SPAN: August 1962

THE OAK RIDGE National Laboratory in the southern state of Tennessee, is the oldest and pro·bably the most widely known atomic energy centre in the world. Created at the dawn of the atomic age during World War II, the Oak Ridge Laboratory today is concerned with developing peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Its achievements in harnessing the atom, producing radioisotopes, developing devices for the peaceful application of nuclear power,·- conducting research, and training scientists are recognized all over the world.

I t is the central U.S. establishment for the production of radioisotopes which are bringing about revolutionary advances in the fields of agriculture, medicine and industry.

Since the beginning of public distribution of radioisotopes from Oak Ridge in 1946 more than one million curies, the unit quantity of radioactive materials, have been sold.

Oak Ridge has participated in evolving several types of atomic reactors in use today, as well as others now being built or planned for future construction. At present under construction at Oak Ridge is a 22,300 ekw (nuclear-generated kilowatts) Experimental Gas-Cooled Reactor which will be the nation's first reactor of its kind to produce commercial electricity.

Much of the educational w'ork at this large establishment is conducted by the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, a non-profit corporation of thirty-seven southern universities and colleges. The institute conducts courses in radioisotope techniques for research scientists from all over the world. Since the beginning of these courses in 1947 more than five hundred foreign nationals from fiftysix countries have received training in the use of radioisotopes in research and industrial application.

The medical division of the Oak Ridge Institute in co-operation with some twenty-five medical schools conducts investigations of the application of radioactive substances to the study of cancer and related diseases.

The Museum of Atomic Energy at Oak Ridge is the world's only museum devoted to the study of the atom, and every year thousands of visitors view its 18,000 square feet of displays tracing the development of atomic energy.

In the picture opposite, an Oak Ridge ~cientist observes the circulation of trapped ions in a closed circle in experiments with the direct conversion of heat into electrical power.O

Josh Culbreath gives his young son his first lessons in American football.

See page 48.

CONTENTS '"

4

THE PURSUIT

by Ralph Segman

OF MANY

WONDERS

10

ROCKETEER

FAMILY

12

HARVESTING

by N. V. ~agar

DATA

15

BIOLOGICAL

by Q. D. Penman

18

TELSTAR

19

THE GENIUS

by V. S. Nanda

22

TtlE PROGRESSIVE

by Harold Taylor

24

THE ORIGIN OF THE

by William E. Jakubek

30

THE WIZARD by c. B. Wall

38

A DEAF BOY FEELS MUSIC Photographs by Leonard Nadel

41

PATIERNS

42

BIRTHPLACE

by Ruth Tryon

46

UNIQUE STEEL BUILDING Photographs by Robert Huntzinger

48

JOSH CULBREATH

by Lokenath Bhattacharya

FROM SPACE

ARCHITECTS

OF SAM SLATER

IDEA

IN EDUCATION

BOOK

OF MENLO

IN INDIA

PARK

IN STEEL OF AMERICAN

STEEL

EDITOR Edward

SENIOR STAFF EDITOR

ART EDITOR

Post

Zehra

V. S. Nanda

Sohindar

William

Lokenath

S. Rana

Avinash C. Pasricha

Bhattacharya

United

H. Weathersby.

Director, United States Information

PHOTO EDITOR

FEA TURE EDITOR

RESEARCH EDITOR

Rehmatulla

States Information

Service,

Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf of The American Embassy, New Delhi.

Service.

Isaac N. Isaac at Vakil & Sons Private Ltd.,

Narandas Building, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay-I.' IN CASE OF CHANGE OF ADDRESS, cut out old address from a recent SPAN envelope and forward along with new address to: Mail Unit, United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House,

Sikandra

weeks for change

Road,

New

of address

Delhi-I.

to become

Alfow

six

effective.

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATE for SPAN is four rupees.

Subscri'ptipns should be addressed to: United States Information Service, Bahawalpur House, Sikandra Road, New Delhi-I. Paid subscriptions from outside India cannot be accepted.

The Pursuit

of

Many Wonders a forecast

of technology

INCE World War II, science has made extraordinary Sadvances, constructing the foundations for tomorrow's technology. The next ten years, much as the last ten, will produce an unending stream of discovery and invention, some of it predictable and some unforeseen.

I t will be a time of enormous human progress.

Many nations, having won independence, are now turning their energies towards technological development. Men and women are aspiring to personal betterment. We are moving from an age of bare subsistence into an age of plenty. Humanity has committed itself to a new epoch of discovery and the pursuit of many wonders.

Perhaps the most dramatic event of this decade will be the arrival of man on the moon. But equally important -perhaps more important-are the prospects of breaking the genetic code and the artificial creation of life.

Substantial progress may be expected in the technology of freshening sea water. Weather forecasting will become far more dependable. Almost every area of activity will be touched in one way or another by electronics-from the kitchen to the factory to communications to the human body itself. While it is rash to predict the conquest of a disease, it would not be surprising if most forms of cancer were brought under control by the end of 1969.

One of more persistent, widespread research and development efforts is directed towards new sources of

Thousands of shipments of isotopes have gone out to hospitals and laboratories all over the world from this radiation storage in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Pursuit

of Many Wonders

energy. During the 1960's, atomic energy, in some areas of the world, will challenge fossil fuels and water as the prime sources of electric power. Slowly, but inexorably, the cost of electricity from atomic fission has been coming down to commercially feasible levels. Atomic power plants are now operating in five American cities. Seven plants are under construction and four are planned. Small nuclear reactors are supplying electric power to scientists in remote places-Antarctica and Greenland-at less expense than conventional diesel electric plants. Results of the current sea trials of the N. S. Savannah, the first nuclear merchant ship, will stimulate construction of a fleet of such vessels.

Many scientists and technologists consider atomic fission an interim source of electric power. They feel that thermonuclear energy derived from the fusion of hydrogen atoms will be the ultimate well of energy for all humanity.

Since the hydrogen required for thermonuclear reactors can be extracted from the sea, the fuel supply, for all practical purposes, will be unlimited. Besides fuel availability, fusion has other advantages over fission, among them a considerably greater output of energy and the absence of radioactive wastes. American scientists have had some success in bringing hydrogen to extremely high temperatures-millions of degrees-and in learning how to control it with powerful magnetic fields. In the past year, development of a new electromagnet, which produces strong fields at minute expenditures of electricity, has raised hopes that a fusion breakthrough will occur in this decade.

Direct conversion of heat into electricity almost certainly will be highly developed through at least three distinct techniques. The first is the use of special alloys and ceramic-like materials. When heated, the materials produce electricity with an efficiency of about IO per cent.

While IO per cent is only one-quarter the efficiency achieved in large conventional power plants, it compares favourably with that in small, self-contained electric motors and auxiliary power plants. Materials will surely be refined and it is like!y they will be used by 1970 to obtain electricity inside nuclear reactors.

The second technique makes use of solar cells, purified wafers of silicon, which convert the sun's energy into electricity. Their efficiency rating has been brought up to 13 per cent. Banks of the thin wafers are turned towards the sun and the resultant electricity is immediately used or a portion of it is stored in batteries against the days the sun is not shining. Solar cells are used in earth satellites, to power a telephone system in South Africa, in radio relay stations in California, and in navigation lights. Possibly, within the next ten years, some homes will be heated, lighted, and cooled by roof-top solar cells.

Similar systems will be appearing in mofussil areas of developing nations.

The third technique of generating electricity from a device containing no moving parts is the fuel cell. In this device, a clean fuel such as hydrogen (whose waste product is simply water) is passed over a catalyst where combustion occurs with a direct yield of electricity. The efficiency of some of these fuel cells is a remarkable 75 per cent. It has been suggested that conventional power plants supplement their output with fuel-cell electricity during periods of peak demand. Another possibility in the coming years is cars and trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

During the 1960's, much research will go into the conversion of sea water into fresh water. The United States already has put into operation three experimental desalting plants for demonstrating various methods of producing fresh water. A good deal of progress will be made in reducing the cost of desalted water~ perhaps to the extent of economically supplying some needy areas

of the world with water for drinking and industrial purposes. However, this water is too expensive for general irrigation and agriculture will have to wait for the cost to come down to a feasible level through the development of less costly techniques.

It is safe to say that few technical programmes in the decade will be held back by lack of suitable electronics.

Solid-state devices (transistors, diodes, cryotrons, masers, magnetic amplifiers, and memory devices) will increase the speed, sensitivity, reliability, and versatility of all types of electronic equipment. At the same time, the urge-and the ability-to make things ever smaller will continue unabated.

Several corporations are making electronic circuits in the form of "micro-modules" hardly larger than the head of a pin. A small box would contain enough circuit parts to build 1,000 television receivers. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists hope to produce cryotrons, useful in electronic switching and memory, that are no bigger than a grain of photographic emulsion. If successful, they will be able to fit thousands of millions of cryotron elements in a one-cubic-centimetre container.

These fantastic concentrations, inconceivable a few years ago, make it realistic now to seriously consider computers rivalling in complexity the human brain, with its 10,000 million switching and memory units called neurons. Towards the day when such a computer becomes available, information theory specialists and neurophysiologists are co-operating in an effort to unravel the brain's own circuitry so they can endow computers with brainlike attributes.

Equally startling is the growing belief by some physicists and mathematicians that information theory and computer theory will shed new light on human behaviour. "The effort to translate languages by machine," says E. R. Piore, director of research for International Business Machines, "is forcing us to a deeper understanding of language and its meaning. Since language and human behaviour are so profoundly associated, better understanding of language should have important implications for the social sciences."

SCIENTISTS are verging on a precise understanding of the nature of life. They soon will decode the language of the genes, the chemical substances that control almost all aspects of life. Located in the nuclei of living cells, the genes are strung together as long double strands known as chromosomes. Structurally, chromosomes resemble long, twisted ladders. Normal human cells contain twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. (Until recently, the number was thought to be twenty-four). One member of each pair is derived from the mother and the other member from the father. Altogether, the total mass of genetic material in the nucleus is known to biochemists as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

The genes-specifically, the chemical structure of the DNA-have been found to determine whether an organism is a palm tree, a bacterium, or a man.

They also control the particular characteristics of each individual: for example, eye colour, pitch of voice, facial features, shape of body. In the final analysis, the nature of the individual is contingent on the specific order of four basic parts of DNA. Virtually an infinite variety of combinations of the four bases is possible, which explains both the profusion of species on earth and the individual differences within each species.

The genes are tiny chemical manufacturing plants.

