BRAIN WAVES

WAVES OF ONE KIND OR ANOTHER, emanating from the brain, have been discovered more than once; but they do not stay discovered. Such waves would possess great importance as a possible physical basis for telepathy. The most celebrated were probably the “N-rays” reported from a Paris laboratory a quarter of a century ago. Tho sponsored by some eminent men of science, repeated investigation failed to reproduce them elsewhere, and they are now generally consigned to the realm of the imagination. The latest work in this direction is that of Dr. Ferdinando Cazzamalli of the University of Milan, Italy, who two years ago reported the discovery of electric waves, like radio waves, emanating from the living human brain. He has now published a preliminary report of further experiments tending to establish this remarkable conclusion. Says Dr. E. E. Free in his Week’s Science (New York):

“Dr. Cazzamalli’s method is to place a human subject and a sensitive radio receiving-set inside a metallic cage, this cage being necessary in order to shield the apparatus from stray radio waves or other disturbances originating at near-by radio stations or elsewhere. The human subject used is ordinarily a ‘psychic’ one; that is a person subject to trances like those of mediums or to mental disturbances like hysteria. During such psychic happenings curious signals, not otherwise explainable, are detected in the radio receiver. One instance, now reported, is a signal perceived when a trance medium inside the cage experienced what the experts in psychic research call ‘crypthesthesia,’ which is the perception otherwise than through normal touch or sight of the nature of an article concealed by wrappings. Another instance was a radio signal perceived when a hypnotized subject was made to recall mental images of dead relatives. Dr. Cazzamalli believes that his experiments prove the emission from the brain of electric impulses of some kind. These must be taken into account, he maintains, in theories of mental action. Altho experts elsewhere in the world were fully respectful of Dr. Cazzamalli’s previous experiments, many of them dissented from his conclusions. In the present communication the Italian savant answers some of these previous criticisms, making what must be admitted to be a good case for the correctness of his view-point.”

Source: The Literary Digest for July 2. 1927

IDEAS FOR A VINTAGE HALLOWEEN

Coming up with ideas for Halloween costumes and decorations is a perennial problem that never seems to get easier, and it’s not a new problem.

Our Great Grandparents had the same problem and so a crepe paper manufacturer recognized the opportunity and produced a neat little 34 page booklet that was was chock full of halloween ideas. Beautifully illustrated in 4 colors (when color printing was rare due the expense) it covered every aspect of halloween, from costumes to decor or dance, and including games, favors, invitations and much more – all revolving around the use of colored crepe paper. The ingenious ideas they came up with are just as applicable today as they were 83 years ago.

We have republished the vintage booklet as a downloadable PDF file that can be read on PC’s or Mac’s and added some clipart and cutouts along with more detailed making instructions to complement the original material.

If you’re lacking inspiration or looking for vintage halloween ideas, or just something different, then this book is for you.

Click here to find out more about Halloween Ideas 1923 style

UTILITY COMPANIES AS APPLIANCE RETAILERS

DEPARTMENT stores and chain stores have been showing considerable opposition to the new competition which has arisen from the policy of public utility companies of operating appliance stores in order to spread the gospel of the maximum use of electrical appliances in the house-hold. The stores, in fact, have been making serious objections to this competition on a basis of fairness and economy, notes the New York Journal of Commerce.  The metropolitan daily goes on to explain why the utility companies have felt compelled to go into the retail business, and why the competition seems so objectionable to spokesmen for the regular retailing establishments. It reaches the conclusion that “when the present pioneering stage in the electrification of the household is past, the utilities may rely upon the department stores and other retailers to sell these appliances.” But until then, we read, “the latter must be content to stand this at times unfair competition which is playing its part in the evolution of a great industry.” To quote further:

When an electric-light and power company or a gas company opens an appliance store, it does not make profit the first consideration. The sale of a washing-machine or electric heater will give it a steady source of revenue over several years. Furthermore, the refrigerator, the washing-machine, and many other appliances consume current during the day, when the utilities generally find the greatest difficulty in keeping their plants profitably employed. Hence, the sale of appliances at cost is good business for them.

