the most unusual careers in the U. S.

The Oakes hobby, which has more than justified any expenditures he has made, has brought enjoyment to thousands of persons. Oakes is now “Professor” Oakes, the wizard of Waukesha. Perhaps you have seen some of his weird and imaginative inventions in the movies where they have been featured. Or, you may have encountered the busy inventor in person. Oakes gives humorous talks and demonstrations of his inventions. Recently his services have been in such demand that his hobby has become his profession.

Oakes has some 60-odd inventions to his credit. To call them odd is an understate-ment. He simply calls them goofy gadgets.

Oakes served as a writer and idea man with a Milwaukee advertising agency for 17 years. Most of his leisure time he spent in his home workshop.

Back in 1935, a friend induced him to demonstrate his mirth-provoking devices at a banquet held for salesmen of a hydraulic-jack manufacturer. Attired in a Prince Albert coat, Oakes began his program with the announcement of his greatest contribution to science. Then he demonstrated his Hydraulic Cigar Lighter.

The lighter is a Rube Goldberg mechanism and the hydraulic salesmen got a big kick out of its demonstration. First, Professor Oakes asked for a glass of water. He poured the water into a funnel. The water flowed from the funnel onto a sponge . operating a lever which opened the gate of a rubber rat’s cage, revealing a piece of cheese. When the rat snapped at the cheese, she hit a paddle, operating another lever. This lever punctured a balloon and released a weight which caused a flywheel to revolve. Sandpaper on the flywheel ignited a firing unit. Then, all the professor had to do was to tip up another lever and light his cigarette.

Oakes has devised many “labor saving” inventions to make the pastime of eating more enjoyable. He’s particularly proud of his Catsup Getter-Outer. Everyone knows how difficult it is to coax the catsup out of a bottle. With the Oakes Catsup Getter-Outer, you merely place a plate bearing a hamburger sandwich on a special platform. Then you turn a crank and a mit-tened hand does the pounding!

The Fresh-Bread Tester is another vitally important invention in the food-handling line. The tester makes it unnecessary for homemakers to squeeze the bread to ascertain its age. They merely insert the bread between two “hands,” and pull a long lever. If the bread is hardened with age, it resists more. Day-old bread flashes an amber light. But if the bread is soft and yielding, the word “Fresh” appears—and a green light shows it is safe to buy the loaf.

Recently, Oakes introduced his “patented” Dripless Doughnut Dunker to a group of men attending a smoker given by the Green Bay (Wis.) Chamber of Commerce. The mechanical dunker dips the delectable morsel—either bite by bite or totally—and holds it for the convenience of the nibbler, while a hinged drip pan catches the coffee overflow and saves the tablecloth. In addition to protecting the tablecloth, the dunker also is a godsend to the diner who likes to dunk but is afraid to scald his thumb and forefinger, Oakes explains.

To those worried about the high-cost-of-living bugaboo, Professor Oakes recommends his Sugar Conserver device. It is guaranteed to get more “mileage” out of each lump of sugar by making a single lump serve a family of four. First, the coffee is placed on a turntable. The operator turns a crank, and a cam arrangement lowers the lump into the cup. After two seconds, a bell rings and the sugar is yanked out of the cup. The next cup then moves into position, repeating the action. A dial indicates the number of cups sweetened!

Oakes has a unique invention to benefit the type of person who is always patting himself on the back. It’s the mechanical Back Patter. When the man brags into a microphone arrangement, the hot air rises to inflate the “air chamber.” Then by operating a lever the wind turns a paddle wheel, which in turn operates a crank to cause a hand to pat his back in a gratifying fashion.

One of the most prolific inventors since the days when Benjamin Franklin flew a kite, Professor Oakes also has “patents” on a Chatter Eliminator. It fits over the head like a radio headset. The rubber pads over the ears help eliminate conversations behind you. Assume you are at the movies. The amplifiers on this gadget face toward the screen so you can hear every endearing term spoken by the movie stars. But if the picture is dull you can reverse the headset and pick up the gossip from behind.

The Self-finding Golf Ball is a great boon to golfers who are always slicing the ball into the rough. When it lands in the tall grass, the ball sends up a red flag and blows a horn to indicate its location.