Food eaten by man is digested into its chemical components and absorbed into the cells. Genes in the cell nucleus attract the proper chemicals, mould them into their own

Span

August I962

7

Pursuit of Many Wonders structure, and then release them. Resembling the genes, these newly made substances migrate out of the nucleus into the body of the cell. In a similar way, they manufacture enzymes, hormones, protective antibodies, and other proteins, the chemicals that distinguish living from non-living matter.

Recent research has identified the four chemical bases of DNA. We might expect, beginning this year, to see a rapid series of further identifications of the thousands of genetic "beads" strung along the giant DNA molecules. This achievement will be the breaking of the genetic code. It will result in a biological breakthrough rivalling, if not surpassing, the conquest of atomic energy in its meaning for man.

What can we expect in the next ten years out of this unravelling of life's secrets? While it is impossible to forecast a time schedule, we may look ahead to progress in the following fields: Virus diseases. Diseases such as hepatitis, polio, rabies, certain forms of meningitis, smallpox, mumps, and yellow fever are caused by viruses. Because of the paucity of knowledge about viruses, these diseases are untreatable; all that can be done for the patient is to make him as comfortable as possible while the disease runs its course.

Since viruses are infinitesimal particles of DNA or a chemical called RNA, similar in character to DNA and wrapped in a protein coating, one can foresee that a thorough understanding of the genetic substances will lead to a method of disrupting the viral disease process.

The end of this decade might be too early to expect this achievement, but a good deal of progress will be made.

Cancer. In this disease, cell chemistry is disordered and the cells multiply in a rapid, uncontrolled manner.

More and more scientists believe cancer, in some of its manifestations, is a viral disease. Many consider it a genetic disease, whether it is viruses or other factors that upset the genes. It is likely that, as a result of genetic research, the next ten years will see heartening advances against cancer, in both prevention and cure.

Nutrition.

Better understanding of the chemical activity of DNA and RNA will doubtless enhance the science and practice of nutrition. A precise knowledge of the chemicals essential to good health will result in improved foods, better diets, and progress in the treatment and prevention of dietary deficiency diseases.

Heredity. Perhaps not in this decade, but shortly thereafter, scientists will be controlling the heredity of plants and animals. They will find ways, with synthetic DNA, to improve crops and breeds to an undreamed of extent.

Life. It is possible that before we enter the 1970's a simple form of synthetic life will be produced in the laboratory. The implications are enormous, but they are too far in the future and too filled with science fiction overtones to discuss intelligently.

In the field of medical electronics, we will see an amazing variety of achievements. Already, more than a hundred Americans are alive thanks to small electi'onic boxes implanted in their bodies. These people have an ailment known as heart-block, which disrupts the heart's rhythm and brings it to a stop. The box delivers gentle, regularly paced electric shocks through a set of wires directly into the heart muscle. The shocks keep the heart beating normally. An external dial allows the patient to set the rate of stimulation that best suits him.

Many other ingenious electronic devices have been developed to simulate the function of impaired nerves or to activate impaired muscular action.

Electronics will be employed in still other fieldsits uses are almost endless. Electroluminescence, a method of using special substances that glow when energized by electricity, will result in entire walls providing room light.

Probably within the 1970's, the technique will provide heating and cooling, as well as light.

Ultrasonics-an electronic technique of producing high-pitch sound vibrations beyond the range of human hearing-is solving difficult industrial cleaning problems.

It has also made a start in dentistry for cleaning and painlessly drilling teeth. These uses will be greatly expanded, and new ultrasonic devices, such as clothes washers and dishwashers, will make their appearance during the decade.

Electronic safety devices for automobiles will be available by the time the next decade begins. They may warn of cars approaching from behind or that a car ahead is being overtaken too fast. There is a slight chance that a few automatically guided cars, relieved of human handling, may be rolling on an electronic road.

Experimental earth satellites have proved the feasibility of the practical applications of space in the areas of weather, communications, and navigation. By 1970, fleets of advanced operational satellites will be affecting our daily lives. TIROS meteorological satellites have shown that weather in any given locality usually is a result of world-wide atmospheric interactions. These orbiting devices have also detected major storms long before they were found by conventional forecasting shipment. Early in the decade, the first ofa series of more sophisticated Nimbus satellites will be launched into a polar orbit, allowing its photographic and heat detection instruments to scan weather conditions over the entire earth. The Nimbus vehicles will bring accurate 90-day forecasts, enabling farmers, shippers, and other organizations and individuals to make plans accordingly.

WORLD-WIDE communications, employing satellite systems, will undergo a revolution in the next few years.

The SCORE, Courier, and Echo satellites have demonstrated that long-range communications via space vehicles are not only feasible, but are vastly superior to present techniques. These three experimental satellites have successfully relayed radio, television, telephone, and telegraph signals between widely separated places on earth.

By the time this issue of SPAN is published, Telstar and Relay satellites may be providing television connections between the United States and Europe, and soon thereafter between the U.S. and Brazil. In the latter half of the decade, working space communications systems will be in orbit-one of them consisting of about 50 satellites at a 3,000-mile altitude and another comprising three satellites 22,300 miles above the equator. At the higher altitude, the satellites require 24 hours to travel around the earth. Since they move in the same direction as the Earth's rotation, they appear to hang motionless overhead.

When evenly spaced around the equator, the three satellites can relay signals to any place on earth, except the polar regions. Advantages of these systems are freedom from interference from magnetic storms, a high order of reliability, and ability to carry enormous amounts of communications traffic. Among other benefits, they will bring, especially through television, a widespread interchange of the cui tures of the world.

A series of Transit satellites has paved the way for a global, all-weather navigation system for ships and aircraft. The system will eliminate use of the sun and stars as navigation aids. Its superiority lies in the fact that it is more precise and that its radio transmissions are "visible" through clouds that hide the sun and stars.

New types of scientific space vehicles will continue unveiling the mysteries of the universe. One type of satelli te

will carry a 36-inch telescope which will gather photographs of the stars undistorted by the earth's atmosphere.

The most stirring adventure of the 1960's will be the landing of men on the moon and their return to earth.

It is expected that manned space exploration from the triple orbits of Astronauts Glenn and Carpenter to the lunar landing will be a logical progression following this tentative timetable: 1962-A few more three-orbit flights followed by several 18-orbit missions.

1963-Unmanned flights of the Gemini spacecraft.

Gemini is designed to carry two astronauts to a rendezvous in orbit with a rocket engine. In this rendezvous, cr docking, technique, two sections of the craft will be coupled together while in earth orbit and then fired to the moon. If successful, the technique will advance the first moon landing by about two years: the booster rockets needed for the docking manoeuvre will be available two years earlier than the huge engine which would be required to send a complete manned spacecraft directly to thc moon.

1964-Manned Gemini orbits. Attempts will be made to dock the Gemini craft with an Agena rocket in orbit. , 1965-0rbital flights of the three-man Apollo spacecraft.

1966-A three-man Apollo flight around the moon and return to earth.

1967-197o-A three-man Apollo landing on the moon and return. Apollo spacecraft will weigh about seventy-five tons. In the docking technique, two booster rockets developing 7,500,000 pounds of thrust will launch the two component parts of the Apollo. If it is necessary to send Apollo non-stop from earth to moon, the booster will generate a thrust of 12,000,000 pounds.

The moon voyage will climax a decade of unparalleled exploits by human genius. It will lead us into another decade of even more fantastic exploration, discovery and invention. The greater challenge for man will be to devote these marvels of his ingenuity to the assured benefit of humani ty .•

ROCKETEER FAMILY T

HE SPACE AGE is still young, as are its leaders.

Thirty-two-year old John Thirkill is one of this new breed-a rocket engineer-executive, whose work days stretch beyond a nine-to-five routine, and whose horizons reach far past the moon.

In I955, after graduating from Washington State University at Pullman, Washington, John became the I27th employee of the rocket division of the Thiokol Chemical Corporation, heading a three-man department.

Today, he heads the 75-man Preliminary Design and Analysis Department of Thiokol's Brigham City, Utah, plant, now the largest solid-racket-fuel producer in the United States, employing 10,000 men.

When he was married I I years ago, John and his wife, Mary, lived on his 751-an-hour (Rs. 3.45) salary as a chemistry laboratory assistant. He now earns a sizable five-figure salary, but despite this, the Thirkills, with sons David, 7, and Daniel, 5, live a modest life. "There are only a limited number of things a man needs out of life," John believes.

Their home is in Brigham City, where most of the missile engines Thirkill and his staff design are manufactured.

Brigham City, a one-time farming community surrounded by miles of rugged, bleak, desert and mountain land, has doubled its population since I958. The Wasatch Mountains rise from the Thirkill's back yard, and John and his sons often climb them. For someone who likes to get¡ outdoors, it is "the perfect place to live," John says.

Since he works six days a week, he has little time for the camping-out trips he loves, or for social or civic life, but he does try to save Sundays for family activities.

He does his best work at night before bedtime. In the morning he is off to work at 7-00 a.m. "I never eat breakfast, just grab a vitamin pill and run." Returning home at 9-00 p.m., he still has papers to read, problems to compute, and reports to write.

Right now, John is working on engines for America's most advanced space vehicle-the Nova moon rocket, tall as a 40-storey skyscraper. Thiokol engines he is helping to design, may, with 39 others, be packed in a cluster of eight immense engines used to launch the Nova with its crew of three for the first moon flight.

Working constantly to improve missile design, John says: "As soon as you finish designing a rocket-it's obsolete."

Like all boys nowadays, David and Daniel are interested in rockets. "They know as much about rockets as anyone their age," says John.

John Thirkill is a dedicated and happy man-dedicated to his work in designing missile engines for America's contribution to space exploration and development of the fuel that may start the world's first manned moon rocket on its journey. He is happy because his work is, in his words, "the fuel of my life.". @

1962 by the HeQfst Corporation.

On the rocketman's day off, the family attends an air show.

Harvesti ng Data from Space A flight to the moon is still WHILE the most thrilling prospect opened up by man's ever-widening probe into the cosmos, his explorations of space have already brought tangible rewards of increased knowledge of the earth itself.

The American space exploration programme commenced with the launching of the satellite Explorer I early in 1958. During the past four years a large number of instrumented satellites have been whirling into orbit and transmitting valuable scientific data on such subjects as the density of the earth's atmosphere, the earth's magnetic field, the shape of the earth

and the effects of the sun on the earth's weather and climate.

