Helium Plasma Speakers (Jun, 1979)

Coneless speaker uses plasma driver

“Jack’s Welding? My loudspeakers are low. Fill ’em up with helium, please.”

Strange phone call? It’ll be routine for affluent audiophiles using a new speaker system, the Hill Type 1. Type 1 cabinets contain a helium bottle good for about 300 hours of playing time. Minute amounts of helium bleed into a glowing plasma, or highly ionized gasâ€”heart of the speaker from Plasmatronics Inc. (2460 Alamo, S.E., Albuquerque, N.M. 87106).

World’s First Instant Camera (Polaroid Land Camera) (Apr, 1947)

Camera Coughs Out Finished Prints

YOUR present camera performs only one of many stepsâ€”developing, fixing, printing, and so onâ€”involved in making a photograph. Edwin H. Land, 38-year-old president of the Polaroid Corporation, has invented a one-step process in which the camera does everything. With his camera, you snap the shutter and turn a knob; 60 seconds later you have a finished, dry print. The Land camera takes its pictures in the conventional way, but inside it, in addition to the film roll, there is a roll of positive paper with a pod of developing chemicals at the top of each frame. Turning the knob forces the exposed negative and the paper together through rollers, breaking the pod and spreading the reagents evenly between the two layers as they emerge from the rear of the camera. Clipped off, they can be peeled apart a minute later.

Modern Methods Improve Ancient Tattooing Art (Jun, 1932)

Modern Methods Improve Ancient Tattooing Art

TATTOOING is one of the most ancient arts in the world. Even before man had learned to writeâ€”and centuries before he could printâ€”he practiced the art of pricking various designs and symbols and pictures into the human skin.

Down through the ages men and women have tattooed themselves for a wide variety of reasons. Early tribes tattooed their faces to make themselves appear more ferocious and powerful in battle. Other tribes tattooed their whole bodies as a protection from the rays of the sun and from the eyes of their enemies. Then the custom sprang up of tattooing the various parts of the body for religious purposes, or to show membership in a certain family or clan, or to make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex, or as evidence that a youth had reached the marriageable age.


Why use those annoying glasses when you could stare through slits cut in a pipe?


By Paul A. O’Neal

YOUR FIRST LOOK at 3-D TV will be just as startling and realistic as when you first viewed the new 3-D movies at your local motion-picture theater.

Three-dimensional vision is actually easy to accomplish on television. Whereas in cinematography there are many problems in producing 3-D in large auditoriums, TV can be utilized in a small room and need provide for only a few viewers at any one time. There is no need for using two films and keeping them matched, and no wide-angle screen or throw-away Polaroid glasses are required.

Walk on Air With New Boots (Sep, 1934)

All of us, tricked by the Reebok conspiracy.

Walk on Air With New Boots

A RUBBER boot which at lastenables man to walk on air has recently been perfected by an English inventor.

Rubber bladders have been built into the boot both at the heel and the sole, with a rubber tube leading from the air bladders to the top of the boot. An ordinary tire pump can be attached to the rubber tube for filling the boots with air.

Sponsors claim that those wearing the new boots get a delightful sensation of walking on air. In addition, the air cushion is more comfortable, preventing blisters.

First American CRT “Televisor” (Jun, 1932)


Reception On Moving Train

World’s First Calculator Watch, the HP-01 (Sep, 1977)

Besides being first, this is one of the coolest calculator watches I’ve ever heard of. You could actually use the time and date as variables in your calculations and it would continuously update the values based on the stopwatch or timer.

Hewlett-Packard advances in measurement and computation

The HP-01: a new kind of “time machine” you wear on your wrist.

New tools sometimes demonstrate their full significance only after people have invented a new range of uses for them. Their existence precedes their “reason” for existence. The HP-01 may be such a tool. It results from a timely fusion of two Hewlett-Packard technologiesâ€”precision time measurement1 and computationâ€”and interrelates timekeeping with a computing element for the first time in a wrist-sized instrument.

Any resemblance between the HP-01 and a watch/ calculator stops inside the case. What makes the HP-01 a new kind of “time machine” is that it can compute time data to produce numerical perspectives in time. For example:

Electronic-Music Maestro (May, 1954)

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.

Tour of a Very Early TV Station (Nov, 1931)


And to view it at home? Here’s what you need:


Latest Television Broadcast Station


Electric Pin Boys Never Go Home (Mar, 1946)

Electric Pin Boys Never Go Home

A MAN who wouldn’t give up after everyone else had failed has produced what bowlers the world over have wanted ever since the game was invented a machine that will “spot” tenpins on the alley.