The retailing establishments, however, must rely upon the profit from the sale of the appliances. Hence they look upon the steady growth of utility-merchandising departments with anything but satisfaction. The president of “The Fair” store in Chicago and several other spokesmen of retailers have quite frankly told the utility executives on several recent occasions that they thought the whole proceeding unfair.

Now department-store and chain-store spokesmen are putting their pleas on the basis of economy. They see a great waste in special appliance stores maintained by utilities in places where department stores and other retail establishments are quite willing to push the sale of these goods as rapidly as is needed.

In the matter of credit terms, the controversy has been particularly bitter. The utilities, to push appliance sales, have often asked for very small cash payments, or sometimes no cash payments at all. Here the department store has become a critic of present methods of instalment selling, and has criticized the practise as unsound. The utilities are in fact running the risk of substantial losses by engaging freely in this method of selling.

 Looking at the matter squarely, it is difficult to see how the utilities can be induced to abdicate from the merchandising field. They apparently find it profitable, for reports reach us continually of new stores being opened for the sale of appliances, and in some cities, these stores have taken on so wide a variety of products as to begin to resemble the department stores themselves in size and variety. Some of them make money, others show a loss—the great bulk probably break about even. But there is no doubt that these stores have played a big part in increasing consumption of electricity. In Boston, for example, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company has been able to show a marked increase in sales of current, despite a slow growth in population, by energetic appliance-selling methods.

Source: The Literary Digest for October 1, 1927

WHAT THE WORLD WANTS TO BUY FROM US

ROMANCE is found by a Western editor in one of the “dollars and cents service” bulletins of the Department of Commerce noting actual inquiries received by the Department from thirty-two foreign countries regarding specific American products they desire to purchase. It seems that “what the world wants includes such diversified things as automobiles, dish-washing machines, gumdrops, canned foods, rebuilt typewriters, sporting goods, shoe-shining equipment, lubricating oils, drug supplies, office equipment, leathers, and cardboard boxes.” The Spokane Spokesman Review, which thus calls attention to the Commerce Department’s bulletin, goes on to summarize further the information given about what the world wants to buy from us:

American silk hose are wanted by residents of Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, and South Africa. American underwear is sought by both men and women in the Dominican Republic and Denmark.

Egypt wants American felt hats in all colors for men and women, while Austria and Denmark ask about bathing-suits, caps, and rubber shoes. Colombia wants American canvas shoes with rubber soles.

Costa Rica has a sweet tooth and wants our gumdrops and chocolate bars. The Dutch East Indies want neckties, while

Germany asks tor shoe-shining machines and horn and hoof scrap. Switzerland, the home of the elusive chamois, wants our chamois leather.

Austria wants toy balloons and Denmark garden hose. Italy asks about toys. India wants sporting goods, especially tennis, and Egypt wants canned asparagus.

Obviously, the list is only partial. Virtually every American commodity is wanted somewhere in the world. It is to put the American manufacturer with a surplus in touch with these prospective buyers that the department is launching this “dollars and cents” service.

Source: The Literary Digest for October 1, 1927

A COLD SUMMER; AS PREDICTED

THIS SUMMER HAS REWARDED its prophets, Dr. E. E. Free believes. In an article contributed to The Herald Tribune (New York), he bids us note that nearly three years ago two unofficial meteorologists, Mr. Herbert Janvrin Browne, of Washington, and Mr. H. H. Clayton, of Massachusetts, began predicting that 1927 would resemble that famous year of 1816, still remembered in New England as “the year without a summer.” It was not implied that hot weather would be altogether lacking; that is not even recorded of 1816. The forecast was of a summer prevailingly cold, wet, and stormy, with occasional interludes of warmth. Weather prophets being largely without honor nowadays in everybody’s country, the predictions of Mr. Browne and Mr. Clayton elicited mainly mirth. Now, says Dr. Free, comes their turn to laugh. He goes on: “That is exactly the kind of summer we have had. The announcement of the New York office of the Weather Bureau calling this the coldest August for fifty-four years was not needed to convince vacationists  that they have been – chilly.”  Dr. Free’s article was printed on August 30. Since then, summer has apparently set in. But he cannily makes allowance for this possibility by the assertion that any warmth still to be received will not much alter the summer’s record of cold. He says:

“It is fortunate for Mr. Browne and Mr. Clayton that this is 1927 instead of 1427; otherwise they might be; burnt for witch-craft, because their predictions have come all too true. 

“As it is, the result of their success is likely to be more complimentary. Attention will be attracted, for one thing, to the methods of long-range forecasting which they use.

“These methods are adaptations of the old idea of weather cycles; periods after which the chief phenomena of the weather repeat themselves. As early as three centuries ago Francis Bacon records that such cyclic repetitions of the weather at intervals of thirty-five years had been noted in Holland.  This is the famous ‘ Bruckner cycle,’ so named after the distinguished Austrian meterologist, Dr. Eduard Bruckner, who rediscovered it in 1890.           

“According to this cycle such weather elements as temperature and rainfall swing up and down in an average period of about thirty-six years.  On the average, each alternate eighteen-year period will be cool and wet, the interspersed periods being relatively warm and dry.

“There is now small doubt that some such period as this exists, but there is an unfortunate joker. The thirty-six years is merely an average. Sometimes the time between two maxima of the cycle turns out to be fifty or sixty years; sometimes it is as short as twenty years. Because of this variability the Bruckner cycle, altho well known to meteorologists for thirty years, has never been applied to weather forecastings.

“A cycle that is more regular is the eleven-year sun-spot cycle. This year, as every newspaper reader must now know, we are in one of the recurring maximum years, with many spots on the sun and with the average sunlight slightly more intense than usual.

“There can be no doubt that this sun-spot cycle has important relations to earthly weather. The same eleven-year periodicity has been found in records of temperature and rainfall and in the levels of Swedish lakes. An eleven-year cycle of alternate slow and rapid growth was detected by Prof. A. E. Douglass in the annual rings of pine-trees in Arizona, and by Dr. Ellsworth Huntington in the similar growth rings of the big trees of California.

Cold Summer of 1927 continued here…

Source: The Literary Digest for October 1, 1927

LEGISLATION TO SAVE AMERICAN WOMEN from the effect of “frantic and artificial efforts to make themselves beautiful,” is advocated by Dr. Charles F. Pabst, chief dermatologist of Greenpoint Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. In an interview published in the Brooklyn Eagle he proposes drastic methods to stop “face-lifting” and other such processes, pointing out that in France similar acts, practised by barbarous races, are subject to heavy penalties. Says The Eagle:        

“Skin-peelings, face-lifting, paraffin injections to change the shape of a nose or the obstinate curve of a chin—these things, the doctors find, are being more and more indulged in by the beauty-cult followers; to their own harm, and despite all the warnings of the medical profession.

“The question was discust, formally and informally, at a recent medical convention in Atlantic City, where tales were told to indicate that this type of beauty culture is exacting a great toll from its followers, in deformities, inflammations, skin diseases of one sort and another—even death.”

Said Dr. Pabst, after returning from the convention:

“Where paraffin and wax are injected under the skin, irritation sets in after a few months and, after a few years, you have sloughing of the tissue, gangrene sets in, and even death has been known to result.

“Now, the average normal adult has sixteen square feet of skin, which would form a mat two feet wide and eight feet long, and the modern American woman treats it like a door-mat.