For picnickers, there’s the Sandwich Shoosher, a sort of third hand with red fingernails. You merely place the sandwich in the third hand. Then you can drink your coffee in peace—because waggling the thumb operates a Shoosher, enabling you to shoo flies off your sandwich. There’s also the Sure-Strike Bowling Ball. It overcomes two common problems of all bowlers—getting fingers cramped or stuck in the holes, and eliminating low scores. When you give this ball a heave, an automatic clutch operates, enabling you to keep the finger holes in your hand. When the ball slides down the alley and smacks the first pin, automatic extension bars pop out, doubling the width of the ball and really mown the pins down.

For insomnia victims, Professor Oakes has invented his Automatic Sheep Counter. Insomniacs need no longer worry about the sheep who come up to the fence but refuse to jump. The invention counts only those which actually cross the top bar— and a mechanical counter keeps tab on the number that do go over and reports them to the sleepless one, until a sufficient quantity to produce sleep have passed over the rail. Even then, the counter keeps on counting, and should you wake, a glance at the automatic total will reassure you and put you back to sleep again.

For church collections, the Oakes Collection Box is ideal. A red light flashes for a penny; nickels and dimes are not marked. A quarter produces a green light and the sound of chimes heralds a dollar bill. A button brings a pistol shot.

There are many other goofy gadgets that have come out of the home workshop of Russell E. Oakes, the wizard of Waukesha. And there are more to come, for he always finds time to return to his hobby.

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Electronic-Music Maestro

YOU’RE a radio repair man, why don’t you build me an electric organ?” If Burton Minshall heard that suggestion once, he must have heard it a thousand times from his wife, Madalene. As a matter of fact, Madalene nagged her husband so often about an electric organ that Burton decided to do something about it and end her nagging.

He began by saving odd parts like vacuum tubes, sockets, chokes and assorted pieces of wire and cable. He found an old reed organ in a junk shop which he bought for a song. Then he chopped it up and salvaged its physical movement. When he found another old, worn-out reed organ, he saved the five octave keyboard.

In a short time his living room looked like a Rube Goldberg workshop. To clean up the mess of strewn parts and tangled lengths of wire, he began his project— building an electronic organ. He worked in his spare time and often into the morning on week ends. Madalene patiently watched the musical instrument grow into a fine, finished spinet-type organ.

Proud of her husband’s unique handicraft and his talent for solving intricate electronic problems, Madalene enjoyed playing her home-built organ. The tonal quality was soft and resonant. Ever since Madalene was a little child she had dreamed of one day owning such a musical instrument but never could afford one. Now she played her favorite hymns, popular and classical selections and imitated the styles of her favorite pipe organ artists like Jesse Crawford and Ann Leaf.

One day, when a group of neighbors attended a small concert given by Madalene, they suggested to Minshall that he build them for sale.

“I was a sucker,” recalls Minshall, “and tried.”

As he began collecting spare parts for his second organ, he also surveyed the market. Church officials and pastors discouraged him from going into the organ business. They said that he couldn’t compete against the big organ firms. But undaunted, he continued his survey. This time he called on funeral directors in his home town of London, Ontario. “Don’t go into it. You’ll lose your shirt,” they warned him.

Minshall decided to give it a whirl anyway.

One day he borrowed a panel truck and loaded his homemade organ into it. Then he and his wife canvassed more funeral directors. Madalene demonstrated the organ by playing it while her husband tried to sell it. After an exhausting, all-day tour, they were about to call it quits and forget the organ building and selling business.

“There’s one more undertaker in town. We haven’t called on him,” said Madalene.

“What’s the use,” mourned Minshall. “We’re not built for this business.”

Madalene was adamant and persuaded her husband to call on this last prospect. He reluctantly agreed and after an hour’s demonstration and some high-powered salesmanship, sold the organ to the funeral director for $450. It was a cash deal, too. To Minshall, a radio serviceman who barely eked out a living for his wife and family, this lump sum of money was a windfall. It was the most money he had ever had at one time.

Encouraged by the sale, he worked nights and on week ends fashioning another organ, this time building it in his garage. It was a vast improvement over the first one. The tonal qualities were richer and he had, by now, ironed out many electronic bugs in the physical movement.

Once again Minshall and his wife borrowed a panel truck, and called on nearby funeral directors. “We called on these people,” said Minshall, “because we learned that when undertakers bought anything they could use they always paid cash on the line.” Cash was important to the Minshalls, now.

