1972
Sooner Pictures
“Edwin H. Land, founding father of the Polaroid Company, gave the primary intensive account of his agency’s latest system of pictures at a current assembly. Beneath the title ‘Absolute One-Step Pictures,’ Land demonstrated the brand new digital camera and coloration movie that Polaroid expects to put in the marketplace later this 12 months. The brand new system, Land mentioned, is a compact, automated digital camera able to making a succession of coloration images just about as quick because the photographer can push the button. The digital camera weighs 26 ounces and when folded for carrying is roughly the dimensions of a 400-page paperback guide.”
1922
Swords to Plowshares
“The Limitation of Armament Convention, in Washington, by limiting the US naval program from roughly 1,370,000 tons to 525,000 tons, is chargeable for the brand new business of ship scrapping. Probably the most highly effective oxyacetylene and electrical torches have been developed. The 50-odd destroyers bought by the Hitner agency are being ripped aside by highly effective chisels operated with compressed air gadgets. Ten-ton crocodile shears chunk by means of the destroyer plating as if it have been cheese, and these items are re-melted into ingots and rolled into varied shapes for structural metal, rails, sheet plate and different industrial makes use of. Whole annihilation isn’t the destiny of all the previous combating craft. The hulls of some might be transformed into fruit boats.”
Synthetic Lightning
“By way of a particular equipment, the laboratory of Charles P. Steinmetz, chief consulting engineer of the Basic Electrical Firm, is producing synthetic lightning, which has about one five-hundredth of the horsepower possessed by the lightning flash of nature. It has just one five-hundredth as a lot voltage. However it’s precisely the identical type of vitality, saved up and discharged in the identical means as in {an electrical} storm within the heavens. Any object that’s positioned within the path of the synthetic lightning stroke is torn to items simply as actually as it might be by pure lightning.”
Time for Batteries
“For a few years the bugbear of clock-makers has been the main-spring. Spring stress and driving energy are larger when the spring is tight than when it’s partly run down; regulation to insure working at a uniform price is probably the most troublesome a part of clock-making. A brand new clock, now in the marketplace after some six years of growth, has achieved away with the main-spring. The driving drive is electrical, and comes from a battery assured to run for a 12 months. The reason being primarily that present is used intermittently. At every tick of the clock the circuit is closed, and the present flows for a particularly brief interval of time; throughout by far the bigger a part of every second no ‘juice’ is used.”
1872
Depend Girls as Employees
“In response to the census, the US accommodates 38,558,371 inhabitants and 12,505,923 working individuals; 10,669,436 are males, and 1,836,487 females. Between the ages of ten and fifteen years, the males outnumber the females almost three to 1; between sixteen and fifty-nine years, the ratio will increase to almost six to 1. That is accounted for by girls marrying and settling all the way down to the drudgery of the family. These girls usually are not thought of as employees within the census calculations, and right here we contemplate a mistake has been made. The cares of housekeeping and the rearing of kids are the heaviest of burdens, and a lady who fulfils her perpetual spherical of duties ought absolutely to be classed first on the record of those that earn their bread by arduous work. In actuality we discover that there’s a steadiness on the facet of ladies, within the form of endless labor, probably the most monotonous and thankless in existence.”
Cement from Sewage
“A brand new methodology of disposing of sewage, by making it into cement, has been efficiently examined at Ealing, west of London. The precept consists in mixing, with the sewage, portions of lime and clay, combining with the carbonic acid of the fecal issues to type carbonate of lime, in an impalpable powder. The lime and clay destroy the slimy glutinous character of the sewage ‘sludge’ and hold the sewer outlet drain free from the festering and putrefying deposit which in any other case tends to choke it. It’s claimed that the operation may be worthwhile, impartial of the benefits gained by thus deodorizing and [decontaminating] the excrementitious issues of cities, which should in any other case be disposed of in a fashion kind of unhealthy, and fairly often at nice expense.”
