March of Progress

In a world that was getting more comlicated every day, industrious inventors were doing their best to simplify things here & there. Items:

P:Dayton, the U.S. Air Forces Air Materiel Command produced a parachute with a built-in brain, which automatically goes into action even if an airman is inured bailing out of his plane or blacks out at high altitude. Designed for high-flying fighters and bombers, the release is tripped by a timer (to be set before take-off at from one to 26 seconds), includes an aneroid barometer which opens the chute above 5,000 ft. no matter what happens.

P:In Los Angeles, the National Bureau o Standards' Institute for Numerical Analysis started operating a new electronic calculator which in a mere four hours can solve 150 simultaneous algebraic equations nvolving 4,000,000 arithmetic operations. It can also perform 1,000,000 additions a minute and even make a stab at translating foreign languages (Present vocaulary: 200 words). If SWAC (for Standards Western Automatic Computer) had been around during World War II, hundreds of women calculating-machine operators would have been saved the work ot more than a year compiling rocket-nring tables; SWAC, which needs no sleep, has no love problems, could have done the whole job in a month.

P:In Chicago, the Argonne National Laboratory perfected a new radiation-detector which is smaller than a cigarette, weighs only a quarter of an ounce, can be worn on clothing like a fountain pen.

P:In Bar Harbor, Me., geneticists at the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory finally succeeded in raising a pair of Siamese cats with orange "points" (i.e., ears feet and tails), straw-colored bodies and clear blue eyes. The name of the new Siamese, related closely to the usual blue point and seal point Siamese: red points.

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