To help gather this harvest of information from the satellite programme a world-wide system of twelve optical tracking stations was set up. One of these is operated by the Uttar Pradesh State Observatory at Naini Tal. The sister stations nearest to India are at Shiraz in Iran, at Tokyo, and at Woomera in Australia. The other eight stations are in South Africa, Spain, Peru, Argentina, Chile, two in the continental United States and one in Hawaii. The project started during the International Geophysical Year 1957-58 and is a co-operative effort

by the U.P. Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observ~ atory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Smithsonian Observatory¡ has provided complete equipment for the Naini Tal station, including a highly specialized 30-20 inch BakerNunn Satellite Tracking Camera, a quartz clock, power accessories, ancillary equipment and maintenance materials. In the initial stages, a technical adviser was provided but the station is now manned completely by personnel of the U.P. State Observatory, under the supervision of the Director, Dr. S.D. Sinvhal.

The satellite tracking routine at

Naini Tal proceeds somewhat along these lines. The station receives by priority cable from SAO regular information regarding time of transit and other technical data on the satellite under observation. As soon as the telegram arrives, brisk activity starts at the station. The message is decoded and the data tabulated. A little later the scene shifts to another part of the building where the giant camera is installed.

Capable of photographing any bright object six inches or more in diameter at distances up to 2,500 miles from the earth, the camera is fitted on a triaxial mounting and can rotate around vertical and horizontal axes.

The entire equipment weighs three tons. In an adjacent room is the quartz clock, an electronic instrument which records universal time accurate to a ten-thousandth of a second. A cable connects the quartz clock to a slave clock inside the camera. Another cable from a special unit blows dehumidified air into the camera, so that its interior temperature is automatically controlled.

The preliminary preparations for photographing the satellite start soon after sunset. A team of two observers is assigned for the job. The retractable roof over the camera slides smoothly to one side and the canvas covering of the 3o-inch primary mirror is removed. A highly sensitive film is then fed into the camera and the shutter speed fixed. The camera is switched on shortly before the predicted time of transit, and for about five minutes the observers continually photograph the suggested portion of the sky to and fro along the direction which the satellite has to traverse.

Exposures are made at a pre-determined rate which may be set between one per second to one every thirty-two seconds. The exact mid-instant of the exposure is recorded on the photographic film automatically and accurately to one ten-thousandth of a second by the slave clock inside the camera.

The satellite isphotographed against the background of stars. A special adjustment of the speed of the camera enables a clear distinction to be made between the satellite images and the star images on the photograph. If the camera is set at the rate of the earth's rotation along the path of the satellite, the stars appear as pin-points and the satellite as a broken line. But if the camera is set at the speed of the satellite, the images are reversed, the stars appearing as dashes and the satellite as a point.

After the nightly transits have been photographed, the exposed film is processed and carefully studied by experts, with the assistance of detailed charts of the sky. The position of the

satellite among the stars is determined with the maximum possible accuracy and the data obtained is communicated telegraphically to SAO. The exposed film also follows by air mail the next morning. The preliminary information is used by SAO for further calculations of the orbital position and movements of the satellite. The film is subjected to careful study and interpretation and, correlated with data from other stations.

This research is continuously adding to man's knowledge and correcting some previous misconceptions. The widely-accepted modern theory about the origin of the universe which holds that matter isbeing continuously created at a slow rate in space, was discredited by Explorer XI which reported that there is only one-thousandth of the radiation in space required to substantiate this theory. Explorer VIII demonstrated that a layer of helium surrounds the earth between altitudes of 600 and 1,500 miles. Explorer X revealed that magnetic fields in space between the planets are far more intense than was previously believed. This satellite also found that the earth's magnetic field merges with the sun's magnetic field at about 40,000 miles from the earth. Further, Explorer XII found that the Van Allen radiation belts are not two distinct areas but a single region of energized particles from the sun held in the belts by the earth's magnetic field.

The Transit navigation satellites are forerunners of a satellite system which will give ships and aircraft their precise position at all times. A Tiros weather satellite discovered major tropical storms in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and gave warning signals of the approach of the storms.

Perhaps one of the most spectacular achievements is the discovery, through observations of the motion of Vanguard I and the Transit satellites, that the earth is pear-shaped and not round. Imre Izaak, of the SAO, announced recently that optical observations of satellites had indicated an ellipticity of the earth's equator, with the long axis as much as 1,000 feet longer than the short one. Dr. Richard Kershner, head of the Transit project, and his associates expect shortly to be able to re-map the shape of the entire earth completely and accurately.

In the collection and tabulation of the scientific data from which these inferences have been drawn, the world-wide chain of satellite tracking stations, including Naini Tal, plays an important role. In addition to this project, officially described as "Optical Tracking of Artificial Earth Satellites," the Naini Tal observatory also .participated in another international project, organized by the

sate" ite tracking stations in Ind ia contribute a world-wide

to

programme

of space research

Satellite appears as broken line, circled, and stars as fixed points in this photo taken by Baker-Nunn camera at Naini Tal optical tracking station.

Harvesting Data from Space

The Baker-Nunn camera can photograph any bright object at least six inches in diameter at distances up to 2.500 miles from earth.

U.S. Naval Observatory, which is concerned with photographing the moon. For this purpose the station has been equipped with a Markowitz camera provided by the United States. These observations have an important bearing on theories of the moon's motion and more accurate of the rate of the determination earth's rotation. They also serve as a check on some conclusions reached by the satellite tracking method.

The work being done at Naini Tal is an encouraging example of international co-operation in a field which has immense potentialities for betterment of the human condition. Another notable example of a similar kind is the telemetry station at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad which was set up in November 1961 with equipment supplied by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration ( rASA).

This is a mobile station mounted on an air-conditioned vehicle, with its own power unit. I ts special features include a highly directional antenna which can be automatically moved to point at a passing satellite, a very sensitive radio receiver which never "loses" the satellite after once picking it up, a high quality recording system, and a time standard system which provides the unit with accurate time to within one-hundredth of a second.

Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, Chairman of the Indian rational Committee for Space Research, explained that the Ahmedabad station had been used "to train an Indian crew in the procedure of operating a telemetry station.

I t is also receiving signals from certain scientific satellites used for research in ionospheric propagation."

Dr. Sarabhai described the function of the telemetry station at the conclusion of an international space science symposium in Washington where he headed the Indian delegation. He added that India had been interested for the last century or so in various aspects of geophysics, particularly geomagnetism, and many Indian scientists had been engaged in research on cosmic rays, solar physics and the study of the ionosphere. He considered the new technique of satellite tracking a "very powerful new tool to study and interpret these problems."

The overseas satellite tracking projects are based on a desire of the U.S. to conduct space exploration programmes as openly as possible and to enlist the talents offoreign scientists in achieving common objectives. They present a unique opportunity for contributions by many nations to the pattern of open co-operation and to the development of competence in space research .•

DR. SEVERO OCHOA, chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at New York University College of Medicine and Dr. Arthur Kornberg, professor of biochemistry at Stanford University in California were catapulted into the public eye in 1959 because they had won the coveted Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology.

The two prize winners were more than 3,000 miles apart, but their contributions to science were very similar. Dr. Ochoa synthesized ribonucleic acid (RNA). Dr. Kornberg did the same with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Both substances are nucleic acids.

Now an American citizen, Spanishborn Dr. Ochoa received his medical degree with honours from the University of Madrid in 1929. In 1931 he started his career as a teacher at the same university. When he went to the United States in 1941, he was appointed an instructor and research associate in pharmacology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Next came an appointment to the post of research associate in medicine at New York University. Since 1942 he has advanced to the chairmanship of the Department of Biochemistry.

Honours are not new to him. Now he has been admitted to the charmed circle of the world's greatest scientists.

The two winners met for the first time in September 1946. Dr. Kornberg was then a post-graduate student under Dr. Ochoa. He was "an exceptional student" who had "an extremely brilliant and rapid mind. I am very proud of him. I can say he was my best student," Professor Ochoa commented.

"Marked for brilliance," said Dr. Kornberg's associates at the U niversity of Rochester, where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1941.

Dr. Kornberg, 41 years old, was graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the City College of New York in 1937. In 1942 he joined the National Institutes of Health of the U.S. Public Health Service. There he advanced to the post of medical director. In 1947 he went to Washington University in St. Louis.

How do Nobel Prize scientists work? If you were to interview Dr. Ochoa at NYU's College ofMedicine, he would probably first show you a view of the East River. Next would come a tour of his laboratory.

Such is Dr. Ochoa's way. His interests are many. He relaxes with the music of Beethoven and Bach. His hobby is outdoor colour photography.

He has been described as demanding and exacting when at work, but his ever-present sense of humour helps to

Biological Architects

biochemists

Biological Arch itects

Continued

clarify the riddles of regeneration

lessen the tension under which he and his colleagues work.

Dr. Kornberg's work habits are similar. He has the knack of getting his associates to work at his own level of intenseness and devotion. Highly competent in solving technical problems, he is capable of long hours of concentration. Both scientists worked independently on their research.

For a better understanding of the significance of their discoveries, let us first unravel the story of nucleic acids.

Proteins have been called the "building blocks of life." Nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) are the "blueprint" that determines the structure of the building blocks. These acids are found in living tissues.

DNA is found inside the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell, RNA is the cytoplasm outside the nucleus. Scientists believe that the nucleic acids may hold the key to the hereditary structure of all plants and animals.

Both DNA and RNA are in the shape of long chains. X-ray analysis of DNA reveals it to be a double molecule. Chains made up of phosphate and sugar molecules are twined around each other in the shape of a spiral staircase. Units of four molecules-thymine, cytosine, adenine, and guanine, which are nitrogenous bases-are arranged in shelflike layers inside the spiral chains. The phosphate and sugar molecules, in turn, spiral around these nitrogenous bases.

The bases, linked in pairs, may be arranged in a variety of ways.

This arrangement enables molecules of D A to react with the elements in the fluids circulating through the living cell.

DNA is the material in genes which determines the physical and mental characteristics of all living things.

Genes govern inheritance from one generation to another. They also govern the development of specific characteristics in an individual, such as colour of eyes and hair. They are found inside the chromosomes ofliving cells. Each chromosome has a specific amount of DNA which never varies.

There is direct evidence that DNA has a genetic role. Thus, if pure DNA is extracted from certain bacteria, it is capable of transferring some of the properties of the strain to a related strain. Scientists have found that when a bacterial virus infects a bacterium, the DNA of the virus and not its protein enters the bacterial cell. Progeny viruses produced in the cell have much of this DNA. How does DNA reproduce itself?