After a few days of door-to-door canvas-ing, Minshall was successful in unloading the organ—for $650. When he returned home that night he was faced with a tough decision. Should he quit his salaried job which was badly needed to support his growing family, or give up the idea of going into the organ manufacturing business? He finally decided to risk everything on his new venture. Borrowing the organ from the second undertaker who had bought it, he and his wife toured the provinces of Canada demonstrating and selling electric organs from the lone sample. Within a week, Minshall had sold six organs, all to undertakers.

As a result, he rented a small shop and bought parts to be assembled for his backlog of orders. Next, he hired six untrained people to help him. By the end of the year practically every undertaker in the area owned one of Minshall’s electric organs. He had built and sold 50 instruments each selling for $1,000— and this price happened to be $2,000 under that of the most popular organ on the market.

One advantage Minshall had over competitors was the fact that his organ didn’t require any special kind of instruction. Anyone who could play a piano could easily adapt his talents to his instrument. This in itself, became a terrific selling point for Minshall’s low-priced product.

Soon he branched out into larger quarters. He bought an abandoned school house for $2,100 and repaired it, converting it into a factory. He trained employees to make parts and assemble them into completed organs. With sufficient capital on hand, Minshall began to invade the church field.

Once, while on a demonstration tour, he had set his sample on the pulpit of a Toronto church. In the midst of prayer service, the packed house of worship suddenly heard strange voices emanating from the direction of the organ.

“Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Proceed to King Street.” The voice was clear and loud as it echoed through the church.

Minshall, sitting in a front pew, immediately recognized the trouble. By mistake, he had left the “swell” pedal that controls the volume wide open. Immediately, he apologized for the police short-wave signal and assured the minister and his church officers that it would never occur again. Later, Madalene demonstrated the qualities of the organ and Minshall wrapped up the sale. He developed a trap to eliminate future outside noises from creeping through his electronic circuit.

Up to now, Minshall was solely involved in selling his product direct to the consumer. To stay in business, he had to have dealers to represent him. For a long time he had no luck getting them. Then one day his big break came. The Heintzman chain of music stores, a long established and respected firm, ordered nine Minshall organs, one for each of their stores.

Minshall immediately used this sale as a selling point to make other dealer arrangements. When other music dealers learned that Heintzman stocked the organ, they climbed on the bandwagon. Soon, Minshall was selling to dealers all over the country and his plant boomed, working full blast.

In 1944, Minshall saw the need for his product in the United States. He surveyed many locations and finally settled in Brattleboro, Vt., the home of another established organ company. He produced an organ designed essentially for churches. They moved rapidly in the States. But while he did a good business with churches and funeral directors, it became obvious to him that he needed a more versatile instrument—one that could be sold to the home and one that could be used with small professional musical combos in night clubs, chapels aboard ship and on land where servicemen were stationed.

One day while visiting the piano buyer at Macy’s New York store, the buyer said: “Minshall, what you need are organs to sell for under $1,000. Get them and we can sell them faster than you can make them.”

Minshall headed for home with the buyer’s words ringing in his ears. It was a challenge. He corralled his electronic wizard, George Hadden, and told him the story. Together they took off their coats and went to work. For many months they worked in the shop, never taking a week end off.

They were on the verge of giving up when one day, on an automobile trip they had taken for rest and relaxation, Hadden sank into profound thought.

Suddenly he yelled. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” Minshall asked.

“Just what we’re looking for. An entirely new electronic circuit.”

When Minshall asked him to draw a plan of his sudden brainchild, he replied. “I can’t. It’s all in my mind.” The circuit, he explained, would divide frequencies and produce an ideal musical rave form.

For the next three weeks, Minshall, Hadden and another associate named Dick Campbell, worked around the clock trying to get the dream circuit to divide. Mathematically, it was possible. But physically, it didn’t seem to pan out.

“We were desperate,” recalls Minshall. “We simply had to lick the problem and put a low-cost organ on the market or go out of business.”

Finally, they came up with a frequency divider that used half the number of tubes in the tone generating system. A sample organ was built with the new circuit and in July, 1950, Minshall unveiled his product at the National Association of Music Merchants Convention in Chicago.

“Our dream organ,” says Minshall, “literally broke up the show.”

Dealers stampeded the Minshall crew during the four day show to the tune of $2,500,000 worth of orders.

He and his associates were kept busy writing orders day and night. One salesman, believe it or not, was pushed into the bathroom of the Minshall hotel suite and had to write out his orders using the top of the water basin as a desk.

“Boy,” he exclaimed later, “Was I glad to get out of there!”