Facelift article continued here

Source: The Literary Digest for October 1, 1927

ICE CONCRETE—This is the name of a new, porous, astonishingly light building material invented in Finland. Like ordinary concrete, it is composed of cement and sand. Crusht ice or snow is used during the process of mixing. Says Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times:

Heat evaporates the water of the melting ice, and the result is a block or brick uniformly honeycombed with minute pores. The number of pores varies directly with the quantity of ice or snow mixed with the cement and sand. Building blocks thus made are exceedingly light and durable. In a house or office building of ice concrete there is a saving of weight varying from 20 to 50 per cent. Because they are cellular in structure, the blocks act as insulators to keep out heat in summer and cold in winter. If ice concrete is made without sand the resultant product is a tough compound that can be sawed, nailed, screwed, chiseled, and cut as readily as if it were wood.”

Source: The Literary Digest for October 1, 1927

Psychology is spreading like a weed. It has even invaded the golf courses, we are told by The British Medical Journal (London). The latest example is a small volume on mental handicaps in golf, by Dr. T. B. Hyslop, who is not only an enthusiastic golfer, but also an entertaining writer. Says The Journal:

Before we opened it we felt instinctively that the book would add another to those distractions which afflicted the centipede of fable, and indeed the honorary secretary of the Medical Golfing Society (to whose members Dr. Hyslop dedicates his volume with sympathy and regard) appears to have a similar feeling, for he quotes the whole of the fable in a foreword. Incidentally he quotes it wrongly, but that is another matter. Hitherto we have been under the impression that golfers and poets had one common characteristic in being born and not made; the golfer, of course, being born with a wooden spoon in his mouth. But after reading what Dr. Hyslop has to say on mental handicaps we have come to the conclusion that a babe with the minimum of golfing instincts may grow into a golf champion, provided he attends to his mental stance, when sufficiently grown up, that he is neither too optimistic nor too deprest in addressing the ball, and keeps his mind off his opponent and his opponent’s mind. Moreover, if he suffers from bunkeritis, putterphobia, or any of those other disorders to which he is subject between the tee and, let us call it, the putting green, he need only consult a psychologist or, better still, read Dr. Hyslop’s book, which does not, however, tell us much in a therapeutic sense. Etiology and diagnosis are its prominent features. Nor is it a book that lends itself to analysis. Its ten short chapters are concerned with such subjects as prodromata, diatheses, mental stances, automatism, stigmata of degeneration, time-reactions, psychotherapy, the tee-side manner, and anecdotage. We hoped to enjoy some new golf stories in the last chapter, but it contains none. The other chapters contain several. The ultimate result of mental handicaps is, in the author’s own words, that reserve, resource, and reason are the three best clubs for a golfer’s mental bag, and these three mental characteristics are really the triumvirate of potential champions. Altogether it is a most entertaining volume if not taken too seriously. Taken seriously it is distracting and brings us back again to the fable of the centipede.”

Source: The Literary Digest for July 16, 1927

OUR VISITING COMET

CLOSER TO THE EARTH than any comet except one is known to have come before, the Pons-Winnecke comet was only 3,500,000 miles away from us on June 27, about fourteen and a half times as far as the moon, and far closer than any other astronomical body ordinarily comes. But despite this neighborly visit, says Science Service’s Daily Science News Bulletin (Washington), no empires fell because of its proximity, and no kings passed away. In fact, no signs at all appeared in the sky, for it is quite doubtful if the comet was visible to the unaided eye, and even if visible, it was a mere faint patch of light, quite different from the usual conception of a comet, for in the ten previous visits on which it has been observed by astronomers, it has never shown any trace of a tail. We read further:

“The mere fact that it is coming so close makes it interesting to the astronomical profession, and for the next month or two it will be the cynosure of telescopes large and small. Only once, so far as astronomers know, has a comet come anywhere near as close as Pons-Winnecke. That was in 1770, when Lexell’s comet approached to a mere stone’s throw of 1,400,000 miles from the earth. Probably within a few years after that, many people thought that it had been a warning of the American Revolution, for until comparatively recent times superstition about comets has been rampant. They were supposed to be the heralds of wars and conquests.