Dr. F.H.C. Crick of the University of

and continuity of life

Cambridge believes that the two chains of DNA, which fit together as a hand fits into a glove, come apart.

The hand then acts as a mould for formation of a new glove and the glove acts as a mould for a new hand.

Thus there are two gloved hands where there was only one before.

Scientists are looking forward to more information on how RNA behaves inside the living cell. Then they will be able to explain the events that occur in the cell and the circumstances under which they take place.

From the few facts scientists have been able to gather concerning the nucleic acids, they have developed this theory: The nucleic acids control the making of each organism's characteristic living substances-its proteins.

What role do DNA and RNA play in determining the structure of the whole organism? It is believed that DNA is the master mould for passing heredity patterns from generation to generation. RNA serves as the copy used in the actual manufacture of proteins. This theory has served researchers as a guide in working out the intricacies of biological systems.

Dr. Kornberg's research uncovered an enzyme in common intestinal bacteria iden tified as escherichia coli.

(An enzyme is an organic catalyst that speeds up a chemical reaction.)

This enzyme promotes the manufacture of DNA from smaller organic molecules.

Dr. Ochoa uncovered an enzyme in the bacteria known as acetobacter vinelandii. This enzyme turns alcohol to vinegar. These newly found enzymes were used to make compounds almost identical with DNA and RNA. The test tube models of DNA and RNA resemble the real nucleic acids both physically and chemically.

What is the significance of this discovery? The Caroline Institute, which makes the annual Nobel Prize nominations for physiology and medicine in Stockholm, said that the two biochemists "clarified many of the problems of regeneration and continuity of life."

The work of these two Nobel Prize winners, as is so often true of "pure" research, will undoubtedly have practical value. Their work may help solve the riddle of cancer, since in cancer abnormal growth and reproduction of cells occur. The research of the Nobel Prize winners may also give scientists new insights into the nature of viruses and their reproduction .•

TELSTAR

THE TELSTAR, a U.S. communications satellite, has undergone thorough tests prior to launching into orbit. In the test chamber above the satellite was exposed for days to temperatures down to 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in a near vacuum to test its performances under space conditions. Telstar is designed as a television relay transmitter in space and the basic unit of a world-wide television system .•

T

HE INDUSTRIAL revolution had its genesis in the fertile brains of some half-a-dozen men. About the time James Watt invented the steam engine and many years before George Stephenson made the steam locomotive, Sir Richard Arkwright had harnessed water power to drive the first textile machines in England. By the side of these famous names must also be placed that of Samuel Slater, the English emigrant who ushered in the industrial age in America.

The history of Samuel Slater has all the ingredients of a fabulous success story. Born at Holly House, Derbyshire, England, in 1768, he left his father's farm at the age of fourteen to become one of the first mill apprentices in England. He was employed by Jedediah Strutt, at one time a partner of Arkwright's, in his water-powered spinning mill at nearby Belper, and served his employer for six-and-a-half years, faithfully fulfilling the conditions of the indenture. It is interesting to note that besides solemnly promising to keep his employer's secrets and to carry out his lawful commands, the young apprentice bound himself not to marry during the term nor "play at cards or dice tables or haunt taverns or playhouses."

During this period so great was young Slater's diligence and absorption in the details of his trade that, although his family lived only a mile away, it would be sometimes six months before he saw them. Besides thoroughly familiarizing himself with the processes of spinning yarn, he also learned to design machinery by experimenting with it in his leisure hours.

Before Sam Slater had completed the term of his indenture Strutt recognized his worth by appointing him superintendent of his new hosiery mill. But towards the end of his term, Slater happened to come across a news item in a Philadelphia paper which someone had left at the factory. His interest was aroused when he read that the Pennsylvania Legislature was offering rewards of 100 pounds for improvements in textile machinery. When he also heard that certain American organizations had advertised for men who could build the Arkwright spinning equipment, his mind was made up and he resolved to seek his fortunes in the New World.

Slater had inherited enough money from his father to pay his passage to America, but his undertaking was beset with serious hazards. England was fully conscious of the importance of her textile exports and jealously guarded her trade secrets. There were rigid restrictions

on the emigration of trained mechanics and severe penalties for any attempt to send models or drawings of the precious machinery out of the country. All passengers for American ports were subjected to a thorough search before they boarded a ship. Slater was; of course, well aware of these restrictions and met them with courage and resourcefulness. Relying on his prodigious memory for details of the machinery, he carried with him no plans or drawings but only his indenture papers which he carefully concealed. He kept his intentions a close secret even from his own relations and spent a few days in London sightseeing. Thenjust before his departure he posted a letter to his family telling them of his projected voyage and, disguised as a farm labourer to escape detection, boarded a ship for New York. Thejourney from London to New York took sixty-six days.

Within a few days after his landing in America in November 1789, Slater got a job with the New York Manufacturing Company. But the hand-operated machinery, copied from antiquated English models, was unsatisfactory and there were frequent breakdowns ..When Slater had worked with the company for about three weeks, he had a chance meeting with a mail-boat captain which

shaped his subsequent career. He learned from the captain that a wealthy Quaker merchant by the name of Moses Brown had invested a large sum of money in two spinning frames, a carding machine and a couple of "jennies," and was looking for someone who could make the machinery work to produce good cotton yarns. This was just the kind of opening that young Slater, then twenty-one, was looking for. He wrote to Moses Brown offering his services and stating: "I flatter myself that I can give the greatest satisfaction in making machinery, making good yarn, either for stockings or twist, as any that is made in England, as I have had opportunity and an oversight of Sir Richard Arkwright's works, and in Mr. Strutt's mill .... " The shrewd Quaker businessman was quick to perceive the possibilities of this proposal and invited Slater to "have the credit as well as the advantage of perfecting the first water mill in America." One look at the machinery installed by Almy and Brown in Pawtucket, however, was enough to make Slater pronounce it worthless and he could not be persuaded to try it out. Sorely disappointed and in desperation, old Moses Brown at last threw the young man a challenge: "Thee said thee could make machinery. Why not do it?"

After some hesitation Slater agreed that the only thing to do was to start from the very beginning and he accepted the challenge. "If I don't make as good yarn as they do in England," Slater declared, "I will have nothing for my services, but will throw the whole of what I have attempted over the bridge." He became a partner of the firm and, in return for half the net profits, undertook to construct and operate the Arkwright machines while Almy and Brown were to supply the finance and market the finished product. Slater was also to be paid a living wage of one dollar per day.

What followed was little short of a miracle in the history of American industry. Without any models or drawings and with nothing but his memory to guide him, Slater worked behind shuttered windows in a small riverside building for the next few months, assisted by an experienced wheelwright and a skilled iron-worker. The latter was David Wilkinson with whose sister Hannah, Slater fell in love and married two years later.

20

Span

August I962

With chalk Slater drew the parts of the machinery on wood. The wheelwright cut out the parts from oak and fastened them together. The ironsmith forged shafts for the spindles, rollers for the frames and teeth for the carding machines. Working sixteen hours a day, and enlisting some outside help to prepare suitable castings, Slater was ready by the autumn of 1790 to tryout the three carding machines, the drawing and roving frame and the two spinning frames he had made.

When the trial was made, the carding machines would not work and Slater spent many sleepless nights trying to locate the fault. He was greatly depressed, fearing that he might forfeit the confidence of Moses Brown and his partner William Almy, both of whom had consistently backed him. Eventually he traced the defect to the positioning of the teeth in the carding machines. They had been placed too far apart and flattened under pressure of the raw cotton. The defect was rectified and a further test proved successful. One final problem remained, however, and that was the automatic operation of the machinery by water power-the most remarkable feature of the Arkwright "perpetual spinning" technique. The machines were connected to a small water wheel and, as the river was frozen over, Slater himself had to break up the ice around the wheel to make it turn. The wheel moved and the first water-powered mill in America began to operate. The date, December 20, 1790, is a highly significant one in America's industrial history.

Slater's mill made a modest beginning. Throughout the remainder of that first winter, he himself had to stand on the frozen river for two to three hours each morning and break the ice to start the water wheel. It was a trying routine which supposedly brought on rheumatism in his later years. He opened the factory with four employees.

After three weeks, however, the number had increased to nine and the operations of the mill expanded rapidly. The yarn it produced, and of which Slater proudly sent a sample to his old employer Strutt in England, was of excellent quality. By the end of the first ten months, Almy, Brown & Slater had sold about 8,000 yards of cloth produced by weavers from their yarns and when the accounts of the firm were squared at the end of two years, Slater's

share of the profits worked out to more than 400 pounds, over and above his wages. In terms of the times, this was a handsome income for a young man of twentyfour.

Soon the mill was turning out more yarn than the weavers in the locality could use and it was a natural development to expand the market to dispose of the surplus. To promote sales the firm began to employ agents in such towns as Salem, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The increased demand led in turn to a reorganization and expansion of the firm. The little mill was replaced in r 793 by a larger and more efficient factory, later known as the Old Slater Mill. With the continuous and rapid rise in the demand for textiles, it was not long before more factories sprang up along the banks of New England rivers. Some were built by Slater and others by his former employees or competitors inspired by his success. When Slater was in his early thirties, he promoted the building of the White Mill, not far from the site of the Old Mill, and operated by the new firm of Samuel Slater & Company. His next venture, undertaken with the assistance of a younger brother, John Slater, who was, sent for from England, was the establishment of still another cotton mill. in r806. The mill town, with its factory and cottages for the operatives, was named Slatersville. .

Other projects followed. Attracted by the potential of water power in Oxford, Massachusetts, Slater in r832 developed an extensive textile centre near there, which became the town of Webster. About the year r8r6 he had also become interested in a small mill on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, whose proprietors were in financial difficulties. He expanded the concern, adding new equipment to it and later building a new mill. This enterprise developed into the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, and around it grew up the greater and even New more famous textile centre of Manchester, Hampshire.

There were other ventures too, mostly promoted and organized by Slater personally and some managed by the relations of his first wife, Hannah Wilkinson, or, in his later years, by his sons who were trained in his methods.

At Slater's death in r835, his estate was estimated at $r,200,000, which represented a remarkable achievement in America of the early r9th century. His example had inspired many other entrepreneurs, and the infant industry which he founded had achieved phenomenal growth in the forty-five years since the opening of the tiny mill in Pawtucket. By r835 American industry was processing about 80,000,000 pounds of cotton annually and the value of cotton manufactured goods was more than $47,000,000.