Today the Minshall firm in Brattleboro produce more than 250 electric organs a month and does a yearly business amounting to over $4,000,000 wholesale.

Electronic experts confess that the Minshall organs are perhaps the simplest of the pure electronic organs being produced today. Prior to the new divider, it was necessary in some organ designs to employ hundreds of vacuum tubes and a raft of associated parts. “Now,” explains Minshall, “our new circuit makes possible a two-manual and pedal organ with 16 speaking stops all derived from only 36 tubes. Most two-manual electronic organs built with only one rank of tone generators have no way of providing separate registration on the two ranks. Our organ is so built that the swell and great stops are entirely independent of each other. What’s more, our organs employ no moving parts but we use a master oscillator frequency divider principle of tone generation.”

Minshall’s latest innovation to the home electronic-organ field is his “Tone-Arama.” Two speakers, one on each side of the spinet-type organ, instead of the usual single speaker, provide greater depth and clarity to the music. In addition to this new feature, Minshall offers a four-record album by Skitch Henderson which shows the average person how to play the organ in a few simple lessons.

Little did Mrs. Minshall think when she asked her husband to build an electronic organ that eventually he would be turning out 3,000 a year.

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Magic-Makers of the Radio Stations

Sound engineers combine ingenuity and science to make up their bag of tricks.

THEY were dissecting the brain of Nicolai Lenin—on the radio. It was a news broadcast of the achievement of the Soviet Brain Institute in Moscow which had developed a means of slicing brain tissue into thousands of paper-thin fragments for scientific study.

“Give us the sound of a brain being sliced,” came the bizarre order to the sound effects department of the Columbia Broadcasting System.

The broadcast—it was on the “March of Time” program—was to go on the air within a few hours. Columbia’s sound experts hurriedly experimented with meat sliced before the microphone. It was unsatisfactory. Someone suggested cheese, but this also failed to fulfill the delicate assignment Liverwurst was tried and discarded.

Finally Walter Pierson, Columbia’s chief sound man, smiled with satisfaction. He had it! The broadcast was given on schedule. The “brain” of Nicolai Lenin, sliced within an inch of the microphone with a realism that satisfied several million listeners, was a slightly over-ripe banana!

This is but one incident, selected from hundreds that complicate the inventive lives of the sound experts, which serves notice on the radio fan that he must be prepared to discard all preconceived notions of how sound effects are produced. For during the last few months the art of the sound effects man has changed so drastically that the chances are whatever you have read about his unique business is obsolete.

Today the sound man has become the scene-setter of radio. The movies long ago discarded the painted canvas background for the elaborately constructed set. Just so, the modern radio sound effect is a composite thing designed to create a visual image. The days when a few phonograph records, a thunder machine, and a door for slamming purposes constituted the sound equipment of a studio definitely belong to radio’s youthful, past.

“A single sound effect no longer gives the desired mental image,” says expert Pierson of Columbia. “Sound, like the scenery of a stage play, must give a three-dimensional effect. For instance, the ticking of a clock gives an isolated bit of atmosphere. But add to the ticking the sound of an opening window, plus the distant ringing of church chimes, and you have an entirely different mental picture —one with action, depth, a background for drama.”

The new methods by which the network broadcasters produce their effects are fascinating. Ray Kelly, head of the National Broadcasting Company’s sound effects department, has invented hundreds of devices for this purpose. His latest creation is a new thunder machine which can’t even be heard in the studio!

It is an ordinary window screen mounted in a frame, with electric wires connected to the mesh and passing through a switch to the microphone. When Kelly strikes the screen with a soft mallet, the sound is inaudible a few feet away, but the microphone picks it up intensifies its lowest vibrations into the roll of thunder that is stormy weather at its worst.

The sound effects man has to know the possibilities of the microphone—its ability, for instance, to broadcast inaudible sounds by picking up certain vibrations which can be intensified in the control room. He also must have a retentive ear and more than an average allotment of mechanical imagination. The ideal sound effects man has been described as one who, honked at by a taxi in the street, registers the sound of the horn before he jumps.

All too often the expert does not even have the advantage of hearing or analyzing the sound he is called upon to reproduce. A surprising number of radio effects are sounds never before heard by mortal man. One of Kelly’s assignments was to produce the sound of an, as yet, uninvented steam airplane motor on a program presenting scientific advances of the future. With a length of rubber hose, he hooked a container of compressed air to a model airplane propeller and the sound effect was perfect.

