KEEPING A RECORD

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 20, 25 January 1939, Page 20

KEEPING A RECORD

In tlio year 7939 people will not be puzzling about how we lived in this year 1939 if the plans now being made by far-sighted scientists work out as they should. On little narrow bands of metal film, not much wider than half an inch, pictures, documents and even novels are being copied with meticulous care. Many thousands of words are imprinted on a few score feet of film. Pictures are developed in a special way to leave the images in raw metal, and they finally appear black on a white background. To decipher the words imprints on the film are magnified by a reading machine and thrown up to the original size of the pages from which they were copied. This is the way scientific men are trying to make records of out times for future generations, for men and women who, in some 0000 years' time, will open the specially sealed vaults in which these records will be carefully preserved. Placed in glass containers cleared of air with a vacuum pump, and into which <helium gas is introduced before the tube is sealed with hot flame, the photographs and . stories of present-day life, with models of many important inventions, are being left in a specially built crypt. A reading machine has not been forgotten, so that those living in the year 7939 will have positive proof of our* life of to-day.