Beer Making Is Marvel of Industrial Chemistry
With the removal of national restrictions against the manufacture and sale of beer, American brewers are again in action. Their operations represent one of the most extensive applications of modern industrial chemistry. More than 2,000,000,000 pounds of malt, 650,000,000 pounds of corn and corn products, and 41,000,000 pounds of hops are a part of the vast consignment of raw materials that experts will turn each year into beer. On these pages, our artist shows how the transformation is accomplished in one big, and now active, American brewery.
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Engineering the Magic Carpet’s Flight
Problems in Mechanics that Make the “Movie” Engineer’s Profession Recall the Magician’s Miracles
BUILD me a magic carpet on which I can ride; a flying horse like Pegasus and arrange a set so that I can disappear in a whirlwind.”
The “boss” of the moving-picture lot, without more ado, walked out of his chief engineer’s office, leaving that hard-working individual the three problems which he mentally added to the score or more of similar commands he had executed since the actual “shooting” of the scenes in the huge spectacle had begun months ago. For the engineering staff of the larger moving-picture producers is used to facing and conquering problems that for sheer unusual-ness are perhaps unrivaled.
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MM’S Cover from Painting to Magazine
Three photo negatives are made of 21″x30″ oil painting (below). At same time screen of 133 dots to inch is placed between plate and lens. On one negative all but blue color is filtered out, second all but red, and third yellow. Proof of type for the cover is photographed. Type on negative is masked for drawing.
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Very cool. This article was written back when they still had a big network of pneumatic tubes connecting all of the post offices in Manhattan.
What Happens When You Mail a Letter
By Herbert O. Johansen
With the Christmas rush on, the complex network of men and machines that speeds the mails is working in high gear.
WHEN you drop a letter in a mailbox and hear the slot lid click, you probably give the lid a couple of extra flips for good measure. In return for that effort, plus licking the stamp, you take it for granted that your message of love, business, sorrow, cheer or complaint will be delivered to the right person at the right place in the shortest possible time.
And it almost certainly will be—along with the other 127,677,738 letters that are mailed in the United States on an average day—enough letters, if their envelopes were laid end-to-end, to reach from New York to Shanghai.
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Stitching Steel Into Streamliners
Budd’s new assembly line rolls out cars like cans.
By MORTON C. WALLING
AS YOU stand on a catwalk high above the plant you can scarcely see where it ends, dim in the distance, five city blocks away. The workmen dwindle to mere specks, the gigantic U-shaped welders become tiny tweezers. Toward you stretch three long, silver caterpillars: assembly lines. Here and there comes a flicker of blue flame from an arc welder, reflected and reflected again from shining stainless steel. Occasionally there is a rumbling medley of thumps from shot welders; otherwise there is only a low hum from the thousands of workmen and machines.
Here is modern technology in action—the assembly-line system the auto industry made famous. But as the great cranes swoop down along the line and the silvery bodies roll nearer and nearer you can see they are too shiny for automobiles—and too big. Each is as long as half a dozen motor cars—a stainless steel railway coach.
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Prehistoric Monsters Roar and Hiss for Sound Film
THIS remarkable article tells you how the ingenuity and skill of motion picture directors solve the hard emblem of putting on the screen the forms and noises of animals that have been extinct thousands of centuries
by Andrew R. Boone
FROM the slime of tropical mud flats, the ghost voices of prehistoric monsters have reached the screen. Hisses and grunts of the pterodactyl and brontosaurus; roars from a tyrranosaurus, largest of the dinosaur family; groans and roars of an imaginary giant ape are reproduced by mechanical contrivances.
Kong, the ape, crashed through the heavy growth of an unknown forest, uttering fierce growls and beating his breast in rage. As the scene unfolded in silence before a small group of us in a tiny projection room, the studio sound experts discussed ways and means of re-creating his awful voice and the solid thumps of clenched hands against the massive chest.
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The Amazing Story of Stainless Steel
RUST which, it is estimated, causes a loss of about one billion dollars a year in this age of steel, today is in full retreat before an advance that began about a generation ago. Strangely enough, the big guns of war played a key part in the early stages of the battle.
The history of man’s attempt to conquer rust goes back almost to the time when the first iron tool was fashioned. The most important chapters, however, have been written since the beginning of the present century.
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Box and Crate Engineering
That may be a recognized course of study some of these days
By WM. J. DUCHAINE
UNIVERSITIES and engineering schools, now that the war is over, quite likely will offer courses in “box-and-crate engineering.” Industrial concerns, who employ safety engineers, chemical engineers, and others with specialized training, will add experts on container construction to their staffs. Packing and shipping of postwar industrial products will become an exact science, and for no small number of college graduates it will become a profession.
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The Story of Soap
FROM JUNGLE TO HOME
By Ralph Baker
THE white meat of the cocoanut from tropical islands of the South Seas, oil from the cotton fields of the South, thyme and other herbs from shady gardens, soda and potash from desert mines, flowers from the flower-fields of Europe—these are the principal ingredients from which modem soap is made.
The origin of soap is lost in antiquity. Buried in the flaming lava of Vesuvius a soap maker of Pompeii met his death. Centuries later excavators found his shop with bars of soap in their original moulds. Even that is not the beginning. In 600 B. C. the Phoenicians made soap as a commercial product, and it was doubtless used long before that.
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From Goggle Balls to Sun Glasses
THE craze for gayly colored sun glasses that swept the country last year and is booming again with even greater fervor as summer comes on again, has revived to full capacity one of the most remarkable and least - known branches of the glass-making industry. Although tens of thousands of the familiar “smoked” and amber glasses, for beach and sporting wear, had been made and sold regularly each year, the new fad sent the demand skyrocketing to millions, while lens glass of half a dozen new tints and colors had to be created almost overnight.
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