WONDER CEASES

Taranaki Daily News, 24 November 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

WONDER CEASES

THE LATEST COMMONPLACE. PUBLIC USED TO SHOCKS. The new invention is at first a miracle, then a nine-days wonder, and then a commonplace, says the Children’s Newspaper. Already we hardly, turn our heads to look at an aeroplane. As for air disasters, they have to be very serious indeed to engage attention in the papers. Thus, on June 9, in the United States, an air-liner left Newark airport at 5 p.m. and was due to reach Syracuse at 7.30. She wirelessed all well at 6, and was then silent. She carried a crew of three and four passengers. They crashed in a desolate spot, and all were lost.

This terrible thing was recorded in a few lines in papers outside America. Nearly always such disasters are described as exceptional, which they are net.

In France recently an aeroplane crashed at a show, cutting the aviator in two. The crash narrowly missed the crowd of spectators. This also was awarded only a few lines. Is the modern world growing altogether callous? Only yesterday, as it seems to us, we were accustomed to speak with disapproval of the ancient Roman arena, but we are easily beating its horrors.

CAMERA TO TELL SECRETS

REVEALING SLOW-MOTION. Please do it more slowly so that we can see how it is done. How often has such a request been made by eager learners who want to know how to get the right twist on the ball to bowl the batsmen, the right angle for their tennis mckets to ensure that their brilliant strokes do not land gaily in the next court. To them the slow-motion camera has been a boon, for it has allowed them to study on the screen movements which could not possibly be performed at the slow rate shown. NovA for industrialists and research workers, to whom it is even more important that they should “see how it works,” the Kodak Company has designed a new high-speed rr ition picture camera. It can take up to 2500 pictures in a second, and with .it is combined a timing apparatus, produced by the Western Electric Company, Inch records the time taken by the subject filmed in thousandths of a second. There are two lenses, one for the action and one for the time, both registering on the same film.

Many a movement which the eye cannot see will be revealed by this camera, so that both science and industry should benefit from the latest joint production. But we advise the conjurer to keep out of its way! ’