A similar assignment came the way of Walter Pierson of Columbia. In the “Cavalcade of America” program the script called for a reenactment of the run of the original locomotive of the New York and Hudson railroad which ran 25 miles up the Hudson river and then blew up. He read descriptions of the catastrophe, and used a heavy iron disc running on wheels like a merry-go-round to recreate the clatter of the suicidal engine.

Not all sound effects require ingenious mechanical devices. In the enactment of a news broadcast describing a blood transfusion operation, the sound of dripping blood was required. Water was tried and found too thin. Clam broth fell short of requirements. Tomato juice was the substance finally used.

It is notable that, where a few years ago radio shied away from effects tending toward the gruesome, today there is a pronounced trend toward realism. The emergence of radio drama and the popularity of news features must be credited with the development. A case in point was the radio story of the beheading of criminals in Germany not long ago. No detail was omitted, but the radio audience would have been spared its shudders if it could have been present in the studio to observe that the victims on the block was a mammoth piece of bologna sacrificed to the knife.

In Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the reader may remember that the criminal who has murdered a man and buried him beneath the floor of his home is finally driven to confess by the obsession that he can hear the dead man’s h2art thumping accusingly. In the radio presentation, the sound the audience heard was the actual heart-beats of a husky six-footer, amplified through a stethoscope.

Accident is responsible for a number of unique sound effect discoveries. A sound effects technician, making a department store purchase, flexed and unflexed a dollar bill in her hand. To you or me it would sound like a dollar bill being snapped. But to her it was the put-put-put of an outboard motor, and so it proved to be when she hastened back to Columbia studios to try it out before the mike. A studio wit suggested that at that rate a ten-dollar bill should be able to reproduce the sound of an entire outboard regatta.

The most satisfactory way to insult a sound effects man is to imply that he uses “canned” effects—phonograph records—because he is unable to reproduce the sounds in question. Forty per cent of all sound effects actually are supplied by records, but the expert maintains that this is merely a matter of expediency. It is a touchy point of pride with him that he can create any sound known to man.

It is perfectly within his capabilities to produce the sound of frying bacon, popping corn, perking coffee, and the like, but it saves time to rely on records for these effects. The well-equipped studio record library contains some 150 discs, carefully indexed. These are made by a special recording studio which makes a business of supplying sound effect records to broadcasting stations all over the country.

The aid of records, however much the true artist may disdain them, is a matter of necessity when one considers that certain script shows (which is the radio description of dramatic plays) are one-third dialogue and two-thirds sound effects.

“Renfrew of the Mounted,” the story of a Canadian mounted policeman, holds the record at Columbia for its demands on the sound department. Five men work all day, five days a week, preparing the sound effects, rehearsing them, and presenting the show. If the script calls for horses stampeding, they cannot be satisfied by reproducing the beat of hoofs and letting it go at that. Modern technique calls for a sound picture of the entire scene. Thus to the beat of hoofs is added the splash of water as the horses rush through a river, the muffled thud as they reach the sandy shore—the whole panorama must be constructed for the listener.

One persistent story regarding the sound man deserves to be scotched once and for all. You have probably heard it. It goes something like this—the script calls for the sound of someone cracking peanuts. For days the sound department drives itself into a frenzy trying every imaginable means to produce the effect. They snap wood, break lead pencils in half, crackle paper and tear their hair. Finally someone suggests that they try cracking peanuts, and lo!, it is the perfect effect which has so long eluded them!

It is not to be denied that such rejections of the obvious have occasionally occurred, but for the most part they are just good newspaper stories. The first consideration of the sound expert is whether or not the desired effect can be produced by natural means. In a surprising number of cases he goes to great pains and expense to produce the effect in just that way.

The Lux Radio Theatre program called for a pier in the East River with old, worn planks over which a wagon drawn by two horses rolled and rumbled. Out of the well-equipped workshop of the sound department came an actual pier in miniature, which was set up in the studio. Its heavy boards creaked realistically when they ran a real wagon over it. Three men were needed to produce a few seconds’ sound-illusion on the air —one to give the sound of hoofs, another to take care of the creaking pier, and a third to manipulate the wagon.

