Shooting the Works

Researchers in the labs of Monsanto Chemical Co. have learned to turn out a mouth-watering layer cake, but it is better to look at than to eat. Baked right into it are a quartz rod and a telescope. These two ingredients make it possible for a Kodak movie camera posted outside the glass oven door to take pictures of just what goes on inside a baking cake. Monsanto, a producer of leavening agents tor cake-mix companies, designed the study to discover the best leavening combination for each mix. Its experiment is just one of the hundreds of ways in which the camera is poking its prying lens into everyone's business, and proving to be one of industry's most useful tools.

Cameras now work on assembly lines, inside missiles, in farm fields and in beauty parlors, saving their users millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours. They range from giants that can photograph full-scale engineering layouts to high-speed models with liquid shutters that can take pictures at the rate of 100 million a second and stop a light beam in midair. In only five years the sales of cameras and supplies to industry and government have jumped from $360 million to $630 million, almost half the entire business of the $1.4 billion photographic industry.

Catching Bugs. One of the most profitable uses of the camera is in finding bugs in machinery that moves faster than the eye can see. International Harvester takes pictures of the workings of its farm equipment at the rate of 5,000 a second to study how it can improve its design. Ohio's Mead Corp. photographs the flow of fibers in papermaking to keep a check on quality, and other rapid-fire cameras stand duty at the looms in textile mills to spot the reason for a thread break. General Dynamics located the cause of a hydrogen valve failure in the Centaur space vehicle by setting a Fairchild camera to watch it at simulated flight speeds.

Cameras are used for production, protection and sales. IBM uses photographs to make printed circuit boards for computers, and McDonnell Aircraft saves $28 and 15 man-hours on each engineering layout by using cameras for reproduction. As a protection against forgers, cameras snap pictures of people who cash checks in supermarkets and banks. Newark's Beauty Industries Inc. uses an instant-picture Polaroid as a sales tool, photographing a beauty parlor's client and then overlaying different hair styles on the photo so that the customer can see how she will look.

High Spy. Sharp-eyed aerial cameras, such as those that enabled the U-2 to chart thousands of square miles of the Soviet Union, have also moved into the realm of commerce. They spot diseased trees in a lumber company's forest, take a quick inventory of grapes while they are still on the vine, measure the size of a coal stockpile for a utility company and point to the best spot for a coal miner to dig in. The Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio even takes aerial-type shots of a steer, then analyzes the animal's "hills and valleys" to get an accurate reading of how much meat is on his bones.

A camera built by Hughes Aircraft will probably be the first to explore the moon's surface, and cameras are also reaching far back into the past. A nine-lens aerial spy produced by Itek will soon begin searching out ancient Mayan and Incan ruins in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala. It will also be used to study the behavior patterns of a timid tribe of Mexican Indians--believed to be direct descendants of the Mayans--by spying on them from 20,000 ft. up.

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