Big social changes had also taken place during the period.

When Slater arrived in America, the economy of the country was entirely agricultural and it was a nation of farmers and artisans. By the time he died, and largely because of what he accomplished, there had grown¡ up a new and important class of trained factory workers.

Two years before his death, Samuel Slater, confined to his home with rheumatism, had a distinguished visitor.

President Andrew Jackson happened to be in Pawtucket and, greatly impressed by the Slater Mill and the general prosperity he saw around him, he wished to see the man to whom the village and the country owed so much. It was a pleasant visit and the President paid a fitting tribute to Slater's genius. He addressed him as "the Father of American Manufactures" and said: "You taught us how to spin, so as to rival Great Britain in her manufactures; you set all these thousands of spindles to work, which I have been delighted in viewing, and which have made so many happy, by lucrative employment." Slater thanked the President and remarked: "Yes, Sir, I suppose that I gave out the psalm, and they have been singing to the tune ever since."

The amazing success of Samuel Slater's ventures cannot be explained by his mechanical talent or mental gifts alone. Besides these qualities he had an unusual capacity for hard work, great business acumen and the ability to inspire confidence in others. He was a conscientious employer, kind and even fatherly to his operators.

His interests were not confined to his mills. He founded a bank and helped to promote several road projects. He was a distinguished lay member of the Episcopal church and is accredited with having s..tarted the first Sunday School in America .•

The Progressive

"education

is the release

of capacity from whatever

hems it in"

THROUGH seventy years of constant teaching, ninetyyear-old William Heard Kilpatrick has released a flood of new ideas for the reform of education. He has written fifteen books, edited three others, kept a diary now forty-five volumes long, produced four hundred articles, dozens of pamphlets, introductions and reviews, taught 35,000 students from fifty-nine countries, been dismissed for heresy, attacked for radicalism, praised for integrity, acclaimed and condemned for progressive ideas, admired for his teaching, and, by critics and supporters alike, identified as a major force for educational change in the United States in this century.

"Whatever I accept to act on, that I learn, and it becomes part of me," he wrote. This idea and others allied to it have been powerful instruments of educational change because they connect with American life and temperament. Their root is in the American tradition of plain talk, self-reliance, respect for ideas that work.

The tradition stems from Emerson, who said flatly, "only so much do I know as I have lived"; from William James, who remarked about education, "In almost any subject, your passion for that subject will save you"; and from John Dewey, who thought of education as growth, or "the release of capacity from whatever hems it in."

During the 1920'S and 1930's students flocked in hundreds to the Kilpa trick classes at Columbia U niversi ty, crowding the largest available auditorium. They went to hear a rebel who had a method by which tradition could be overthrown.

Out would go the system of formal subjects, textbooks, recitation, examinations, and grades. In would come an education which gave the child a chance to discover things for himself, to gather facts, to draw conclusions, to build his own knowledge through experience with life. The philosophy was John Dewey's, the application was William Heard Kilpatrick's. He has been applying that philosophy ever since, until now, at ninety, still living near Columbia, he is writing an autobiography and a new book on education, and working out plans for a new international college.

So great was the Kilpatrick influence that he has been accused by the critics of progressive education of having indoctrinated a whole generation of teachers and administrators in Dewey's ideas, and of having formed, with his colleagues at Columbia University's Teachers College, a tightly knit movement of progressive educators who controlled the American educational system.

What the critics of the progressives fail to note is that the power of an idea to convince depends finally on the strength and vitality of the idea itself and the way it . meets the demands of its context. If progressive ideas cease to generate new reforms to meet the demands of a new context, they lose their power to convince, and they lose it exactly where they found it-in the open forum of experience where all ideas must meet their test.

The distinctive character of progressive education is that the subject matter for learning is considered to be the total world in which the child exists, and the effort of the teacher is to find ways in which the child can learn for himself the things he needs to know. The aim of education, for the progressive, is the development of personal character, of which intellectual power is a central component.

•

Idea In Education The child is to be educated by the encouragement of his intellectual and personal assets, rather than by punishment for his weaknesses. Acquiring subject matter is not enough. The child must learn how to use his intelligence in gaining knowledge of all kinds, and it is the teacher's duty to help him with a curriculum that gives him something to do, and to match the level of his talent with tasks of which he is capable.

Professor Kilpatrick and the progressives from Dewey's time to now have abhorred the notion that all children, regardless of their background and capacity, should be lumped together in classes inappropriate to their talents, where the more talented would be frustrated by inability to learn if the teaching were too far ahead of their stage of development.

The progressives have called on everyone to take full account of the differences in ability, temperament and background of all children. They have argued against classifying children by I.Q. (Intelligence Quotients) tests, grades and formal academic ratings which could easily mask the native talent of each of them and could often destroy the normal development of a child by convincing him that he was stupid.

Science, the progressives said, is learned by doing what scientists do, that is, gathering facts, testing hypotheses, forming conclusions. The arts and the social sciences are learned by doing what artists and scholars do, writing poems, histories, stories, reports, composing music, painting, acting, sculpting, creating new forms and new knowledge along with it.

Above all, the child learns truly what he sets out to learn and what he engages himself in learning. If he learns only in order to avoid punishment, to secure a grade, to pass an examination, to compete with others, he has not broken through to the real purpose of education. Instead, he leads a double life, and learns to disguise his true motives and to meet external demands.

DURING THE years since World War II a stream of criticism has been directed against the effect of progressive reforms and practices. Reduced to their essentials, the criticisms state that too little emphasis is given to the fundamentals of subject-matter and to intellectual discipline, too much is given to the interests of students and their emotional well-being.

The progressive idea of learning by doing, of involving students in school government, of creating informal relationships between teachers and students, of allowing students freedom to form their own conclusions about political and social issues, has, in the judgment of the critics, produced soft, lazy and ignorant high school graduates.

Another kind of criticism comes from those who attack progressive ideas on political grounds, holding that the schools fail to teach patriotism, Americanism, belief in God and respect for authority.

To those criticisms and attacks Professor Kilpatrick answers, "Democracy, to be itself, cannot indoctrinate, even itself." The point of view of the progressives is simply that students learn democracy by living it, and free expression is their right. Their freedom to read, and the

The author, President of Sarah Lawrence College from I945 to I959, is himself a leader in the progressive movement in education and was a close friend of John Dewey.

freedom of their teachers to teach, must be protected from those who wish to establish political control of the schools.

As. for the matter of religious beliefs, Professor Kilpatrick points to his own experience in teaching as a his native State of Georgia, young man atMercerCollegein where, after serving as vice president and president, his resignation from the faculty was sought and accepted. The grounds were that he held heretical views and encouraged free student discussion of religious beliefs.

If free discussion of ultimate belief is not allowed, according to Kilpatrick, the young will never achieve sincere conviction, no matter what their religious upbringing. Heresy is only possible where authoritarian principles are at stake, and if progressives are at fault here, let us make the most of it.

The answer to the other criticisms of Professor Kilpatrick's brand of progressive education is more complicated, both because Kilpatrick's iQeas are enmeshed in an entire complex of ideas which go to make up the progressive movement and because many of those who have applied the ideas in practice have not understood the conditions necessary for their success.

Throughout the whole range of progressive education there is a wide variety of programmes, and no two are the same. But in these institutions the level of intellectual discipline and comprehension of subject matter is higher than in most conventional schools and colleges, and what is more important, the students have a spirit of commitment to their work and to the life of the school.

A definitive reply to the critics is given by the eightyear study which matched r ,500 progressively educated students with. 'r ,500 from conventional schools, and followed their progress through college. The progressively educated did better work, as judged by the usual tests, but in addition, showed far more initiative, resourcefulness and intellectual maturity.

Bad education and bad teaching by foolish methods should not be confused with progressive education. It is the quality of the teacher more than anything else which determines the quality of education, and the progressive system requires depth and range in its teachers far beyond the conventional demands.

If one enters an elementary-school science classroom and finds a well-trained biologist teaching a project in embryology by hatching eggs with apparatus the children have helped to construct, one is in the presence of a teacher who understands what Professor Kilpatrick and progressive education really mean. If one enters another classroom to find children making papier-mache alligators as a way of combining the creative arts with science under the supervision of a teacher who is neither an artist nor a scientist, the conclusions may be different.

All his life Professor Kilpatrick has been working to create better forms of knowledge. He has put the child into the centre of education, he has given the child a world of his own. He has led the teacher into a new classroom .•

•

The Orig In ofth e

AN EXHIBITION

of one hundred rare manuscripts tracing the development of the book form in Indo-Persian culture was recently held at the Grolier Club in New York. It was prepared by Mr. Karl Kup, Curator of Fine Arts at the New York Public Library and a member of the club.

Exhibits covered a period of about ten centuries, with the earliest examples in the Indian section dating back to the twelfth century.

"The exhibition was organized," as Mr. Kup explained, "to show members of our club and the public the centuries-old art of the book as developed by other civilizations than those of the Western world."

The most ancient exhibit was a palm-leaf manuscript from Nalanda, the historical centre of learning near Patna. This rare relic is a collection of Buddhist prayers written in Sanskrit and illuminated with drawings of Buddhist divinities. Commissioned for presentation to the religious preceptors of the donor, these painted miniatures are of the Pala School and were based on Ajanta

Pages from a Jain manuscript, Kalpasutra, written about /550.

Boo kin I n d ia

prototypes. Mr. Kup described this manuscript as "a very precious monument to an art that has practically vanished, and a thing of great beauty."

In the latter half of the 14th century, paper began to replace the palm leaf and the bark of the birch tree, and the illustrated manuscript began to assume the book form which we know today.

An example of this second stage of development of the book in India was provided in the exhibition by a beautifully illustrated manuscript, Kalpasutra or Canon of the Jains, written about the year 1550. It is typical of the Western School of Indian painting, which later assimilated Persian influences and out of which developed the well-known Rajput and Moghul Schools.

The consolidation of the Moghul empire under Akbar in the 16th century had a powerful impact on indigenous art styles. Numerous painters and calligraphists from all parts of India were employed in the emperor's workshops under the supervision of Persian masters, and the Moghul School soon began to influence profoundly the art of the Indian illustrator. The Rajput and Pahari

The Bazaars o( Faizabad.

Uttar Pradesh. /822: specimen o( the Moghul School.

Schools flourished side by side with the royally-patronized Moghul School but developed a distinctive style, drawing their themes from Hindu classics or popular lore and their inspiration from ancient art traditions dating back to the days of Aj(l.nta.