The sound of a compressed-air drill is made by a compressed-air drill. Ten-gallon milk cans delivered from a milk train are actual cans rolled on a platform. The National Cash Register Company supplies a new cash register every month to each of the New York studios for the authentic jingle of this interesting accessory. Typewriters, alarm clocks, and doorbells are present in the flesh. Columbia has fifteen French taxi-horns, each guaranteed to blare an individual bellow. In the “spook” division of the sound department, devoted to the radio interests of ghosts, phantoms, and supernatural menaces, the visitor will observe row upon row of chains, each with its distinctive clank. “Creaks” come in a variety of mechanical assortments. They are made by mounting rusty hinges on wooden frames and by the use of selected woods in varying combination. Thus, upon order, the sound department will deliver a hesitant modest creak, appropriate to a wandering lady ghost, or a spine-chilling crepitation suggestive of Dracula at his worst.

Crockery mortality in the network studios is appalling. Both NBC and CBS buy dishes by the barrel and break them recklessly, not only in domestic dramas but for general crash purposes as well. A gross of platters dropped from a six-foot elevation can be almost anything from a landslide to a train wreck.

Indispensable, too, are small fruit boxes of the type used to pack strawberries. The brittle wood, crushed before the microphone, can be the crackling of a forest fire, the destruction of colliding automobiles (plus shattered dishes for crackling glass), and has even been used to simulate the breaking of a human neck and other emergency purposes.

These stock items, plus the record-playing machine, a collection of doors of all kinds for slamming purposes, and a rain and wind machine are standard equipment in every well-equipped studio. Ray Kelly is the inventor of a new rain machine which can reproduce every pluvial variation, from an April drizzle to a China Seas typhoon.

As a gadget it suggests a Rube Goldberg contraption at its most fantastic. Grape seeds, marbles, a ping pong ball, cellophane and peanut bags are the amazing ingredients assembled by the Kelly genius to produce radio rainfall and nothing else. The grape seeds are the raindrops; they are distributed on a revolving disc and scraped off by a windshield wiper, directing them in a falling stream upon a marble a foot below the disc. Some of the seeds bounce off the marble and strike a suspended ping pong ball, dropping upon a sheet of cellophane and tumbling down it to beat upon a glazed bag which originally contained salted peanuts. The rest of the seeds pepper a tightly stretched bit of onion-skin paper. A tornado is air escaping from a rubber balloon. Marching soldiers are wooden pegs strung loosely in a frame so that they may beat upon a sounding board in irregular rhythm. A whirring factory is a series of gears driven by an electric motor. An airplane engine is a rubber strip whirled on a motor shaft.

But no single one of these devices is so self-important as it used to be not very long ago. Today they are simply the elements out of which the expert builds his composite sound picture. That is the new radio technique.

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How Comic CARTOONS Make Fortunes

The “funnies” you read every day bring $8,000,000 a year to a small group of 200 cartoonists. How they rose to the top and how you can enter their select circle is told here by leading comic artists.

THAT laugh you had today over your favorite funny strip is worth money— $200 to $1,000 a day to the cartoonist that made you chuckle.

His pen and ink characters are part of a great $8,000,000 industry that is far from overcrowded and that is practically depression proof.

Of the 200 successful cartoonists today the majority were not “born artists.” In many cases they were not artists at all, but just fellows with a knack for sketching who thought of a good idea or a funny character that “made a hit” with an editor and eventually with newspaper readers.

Today editors are eagerly looking for more cartoonists with better ideas or funnier cartoons. It has been proved that dad, mother, brother, sister, the bootblack and the millionaire— nearly everyone—reads the “funnies” and that a great number of readers buy a certain newspaper every day just to follow the antics of some pen-and-ink manikins.

The big financial returns of cartooning was revealed a short time ago when Robert L. Ripley, the “Believe-It-Or-Not” wizard, testified in a law suit that his income from his drawings averaged from $6,000 to $7,000 a week. That statement surprised many people and immediately afterward there was an epidemic of “Believe It or Not” imitators. The figure quoted by Ripley also showed that he was the biggest “money man” of the cartooning industry. As a boy Ripley had a talent for drawing, but his ambition in life was to be a big league baseball player. At 14 he sold his first cartoon, “The Village Belle Was Slowly Ringing,” depicting a country girl turning a clothes wringer. But he concentrated on baseball so successfully that he was signed up as a “rookie” pitcher with John McGraw’s major league New York Giants. The first day he wore a Giants’ uniform he broke his arm and his baseball career came to end.

How Ripley Discovered Fame

Eventually he succeeded in joining the art staff of the San Francisco Bulletin as a sports cartoonist. Ripley admitted his drawings were not very good and his mother tried to urge him to learn a trade.

