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THINKING IN GLASS
By J. S. QUALEY

MOST of our giant oil refineries have glass skeletons in their closets. Before they spill one drop of gasoline, lubricants or other by-products of crude into the pipe lines or the stomachs of water, rail and highway tankers, their efficiency at squeezing out every cubic centimeter of value has been planned and proved in glass models sitting atop stone tables in engineering laboratories.

Actual creators of these refineries are the glass constructionists who fashion the prototypes. Typical of scientific glass blowers are three men in the laboratory of the M. W, Kellogg Company plant in Jersey City, N. J.—master glass constructionist T. A. Graf, and his staff of two, Robert Connelly and James Margiotta.

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This was a really interesting read. I honestly had no idea how a steel was made. I wonder if it’s still done the same way.

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Steel - Backbone of the Modern World
by Robert W. Gordon

A WORLD without steel—try to imagine it! Without steel, the whole physical structure of the modern world would collapse. Lacking this one all-important substance, the civilization we know would cease to exist. There was, of course, civilization long before the discovery of steel, but it was vastly different from ours; so different that it requires an effort of the will to picture a world without steel.

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New Marvels of Food Factories

PERMITTED to peep behind the scenes in a giant food plant, a housewife would envy the speed and exactness of the modern machines used in preparing and packing food. The variety of these error-proof automatic devices is almost endless. In bakeries, massive, yet delicately adjusted mixers weigh and sift flour and measure water, mixing enough dough for hundreds of loaves of bread in one batch and assuring uniform taste and texture. The baked loaves are brought into position before a rank of dancing hack-sawlike blades that slice them in a flash, more nearly even than the most skilful housewife could do. Huge disks, rotating under corrugated rollers, knead spaghetti dough to a uniform consistency.

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How Light Bulbs Are Made

1 Pictures on this page show the steps in the process of making electric light bulbs. First, the tungsten wire filament is drawn through diamond dies. So fine is this wire, one-quarter the diameter of a hair, that it is extremely difficult to see it

2 Here is the mechanical spider that takes the fine tungsten wire and winds it around a steel wire form to shape the filament. An attendant watches the process through a microscope to be sure the spacing is accurate

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Here’s How Harmonicas Are Made

HARMONICAS, like many another product, have taken their place on U.S. assembly lines. Largely imported before the war, the ubiquitous and versatile instruments, more familiarly known as mouth organs, will be mostly American-made from now on.

With an estimated 3,600,000 slated for production in 1947 by one factory alone, the hip-pocket band has rapidly become a precision-made, mass-production commodity with a wide public appeal and an industry all its own. Invented more than a century ago, the harmonica was once a toy, is today a real instrument with complex 50-note chromatic models now available.

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Jungle to Factory—Trail of Auto Tire

Sidewalk from Chicago to New York Could Be Built from Rubber

Annually Consumed in Making Treads and Tubes

ABOUT seven-tenths of the value of rubber products made in the United States is represented in automobile tires and inner tubes, while 75 per cent of the world’s entire output of the material is consumed in their manufacture.

Until recent years the “rubber trail” took its traders into the wildest lands of the tropics, where they confronted untold hardships in order to provide the motorist with velvet shoes for the wheels of his car. Now, the rapid production of rubber on cultivated plantations makes the collecting of the various grades a far easier task.

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Baskets Rolled Him To Riches

Grocer S. N. Goldman looked at a folding chair and came up with a $1,000,000 idea-collapsible wire pushcarts.

By Gilbert Hill

MOST folks look too far away for that “big chance.” It’s usually right in front of you, just daring you to do something about it.

S. N. Goldman, of Oklahoma City, believes this. He can prove it, too, because he’s built a multi-million-dollar business —on the side, away from his regular business—with a product known around the world, just by “looking close.”

Goldman is a groceryman. He operates 30 huge super-markets in Oklahoma in his Standard & Humpty Dumpty chain. But he’s just a little guy in the grocery business compared with some firms and yet many of his competitors couldn’t get along without him.

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From the Stone Age to Wallpaper

Patterns of Today Reflect Designs, Coats of Arms and Tapestries First Used During the Middle Ages in Europe

ALTHOUGH the manufacture of wall-papers is one of the most interesting branches of the paper industry, comparatively few persons are familiar with its details or with how its development has kept pace with the progress of mankind from the earliest ages.

In the modern mill waste paper of various kinds—catalogue trimmings, office records and overissue newspapers—is reduced to pulp together with a certain amount of chemical, coloring matter and sizing. Since the output of this process does not have the color or texture necessary for the background, a coating of china clay, or plain ground color, is applied before printing.

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Chicle Quest Beats Highway to Tropics

World’s Taste for Chewing Gum Once Known to Ancient Aztecs Builds Giant Industry in Few Decades

WITH well over a million dollars a week being spent in America for chewing gum, an enterprise that was launched amid much doubt on the part of the public, not so long ago, has become a leading industry.

It has been only a few decades since it was discovered that the combination of chicle and sugared flavors made a pleasing confection and in that short span of time, its use has become so common that today it is estimated the delicacy claims 75,000,000 devotees in America alone. Abroad, too, the demand for the sweet has caused abundant exportations of the commodity which now is known to almost every people under the sun.

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This is an excellent, very long, 1982 National Geographic overview of all aspects of the microchip. It covers advances in silicon tech, how chips are produced, their uses and their effect on society. Topics include robots, hackers, digital watches, computers in the classroom, AI, early navigation systems, online news and shopping, telecommuting and more. Plus a ton of great pictures. Check out this rather prescient quote about online privacy:

“With personal computers and two-way TV,” he said, “we’ll create a wealth of personal information and scarcely notice it leaving the house. We’ll bank at home, hook up to electronic security systems, and connect to automatic climate controllers. The TV will know what X-rated movies we watch. There will be tremendous incentive to record this information for market research or sale.”

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ELECTRONIC MINI-MARVEL THAT IS CHANGING YOUR LIFE

The Chip

By ALLEN A. BORAIKO, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EDITORIAL STAFF
Photographs by CHARLES O’REAR

IT SEEMS TRIFLING, barely the size of a newborn’s thumbnail and little thicker. The puff of air that extinguishes a candle would send it flying. In bright light it shimmers, but only with the fleeting iridescence of a soap bubble. It has a backbone of silicon, an ingredient of common beach sand, yet is less durable than a fragile glass sea sponge, largely made of the same material.

Still, less tangible things have given their names to an age, and the silver-gray fleck of silicon called the chip has ample power to create a new one. At its simplest the chip is electronic circuitry: Patterned in and on its silicon base are minuscule switches, joined by “wires” etched from exquisitely thin films of metal. Under a microscope the chip’s intricate terrain often looks uncannily like the streets, plazas, and buildings of a great metropolis, viewed from miles up.

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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.

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Turning Out Photographs by the Million

Great Plants in All Parts of the Country Are Developed to Supply Quick Service and Assistance for Army of Amateurs

DEVOTED exclusively to developing films and printing pictures for an army of amateur camera enthusiasts, great plants have been built up in all parts of the country. During the “busy” months of June, July, August and September, when the weather is best suited to taking pictures, the seven largest finishing plants in Chicago handle more than 114,000 pictures daily. Several have an output of 8,000 to 12,000 every twenty-four hours, and many print more than 5,000,000 as an annual average.

In Cincinnati, a single company serves almost a hundred drug stores, employing a fleet of automobiles to collect the film and deliver the pictures to the proprietors who have found that the “side line” in film service is a profitable advertisement and brings in potential customers. In one week, one of the collectors for this company brought in 20,000 spools of film and as many as 17,500 prints have been distributed in a single day.

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