A notable example of Moghul art in the Grolier Club exhibition was an album of thirty-six miniatures, including a series of portraits of the Moghul emperors. Apart from its brilliant illuminations, this book is prized for its historical associations: it was given to Robert Clive by Shuja-ud-Daula of Oudh before Clive left India in 1767. Other notable examples were the Nizami, written for the Emperor Akbar by Abd-al-Rahim in 1595 and an illuminated copy of Babar's Memoirs written in Persian and transcribed by Mohammed Amin Kazvini.

Representative of the Rajputana School was an album of miniatures entitled Rasikapriya, or The Mode of the Beloved, by Kesavdas Sanadya Miscra, a poet from Bundelkhand of the late 16th century. The great Indian epic of Mahabharata also figured in the exhibition in the form of ten beautifully executed miniatures by an unknown 17th century artist of the Pahari School. In the same tradition, but belonging to a later period-the early 19th century-was Badhawa Krishna, the Story of Lord Krishna.

This exhibit, exemplifying the work of the Pahari or Kangra School of the Punjab, comprised twenty-five miniatures illustra ting familiar episodes from the life of Krishna.

Besides portraying romantic themes and the deeds of gods and goddesses, early Indian books also covered miscellaneous subjects drawn from everyday life or relating to different

These pages (rom Badhawa Krishna. early nineteenth century. are typical o( Kangra School o( the Punjab.

The Origin of the Book

• branches of knowledge. One illustrated manuscript in the exhibition portrayed the colourful bazaars of Faizabad in the U.P., as seen by an artist in the year 1822. Evidence of interest in the study of sciences-astronomy, mathematics, medicine-which was fairly well developed in the Moghul period, was provided by another exhibit, the Encyclopaedia of Sciences. This is a rare 16th century manuscript, beautifully illustrated with paintings of trees, plants, rocks and animals.

Among the institutions who loaned items for this outstanding demonstration of the early book-maker's art were the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and Harvard and Princeton Universities.

Some items were also borrowed from private collectors. The Grolier Club, which sponsored the exhibition, has a membership of about six hundred, including book collectors, scholars, writers, artists, printers, publishers and librarians. The club was founded in 1864 and its first president, Robert Hoe Jr., was considered the greatest American book collector of his time.

The present president, Donald F. Hyde, is a New York attorney and also a well-known private collector of rare books and manuscripts. He owns more than one-third of the existing letters of Samuel Johnson and the only known existing page of Dr. Johnson's dictionary in the original manuscript. Members of the Grolier Club have access to a large research library containing some 37,000 volumes and including rare mediaeval manuscripts and specimens of fine printing. The object of the club is described as "The literary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books.".

A sixteenth century illustrated Encyclopaedia of Sciences, Deccan, Golconda.

The IF ALL

"Genius is two percent inspiration and ninety-eight

percent perspiration."

the American success stories were rolled into one, the result could barely describe the life of Thomas Alva Edison. He was an outsize and legendary figure.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, the sixth child of Samuel Edison, who operated a small lumber mill. From the moment he began to toddle he was an unusual youngster. One spring evening, when he was five, his parents found him in a neighbour's barn, squatting patiently on a nest of duck eggs. He had been there for at least ten hours and was blue with cold, but he protested bitterly as the elders bundled him home.

"I can hatch 'em. I know I can hatch 'em," he said.

The next morning at sunrise he was back on the nest. In this, his first experiment, he demonstrated the stubborn tenacity that was to underscore his whole career. vVhen he was seven the family moved to Port Huron, Mich., where Edison began what was probably the briefest formal education in history.

At the end of two months the teacher had a talk with his mother: "I'm sorry, but your boy seems definitely backward. He simply doesn't want to learn."

"Nonsense!" Nancy Edison exploded. "Tom's a brilliant boy-I'll teach him myself."

Nancy Edison was the granddaughter of Capt. Ebenezer Elliott of Connecticut, who had fought under Washington.

She was an unusual woman and her son had an unusual education. After teaching him to read and write, she let him follow his own interests. Before he was ten he was reading Richard Green Parker's School of Natural Philosophy, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Dictionary of Scietlces, Sears's The Wonders of the World.

The Parker book spurred the young mind to experiment. Gradually the farmhouse cellar became a laboratory stocked with hundreds of jars and bottles.

By the time he was twelve the youngster decided to strike out for financial independence. His laboratory needed expensive materials, and he was buying new science books as fast as they appeared. So the inventor went into business. He persuaded the Grand Trunk Railway to let him

Wizard of Menlo Park have the newspaper and candy concession on its new daily train between Port Huron and Detroit.

In Detroit the young news butcher was soon spending his spare time in the reading rooms of the Young Men's Society. He had already learned to read rapidly and could skim through several average-size volumes in an evening, retaining the important facts in a prodigious memory which seemed to operate like a high-speed camera.

The Grand Trunk pr'<lject prospered, and within three years he had expanded it, hired newsboys for other trains, and set up a fresh-fruit-andvegetable business.

Young Edison made scores of friends among the telegraphers, station hands and other railway employees along the 63 miles of track between Port Huron and Detroit. He sold them fresh butter, berries and vegetables at cost; he gave them penny candies for their children, and magazines and newspapers left over from the day's run. In return they helped him.

The Civil War was in full blast and Edison's Detroit newspapers sold best when the big battles were on. One April day of 1862 the Detroit Free Press was full of the great battle then raging at Shiloh. Edison rushed to the depot and persuaded the telegrapher to wire the headlines to the stations along his route. He knew that friendly station agents would chalk the headlines on their bulletin boards. Then he asked the Free Press's circulation office for 1,000 papers.

"A thousand!" The clerk couldn't believe it; Edison's usual draw was 300. When the youngster told him he would have to have the papers on credit, the clerk shook his head.

Edison explained his telegraphic setup. Finally the clerk took him to the circulation manager, who, in turn, took him to Wilbur F. Storey, editor of the Free Press. Storey was impressed by the boy's initiative. He scribbled a note: "Give this boy all the papers he wants."

Edison started off with his 1,000 copies. At the first stop, 12 miles outside Detroit, where he usually sold two papers, he was met by a mob which swept up 40 copies as fast as his arms could pump them out. At the next station he raised the price from five to ten cents: 150 copies

disappeared. After that he upped the price to 25 cents and sold the entire 1,000 before reaching Port Huron.

With the earnings from this profitable coup young Edison picked up a secondhand printing press. He set it up in the baggage car, and began turning out a tabloid-size paper called The Weekfy Herald. In this sheet, he covered all the local news along the route-marriages, births, deaths, fights and fires. The paper sold from the start, and the young publisher began accepting advertisements.

Alongside the hand press young Edison had also set up a chemical laboratory in which he conducted experiments outlined in his scientific readings. One afternoon, as the train lurched over a rough stretch of track, a jar of highly combustible material broke on the floor, igniting newspapers and other flammable odds and ends. Mter the train crew had brought the flames under control, Edison and his paraphernalia were dumped at the first crossroad. That was the end of his career on the Grand Trunk system.

I t was also the beginning of a new career. While still a news butcher Edison had risked his life to snatch a three-year-old boy from the path of a train approaching the Mount Clemens stop. In his gratitude the child's father, who was the Mount Clemens telegrapher, offered to teach Edison telegraphy. The young man practised 18 hours a day.

All copy in that pre-typewriter day was handwritten. Characteristically, Edison began experimenting with various methods of handwriting in a search for the speediest and most legible form. He finally struck on a print-like, vertical script with characters as sharply formed as steel engraving and as legible as newspaper type. After months of practice, he achieved a speed of 55 words a minute, which was faster than any operator could send.

Edison now became a tramp telegrapher. His unlimited curiosity, his tremendous desire for knowledge about every subject under the sun, made him far from a steady employee.

No matter where he travelled he continued his chemical and electrical experiments, reading through the night and into the dawn, catching sleep only when weariness overcame him.

by C. B. Wall

For a skilled telegrapher employment was no problem, however, and Edison soon commanded a top salary of $ I 25 a month. His skill was all the more extraordinary because of his deafness. Only the vibration of the clicking instruments enabled him to hear messages.

Long before his 18th birthday Edison was quite deaf. During his Grand Trunk days a brakeman, trying to help him climb aboard a moving train, had pulled him through the baggage-car door by his ears.

As a result Edison's auditory nerves had been irreparably damaged.

Working nights as a press-wire operator, he spent the rest of his hours in a Boston machine shop,

Thomas Edison posed with the first phonograph, which he invented in /877 when he was thirty.

carrying out experiments which were already beginning to fill countless notebooks.

The application for his first patent was filed when he was twenty-one.

Known as the Electrical Vote Recorder, the device would enable each legislator to register his vote by push-button, thus eliminating timeconsuming roll calls. As this would greatly hamper filibustering, a Congressional committee before which Edison demonstrated his revolu-

tionary gadget regarded it with considerable disfavour.

In that same year Edison finally worked out the method for sending two simultaneous messages over the same wire, and perfected the double transmitter.

Quitting his job as operator at Western Union, he spent all his funds on a demonstration on the telegraph line between Rochester and New York. For some still unexplained reason the test was a complete failure.

Since the gamble had left him absolutely broke, he was unable to file a patent protecting his invention.

A short time later, another inventor, learning of the double transmitter, unscrupulously filed and secured the rights. It was a bitter dose for Edison.

resume his job hunt, chaos broke loose on the floor of the Exchange.

The master transmitter had creaked to a halt. Brokers on the floor and hundreds of offices were without the day's opening prices on gold and scores of commodities. The wheels of commerce were jammed. Messenger boys streamed in from the financial district. The operators, unable to find the trouble, were panic-stricken.

Edison clumped back down to the basemen t, took one look a t the transmi tter.

"Contact spring broken," he pointed out calmly to the manager.

"It's fallen between the gears."

The manager regarded the cool gray-blue eyes, the crumpled suit that had been slept in night after

Deciding a change of scenery might bring a change of luck, he left Boston for New York.

Edison's first days in Manhattan had all the ingredients of a rags-toriches story. He borrowed the money for passage on the night boat from Boston, and arrived in the big city without a cent. Through an exBoston telegrapher he found lodging in the boiler room of the Gold Exchange. His cot was next to the master transmitter, which sent out fluctuating gold prices to the Exchange and three hundred brokerage houses. Edison spent two evenings studying the complicated mechanism, dreaming up improvements.