In a few years Ripley moved to New York where J. R. Darling (Ding), famous cartoonist, hired him as a sports artist on the New York Evening Globe. One day in 1921 Ripley found himself without an idea for a cartoon. He dug into sports record books, found some amazing performances, pictured them and turned them over to the chief of the art staff. The title “Believe It or Not” was put on the drawing.

The cartoon proved so popular that he had to continue the “Believe It or Not” drawings daily. Other papers in different cities wanted the cartoons and Ripley became a syndicate cartoonist with a rapidly increasing income. In 1929 he signed a contract with William Randolph Hearst’s King Features syndicate. His drawings now appear in more than 250 newspapers in the United States, Canada, and twenty-two foreign countries. During 1932 Ripley traveled 60,000 miles and this year 30,000 miles seeking the unusual facts he pictures daily. To date he has visited 151 different countries.

The Leading Comic Artists

Ripley, though, does not draw “funnies.” Of the comic strip type of cartoonist, Sidney Smith, creator of the buffooning Andy Gump, George McManus and his “Bringing Up Father,” and Bud Fisher with “Mutt and Jeff” easily are at the top. These three earn about $2,000 a week from their daily strips and possibly $1,000 more from other sources that use their comic characters. Last year Sidney Smith, Chicago Tribune newspaper syndicate’s ace cartoonist, earned $150,000 from the Gump family’s adventures.

Last year was the worst year of the depression but it affected cartooning very little compared to other industries. Why? Because editors wanted more and more “funnies” to cheer people and help them forget their troubles.

Funnies Started During Depression

The depression brought fortunes to several cartoonists. The adventurous exploits of Dick Tracy, square-jawed detective character created by Chester Gould, pitched the obscure Gould straight on his way into the $50,000-a-year class, within the short period of six months.

Rube Goldberg, leading cartoonist of the McNaught Syndicate whose looney inventions make thousands laugh, also found more income during the depression. He started a new comic strip called “That’s Life” that has become popular. Goldberg, by the way, started out to be a mining engineer. E. G. Segar’s jaw smashing “Pop-Eye” and Phil Nowlan’s and Dick Calkins’ “Buck Rogers,” and Percy Crosby’s “Skippy’ have also made great strides in the last two or three years.

Movie Cartoons Highly Successful

These and other “funnies” have grown during the depression, but the old stand-bys, tried by many years of wear and tear, have clung to the top as popular as ever. Bud Fisher’s “Mutt and Jeff,” whose daily adventures are distributed by the Bell Syndicate, is still a great money maker. These two characters are the veterans of funnyland. Andy Gump first saw the light of the printed page in 1917, but Mutt and Jeff made their debut in 1909.

Another type of cartooning is the animated funnies of the movies, now equipped with voices and music just like all “talkies.” Walt Disney, who has taken a mouse as his leading man and made “Mickey Mouse” a big hit throughout the world, is the leader of this field. His annual income, it is said, reaches astronomical figures. “Mickey Mouse” is also syndicated in daily newspapers by Walt Disney Enterprises.

Where do these expert comic masters who earn such big fortunes come from? How does one go about getting into this select golden circle?

You must have the knack or talent to draw cartoons, of course. Schools specialize in the art and turn out successful graduates. But there are thousands of cartoonists all over the country who are not making fortunes.

Then how does one get into this big money class? Grant Powers, well known New York sports cartoonist, supplied the answer.

“An art school education or training in a school which majors in cartooning can do no harm,” he said. “It may be of tremendous benefit in giving you the technique to polish up your natural talents. “But I have known cartoonists with no previous training to volunteer to work for nothing so that they might assist their idols in lettering in balloons—which is the dialogue—or the background after the artist has done the principal work of the strip.

“Once you have made this contact, or obtained some other work in an office where Cartoonists are at work, you must be very patient as sometimes months and years may foil by and the rainbow’s end still be remote. But sooner or later every understudy gets his opportunity. Most conspicuous of these is the case of the man who inherited the ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ strip after the immortal Clare Briggs, its mentor, died. That feature continued running, uninterrupted by the passing of its creator, simply because there was a pinch-hitter on hand to carry on the work.

“When you have gained entree to a newspaper, you are quite likely to find that the sporting department can use a good feature from you once a week, preferably Sunday. At first it might be crude, finding appeal only in the fundamental fact that it is a cartoon. But if you’ve got the stuff, it will improve—or die.