“Halley’s comet, for instance, which visited the neighborhood of the earth last in 1910, was supposed to foretell the Norman Conquest when it came in 1066. On the famous Bayeux Tapestry the comet is depicted as King Harold views it in alarm, possibly with some fear of the future work of William the Conqueror, which cost him his throne. And then, as Halley’s comet appeared again in 1910, these early historians would probably have supposed that it foretold the Great War.

“Halley’s comet is one of respectable size, even tho it is by no means the biggest. Pons-Winnecke, however, is rather a second-rate comet, as far as size is concerned. It is a periodic comet, and returns once in a little over six years to the neighborhood of the earth. A French astronomer at Marseilles, named Pons, discovered it in 1819, but it was not found on the next few visits. In 1858, however, a German astronomer, at the University of Bonn, Winnecke by name, discovered a comet. After a few observations of his comet had been made, it was found that it was the long-lost Pons comet, and in honor of his having rediscovered it, the German’s name was attached, making it the Pons-Winnecke comet.

Read the rest of the Pons-Winnecke report here…

Source: The Literary Digest for July 16, 1927

CARBON: THE LIFE ELEMENT

IN A BOOK RECENTLY PUBLISHED in Paris on “Carbon, Combustion and Its Chemical Laws,” Henry Le Chatelier, one of the world’s greatest experts on this subject, sums up part of his recent lectures on Mineral Chemistry at the Sorbonne, which Henry de Varigny, writing in the Journal des Debats (Paris), tells us constituted a “veritable event in science,” Mr. de Varigny goes on to say:

“Is carbon a substance particularly wide-spread? Not at all. In the degree in which we evaluate the proportions of various elements in the solid earth, the ocean and the atmosphere, that of carbon is small. While oxygen, the most abundant body in nature, makes up nearly half of all matter (49.20 per cent.) and silicon 25.67 per cent., carbon makes up less than 1 per cent. The capital role in life belongs therefore to one very common element—oxygen—and to one very rare one—carbon. For carbon is the characteristic element of living matter. This is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—one abundant element and three relatively rare ones. A boy who weighs 70 pounds has in him 44 pounds of oxygen, 12 of carbon and 6 of hydrogen. Carbon forms part of all foodstuffs— sugars, fats, meats; it enters into the composition of all living things.

“Whence comes it?   From the air; from the carbonic acid present everywhere in small proportions; with the aid of the sun’s rays, plants that include chlorophyl absorb the carbon from the carbonic acid gas, and this is the beginning of the building up of living matter and also of foodstuffs. A remarkable fact is the great attraction of carbon for other elements. No other element enters into so many combinations or such different ones. It unites with almost all the solids, metallic and non-metallic, and with oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen forms an immense series of compounds. Doubtless this flexible character is connected in some way with the very considerable part played by carbon in life.

“On the other hand, it plays a capital part in industry, being the basis of all combustion, domestic or industrial. It would be infinitely more advantageous for us to be able to manufacture carbon, a source of all kinds of energy, than to make gold. Especially is this true now, when our fossil carbon-reserves— coal and oil—are getting scarce. In these conditions, we may understand the place that Henry Le Chatelier, in his book on carbon, assigns to industrial and other combustion. And in a very different order of ideas, in considering the importance of carbonic acid in nature and the necessity of understanding its properties, we should not wonder that Mr. Le Chatelier gives a large place to researches in physical chemistry.

“In this connection, we may note that in his ‘Geochemistry’ Mr. W. Vernadsky has stated his opinion that a limitation of carbon might well entail a limitation of the quantity of life on the earth. And perhaps the quantity of living matter is thus a planetary constant. The idea is ingeniously developed.

“Carbon is decidedly one of the most interesting elements from very different view-points; it plays two parts of the first order and is worth all the attention that chemists are giving to it. Le Chatelier first of all, then biologists and geochemists.”

Source: The Literary Digest for July 16, 1927