On his third morning in the metropolis, just as he was going out to

night, the straggly unbarbered hair that fell from the brim of the battered felt hat. "''''ho the hell are you? Can you fix it?"

Edison pushed back his hat and went to work. Within two hours the transmitter was clicking smoothly.

Edison was hired on the spot as mechanical superintendent at the incredible salary of $300 a month.

But, as usual, he was far from content with a payroll job-no matter what the figure. Soon he and two friends rented shop quarters in Jersey City and set' themselves uP' as electrical engineers, specializing in stock tickers and private telegraph facilities. The concern had been in business for less than six months when

Gen. Marshall Lefferts of the Gold and Stock Telegraph Co. offered to buy them out for $15,000. They accepted. Shortly afterward, General Lefferts, who had taken a liking to Edison, offered him ajob in a Newark in stock-ticker shop specializing instruments. His task would be to improve and simplify the machines.

Within months the young inventor had designed the Edison Universal Printer-the basic features of which are still in use today. It was much simpler and far more reliable than the automatic printers then in use among brokerage houses, and General Lefferts was highly enthusiastic.

One morning he called the inventor into his office. "How much do you want for your printer?" he asked. of asking Edison first thought $3,000. Could he dare ask $5,000?

"I don't know, General," he answered at last, "but would you care to make me an offer?"

"All right. How about $40,000?"

In a dreamlike stupor the 22-yearold inventor walked to the bank with the General's cheque.

In the beginning Edison's new shop was devoted chiefly to turning out stock tickers for General Lefferts' company, improving the mechanism, keeping them in repair. Soon he had an order for $30,000 worth of his own Universal Printers, and began acquiring a staff of expert workmen, some of whom were to stay with him for the rest of their lives.

Although he was then only twentythree, Edison was known as "the Old Man" to his employees. There was an odd, raffish maturity about him.

Heavy-set, with sharp gray-blue eyes beneath heavy brows and an extraordinarilv broad forehead, he shuffled around his shop in rumpled, greasestained clothes, looking more like a wayward tramp than a rising young manufacturer.

As an employer Edison paid top wages, but he demanded the same single-minded devotion to a job which he displayed himself. He despised, a clock-watcher, and installed half a dozen clocks around the shopall set at different times.

The mere accumulation of money for its own sake meant nothing to Edison. The $40,000 he had been paid by General Lefferts wen t in a few months for equipment for his Newark shop.

On Christmas Day of 1871 Edison married Mary Stilwell of Newark, a charming I8-year-old girl who worked in one of his shops. The marriage was a happy and rewarding one.

Edison felt that rents in Newark were too high and in 1876 he broke ground for a new laboratory, at Menlo Park, N.J., twenty-five miles

"This from New York. That Menlo Park laboratory, every detail of which he designed himself, was soon to become world-famous.

The year it was built, Western Union pressed Edison to improve the telephone, which Alexander Graham Bell had just patented, and on which Edison had already done considerable experimental work.

As a practical commercial device, the Bell instrument was limited. A clumsy, pear-shaped affair, it was held to the mouth for speaking and then shifted to the ear for listening.

Conversation, even over short distances, was extremely difficult because of hissing and static set up by the magneto.

After two years of constant, gruelling experiments (during which he incidentally developed and patented a forerunner of the modern microphone), Edison finally perfected the carbon telephone transmitter. Successful tests were held over 140 miles of wire. Articulation was distinct and the volume of sound several times that of the magneto-type telephone.

Western Union promptly bought the rights for S 100,000. "Bell may have been the first to invent the telephone," an observer wrote, "but it was Edison who made it possible to hear something on it."

I

T WAS Edison's invention of the phonograph, however, which first stamped him. as a genius in the public mind.

The first machine that talked can be attributed to Edison's acute powers of observation and deduction rather than to any set series of experiments.

He was tinkering one summer day of 1877 with his "automatic telegraph repeater," designed to record telegraph messages on chemically treated paper. This instrument had a metal point which passed in and out of a series of indentations on a whirling paper disk. By accident, Edison set the disk to spinning at high speed.

He noticed a whining sound which seemed to rise and fall in direct relation to the indentations on the disk. Fascinated, he lowered the speed, then tried it again at high speed, this time substituting a small diaphragm with a pin attached for the repeater's metal point. The volume of the strange sound was much greater.

At midnight he went to his desk and began a crude sketch. I t specified a metal cylinder with spiral grooves, mounted on a long shaft in such a way that it could be spun by a crank.

A wooden telephone-transmitter case,

fitted with a diaphragm with a blunt pin in its centre, was to be attached to a metal arm.

Next morning he called in one of his men, an expert Swiss craftsman named John Kruesi, who had a knack for translating Edison's roughest sketches into finished machines. As usual, Edison jotted down the estimated cost of the materials, the workman being allowed to keep any saving between actual cost and the original estimate. In this case the figure was $ I 8.

Kruesi puzzled over the sketch.

Most of the devices he worked on were electrical; this had no wires, no coils, no magnets.

"What's it for, boss?" he asked.

"Don't seem to make sense."

Edison, who liked a touch of mystery, waved him away with his cigar. "You'll see when you bring it back. I think you'll be surprised."

As he worked on the machine, Kruesi tried to puzzle it out. Other workmen watched over his shoulder, hazarding guesses. No one was even close. When the Swiss brought the finished gadget to Edison, a curious group gathered around.

"All right, boss," said Kruesi, "there she is. Now, what's she for?"

Edison shifted his cigar in his mouth. "This machine must talk, Kruesi. Think it will?"

Kruesi was startled. The others stopped smiling.

They watched the serious, young Old Man carefully wrap a sheet of tinfoil around the cylinder. At the first turn of the crank, the pinpoint ripped across the foil. The screeching sound jarred the nerves of the watchers. And Edison's intent look frightened them.

He patiently replaced the torn foil with another sheet, this time firmly fastening the ends together with glue.

He placed the needle at the starting position, picked up the long mouthpiece and began turning the crank, reciting in a loud voice: "Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow ... " When he finished the verse Edison calmly replaced the needle at the starting point, and again began turning the crank.

Suddenly his voice began eerily arising from the spinning cylinder.

"Mary had a little lamb ... " Except for the echoing voice, the room was quite silent. The workmen, their hearts pounding, their palms sweating, literally held their breath.

Several instinctively made the sign of the cross. The miracle of the phonograph's birth had been achieved.

For the first time in the history of the Patent Office there were no prior claims to any device even remotely

machine must talk."

resembling it. The first of several patents protecting the invention was granted at once. The crude first machine was gradually transformed

by Edison and others into a more finished instrument.

The imagination of peoples everywhere was captured by this unearthly machine that could actually store and reproduce the human voice. Millions of words about the inventor were cabled all over the world. The name of Thomas Edison became perhaps better known than that of any other living man. He was then thirty-one.

His shy mannerisms, colourful speech, sloppy dress and complete lack of pretension appealed to the press. He was interviewed on every possible subject, and fantastic stories circulated about him. Through a chance newspaper caption he became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park."

In his early 30's, with 157 patents already to his credit and 78 pending in Washington, Edison followed a fantastic, steady work pattern. Embarked on a "campaign"-his phrase for intensive research-he frequently kept going for three or four days and nights before allowing himself to go to bed.

In 1878 Edison began work on the incandescent light. He started, as usual, by making an exhaustive review of what others had done, reading every available scientific paper. He then squared away for his "campaign."

It was to prove stupendous.

In five years' time, although electrical engineering was then in its infancy and everything had to be worked out almost from scratch, Edison built a complete prototype of the electric-lighting industry and established it as a practical public utility.

When Edison first tackled incandescent lighting, he entered a virtually unexplored scientific plateau. In 1841 a British patent had been granted on a lamp consisting of two platinum coils with powdered charcoal bridging the gap between them. When the current was switched on, the charcoal glowed. A New Englander had patented a light in which platinum strips themselves glowed when current flowed into them; and there was also the arc light. But all of these had proved unreliable, expensive to operate, and far too cumbersome for general use.

In his search for a more effective light Edison first tried winding platinum wire around the stem of an ordinary clay pipe. He noticed that after the platinum had been heated several times by electric current it became much harder and could stand higher temperatures.

Apparently

The Wizard of Menlo Park heating expelled gases from the platinum, causing it to become more dense. Reasoning that still more gases could be driven out in a vacuum, and that the platinum would become still harder and give more intense light, he tried passing a current through it while its glass enclosure was connected to the vacuum pump. The light was amazingly brighter.

Edison thereupon turned to the problem of maintaining a lasting vacuum in a lamp. Since no suitable glass-forming machine then existed, he hired a skilled glass blower who laboriously shaped the first experimental bulbs by hand and sealed them off while they were still connected to the vacuum pump.

The vacuum theory was proved, but Edison finally decided that a platinum filament was too complicated and expensive, and that it consumed too much energy for the light it gave.

He proceeded to try-and discardother rare metals: rhodium, ruthenium, titanium, zirconium, barium.

All proved unsatisfactory.

Edison's experiments were costing thousands of dollars. He was being financed by the Edison Electric Light Co., which had been formed with the idea of eventually setting up a utility service to compete with gas.

Capitalized at $300,000, it had at first turned over $50,000 to the inventor. When he ran through this without positive results the stockholders became restless, and only reluctantly raised another $50,000 for him. But Edison was making progress. As he continued the. search for a suitable filament, his genius was working out every angle of the electric-lighting system from a revolutionary dynamo to the home meter, from switches to protective fuses.

Everything was going well except the elusive lamp.

ONE MIDNIGHT as he sat in his laboratory the answer came to him.

Since heavy carbon burners had not stood up, why not try a slender carbonized filament which was almost threadlike? Pursuing this thought, Edison turned from platinum, rarest of metals, to one of man's homeliest commodities-cotton sewing thread.

The experiments were maddening.

Edison ordered sewing threads to be packed with powdered carbon, baked in earthenware crucibles, then slowly cooled. One after another the delicate threads, less than 1/64 inch in diameter, crumbled in various stages of the process. But at last a carbonized filament was installed in a lamp

Continued

under vacuum. When the current was turned on it began to glow with a steady, brilliant light. Edison and his workers barely breathed.

It worked, but how long could this unbelievablv delicate filament continue to burn?'

Two hours crept by ... three ... six ... ten. As the brave glow held steady against the dawn, Edison threw himself down on a cot for his first sleep in more than 60 hours. Assistants took over. From all over the laboratory and machine shops workers came to watch. As the hours piled up into the 30's, keyed-up workmen grinned, pounded each other happily. After 40 hours, Edison characteristically began experimenting with increased voltage. The overloaded filament finally flared and burned out.