“If you’ve got something unique, the publisher will ask you to make it a daily feature. If it goes over big as a daily feature, it will get abroad that you are producing something worthy of national recognition.

“At this point you make your first acquaintance with the syndicates, organizations which take your original product and have it reproduced several hundred times. They then sell the mats—a sort of paper mould from which plates are made in the newspaper’s stereotyping plant—to client papers throughout the country.

“This is what is called in the craft as being on ‘Easy Street.’ You sit in your studio and turn out your copy, send it t

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DELAYING THE BROADCAST

A FEW weeks ago the popular radio show, Information Please, used the following catch question:

“Who hears the speaker first, the people at the back of the auditorium, or the people 3,000 miles across the country who are listening to the broadcast of the speech?”

The catch was that radio waves travel with the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, and sound waves only 1,080 feet per second. Therefore, the answer went, the listeners three thousand miles away would hear it first.

However, in the actual broadcast of a speech from, say, New York to San Francisco, the tripper-uppers would find themselves tripped. The program, would go over a network, which would mean that it would travel through three thousand miles of telephone wire or cable before reaching the west coast, and the impedance of the telephone wire would delay it about one-fifth of a second, so that listeners in the auditorium would be the first to hear the speaker.

This characteristic property of wire and cable caused many a headache for the Columbia Broadcasting System when station WBBM in Chicago and KFAB in Lincoln, Nebraska, were synchronized on 770 kc. There was a strip fifty or sixty miles wide about midway between the stations where their signals overlapped, so that a set tuned to 770 kc. would pick up both stations.

It was a simple matter for the engineers to match the frequencies exactly so that listeners would not be bothered with squeals or howls. But the line running from Chicago to Lincoln delayed the Lincoln broadcast by twenty-three thousandths of a second, while radio waves themselves traveled with the speed of light. As a result, the program from KFAB would reach the listener twenty-three thousandths of a second later than the same program from WBBM, enough to cause a hollow tone about the same as you would get if you yelled into a barrel eleven feet deep.

Frank B. Falknor, chief engineer of Columbia’s central division, undertook to solve the problem. It boiled down to a question of delaying WBBM’s broadcast exactly twenty-three thousandths of a second, and doing it without spoiling the tone quality. There was no equipment anywhere to do the job, and development of an electrical delay system was a matter of months. As a stop gap he rigged up an ingenious mechanical contraption, warranted to make Rube Goldberg green with envy.

He started with a section of lead sewer pipe, twenty-three feet long. It would take a sound wave twenty-three thousandths of a second to pass through it. At one end he put a dynamic loud speaker, fitting it to the pipe with a matching unit that would permit the sound waves to feed into the pipe without echoing. This speaker was connected to the studio microphone, or to the incoming wire from an eastern network program.

At the other end of the pipe he mounted a dynamic microphone. So far, so good. He had produced the necessary delay. But when sound waves hit the mike some of them bounced right back. When they met the waves coming from the speaker they produced a series of beats or humps that ruined the program, making it worse than the barrel tone they were trying to kill.

To choke these echoes he installed a network of cloth in the pipe, starting with gauze near the center and using heavier and heavier fabrics as he approached the mike end. The final pieces were chunks cut from mechanics’ overalls!

This equipment worked fairly well, but there were still a few humps that the fabric network was unable to kill, and the total volume was reduced. Accordingly, volume was stepped up with an amplifier, and the humps eliminated by a series of equalizers, one for each hump, with an amplifier between each of them.

The contraption worked like a charm. Programs started going through it at the same instant they started over the wire to Lincoln. By the time it had bounced down the pipe, passed through the equalizers, and reached the transmitter, the corresponding impulse was leaving the antenna in Lincoln. Its fidelity was fairly good, with accurate results over a tone range from 100 to 5,000 cycles.

The electrical system now in operation has even greater fidelity, covering the range from 50 to 6,000 cycles. It is made up of electrical filter sections, equalizers, and amplifiers. Each filter section delays the impulse by an infinitesimal fraction of a second, but in so doing reduces the volume of some tones far more than others. Hence, it must next go to an equalizer, which levels the volume for all tones, but actually cuts total volume. Next it is fed through an amplifier, then to another filter section, etc. In actual practice twenty sections are needed, the delay required now being thirty-six thousandths of a second because of a new cable installed between the two cities.