Edison next tried filaments of carbonized cardboard. They were even more successful. The life of the lamp was gradually increased to 170 hours.

A public demonstration on New Year's Eve of 1879, when all of Menlo Park was brilliantly lighted with the new lamps, drew three thousand people. The spectacLe created a profound impression.

But Edison knew he must have something tougher, more enduring than a cardboard filament if the electric lamp was to be commercially successful. One morning his roving eyes rested on a palm-leaf fan, and he noticed the thin strips of bamboo which bound its outer edges. At once he had the bamboo shredded into filaments and carbonized. It proved far superior to anything yet tried.

That experiment began a worldwide search for the best variety of bamboo. Altogether Edison tested some six thousand varieties of plants and vegetable fibres before selecting a bamboo grown especially for him in Japan. The carbonized bamboo filament was used for more than ten years, being supplanted first by "squirted cellulose," and then by tungsten, which is in use today.

Edison had realized that if his light was to be practical for home illumination each lamp must be able to be switched on and off independently. Arc lights then burned "in series"-current flowed through all the lamps. If one lamp went out, all the others failed. He had therefore perfected a "multiple circuit" which allowed each lamp to burn independently, and had developed a satisfactory generator to produce steady current.

Not only were all generators then in use designed for the arc-light "series" circuit but they were inefficient, delivering less than half the energy they generated, the rest being lost in the windings. In 1879, when

Edison announced a revolutionarv generator that was 90 per cent effi'cient, the scientific world refused to believe it. But many features of Edison's invention are still used III generators today.

Edison was now ready to build a test lighting system for that crucial square mile in lower New York, Newspapers hooted when he outlined his plans for putting wires underground in conduits. New York streets were then a maze of telegraph and telephone wires overhead. Who ever heard of putting electric wires underground! Didn't the man know they might get wet and leak, and electrocute pedestrians right and left? Edison calmly went ahead with his plans, perfecting new types of insulation to do the job.

When the laying of the first street mains began in July 1881, skilled electrical workers were scarce. So Edison opened a training school, using his laboratory assistants as instructors. He even put together a textbook, with simple sketches showing the proper way to connect dynamos, wire houses, install fuses.

By the end of the summer he had fifteen hundred men tearing up streets, laying conduit, wiring buildings. He set up a special shop to manufacture heavy dynamo parts, opened one plant to make electrical lamps, and another to turn out switches, meters, fixtures, sockets-all the gadgets necessary to this infant industry.

Building that first electric-lighting system was, Edison later said, "the greatest adventure of my life." He threw everything into the gamble: his reputation, his money, the faith of his friends, the trust of the public.

Realizing that he would have to make his product cheaper and more efficient than gas-for the powerful gas trust then had a monopoly on lighting-he made the installations for prospective electric customers without charge, and asked no deposit on the meter. The user would pay the metered charge only if the lighting system worked satisfactorily. Edison personally guaranteed the bills would be lower than those for gas!

As the time for the first test approached, the eyes of the whole world were fastened on that single square mile of downtown New York. Great things were expected and stock in the Edison Co. had soared from $ 100 to $3,500 a share. If Edison failed, it would be the most-publicized failure in history.

On Monday, September 4, 18-8'2, the new lighting system was pronounced ready. In the powerhouse, firemen stoked the glowing coals, steam hissed up from the boilers into the engines' of the mighty jumbo

generators.

Faster and faster the dynamos whirred. Edison reached for the master switch to send the mysterious force surging over 80,000 lineal feet of underground wiring. He was, he admitted later, sobered by the "great responsibility of turning a mighty power loose under the streets and buildings of New York." But there was no hitch. When he pulled the switch, the windows of the downtown district suddenly sprang to life.

Edison's great gamble had been vindicated.

E

VERY JEW product, Edison believed, should be sold as cheaply as possible, since a wide profit margin invited competition. "Vith a canny eye to the future, therefore, he now began selling his incandescent lamps at 40 cents apiece, though they cost him $ 1 .30 to make. In time, and with considerable difficulty, he brought the production cost down to 37 cents. He then sold his holdings in the lamp works for about a million dollars to a firm which was later to become the General Electric Co. Although Edison was an astute businessman, he loathed the book-keeping details of routine profit-taking. As soon as a project was operating successfully his interest in it usually waned.

Two years after he had established his pioneer electric-lighting system, Edison's wife, Mary, died suddenly of typhoid fever.

Grief-stricken, Edison closed his home and laboratory at Menlo Park and sent his three children to live with their Grandmother Stilwell in New York. His home life had been very happy. Now more than ever he plunged into allconsuming work, trying to drown his memories.

At Menlo Park he had started operation of the country's first passenger electric railway. He had sketched plans for a cotton harvester, an electric sewing machine, an electric elevator, a new kind of snow-removal machine.

In his ever-restless ranging it is startling to observe how near he came to breaking through the barrier into the age of presen t-da y electronics.

As early as 1875 he discovered a unique electrical phenomenon which he called "etheric force" (later recognized as being caused by electric waves in free space). He experimented with it, then was diverted to other quests. He gave his findings to Marconi at a time when that scientist was racing with others to perfect the wireless. Marconi was lastingly grateful for Edison's help.

After he had worked himself out of the grief caused by his wife's death, Edison began to seek occasional social relaxation. He accepted a few dinner

invitations and with his young daughter, Dot, attended operas and concerts.

One evening in 1885, after a dinner at a friend's home, one of the guests, a handsome brunette of twenty, sat down at the piano and began playing and singing.

"I was, of course, struck by her great beauty," Edison later told a friend, "but what impressed me most was her air of confidence. I thought it a considerable accomplishment that anyone could play so badly and carry it off so well!"

But the meeting with Mina Miller that evening ended Edison's loneliness.

He fell completely in love with her and the romance was to endure for the rest of their lives.

Edison and Miss Miller were married in 1886, when he was 39. His bride was the daughter of Lewis Miller, an inventor and manufacturer.

Well educated and quiet, she was the perfect complement to the shy, boyish "Old Man." To get around his deafness, he taught her the Morse codeindeed, he proposed to her in Morse.

At the theatre she would relay the dialogue to him with her fingertips; on social occasions she would tap out intimate endearments despite the presence of guests.

The difference in ages apparently meant nothing. To his young wife, Edison was the eternal boy, as careless about dress and appearance as a Cub

Kaiser, one of Edison's assistants, working in the perpetually cluttered workshop on the design of the first motion picture projector.

Scout. He was as likely to come down to a formal dinner with his hair uncombed and minus necktie as he was to neglect his meals entirely. In an attempt to improve his slovenly appearance, she took to hiding his coat.

Before leaving home Edison had to find her in order to get it. This gave his wife a chance to make him shave, comb his hair or put on a clean shirt.

In nearby West Orange Edison now built a new laboratory and shop, which he continued to expand over the years. Its research facilities were lavish, and gradually he acquired one of the most extensive collections of scientific materials and literature in America.

ONE DROWSY summer afternoon in 1887 a friend brought Edison a whimsical gift. It was "The Wheel of Life," a simple mechanical toy. One peeped through a slot, spun the wheel, and a series of pictures sprang into action, giving the illusion of motion.

The device was familiar to millions of Americans.

Edison chuckled as he spun the wheel and watched the antics of a dancing bear. Presently his laughter faded and he regarded the gadget with a speculative eye.

Slumping back in his chair, he drew out his ever-present notebook and began sketching. These casual sketches were Edison's first work on the motionpicture camera that was to change the face of the entertainment world and create a multi-million-dollar industry.

Edison worked four years on his camera. The mechanical problems involved minute fractions of a second, and gears as delicate as watchworks.

Simultaneously he worked with Eastman Kodak engineers, specifying the type of film he needed. Eastman had recently developed a tough, pliable roll film which proved ideal. Finally Edison had a camera capable of taking 20 to 40 exposures a second.

In 188g Edison actually showed a talking picture in his laboratory, synchronizing the film with a phonograph. So all-embracing were his basic patents that the film industry paid him royalties for many years.

In the late nineties and early 1goo's he also took a fling at producing. He built a large, oblong building, covered inside and outside with black tarpaper. Revolving on a turntable device, it moved with the sun, allowing every possible moment

of daylight to shine through its slide-back roof.

In his new role, Edison was all over the place, writing comical sketches, directing the actors, grinding the cameras, repairing them when they broke down. He enjoyed it all hugely.

His first productions were fairly crude -Jim Corbett boxing a few rounds, an Italian organ grinder cavorting with a mischievous monkey, and the like-but they packed the nickelodeons. Later he built a S 100,000 glass studio in Bronx Park, and made several full-length pictures.

Once the movie industry was well launched, however, Edison turned to other challenges. Experimenting with Roentgen's newly discovered X-ray, he developed the fluoroscope, which he gave, unpatented, to the medical profession. Concurrently he also developed the first fluorescent electric lamp.

The nineties were really gay for Edison. These were lusty, productive years, full of hard work and roaring horseplay. His marriage with Mina brought him three more offspring, and some of his most important research was done in the family sitting room with children swarming over him. He had intense powers of concentration.

Frequently he sat reading scientific journals in anyone of the half dozen languages he had taught himself, while the household raced around him in a game of hide-and-seek.

In his laboratory Edison fought with his men, cussed them and was cussed back, fired them on Saturday and re-

hired them on Monday. Outrageous practical jokes often punctuated the exacting experiments and marathons of grinding work.

For years some of the old hands had been helping themselves to Edison's cigars. To stop this pilfering, he ordered his cigar salesman to send him a box of cigars made of horsehair, glue and other smelly rubbish. He was working on an extremely ticklish problem at the time and promptly forgot about the request until the cigar salesman called again some weeks later. Then Edison upbraided him for not sending the trick cigars.

"But I did send them," the salesman replied, "three weeks ago."

Edison, intent on his experiment, had smoked the en tire box himself without realizing it.

Although none of Edison's later inventions were as spectacular to the public eye as were his phonograph, movies and electric light, his prodigality in turning out solidly useful inventions was to continue all his life.

So homely and apparently commonplace were many of his creations that people wondered why no one had thought of them before. Lord Kelvin supplied the reason: "The only answer I can think of is that no one else was Edison."

The years rolled on, but the Old Man refused to recognize their passage. In his sixties his workweek remained as long as ever, and it irked him when reporters began interviewing him on his birthdays.

"It's a hell of a thing to congratu-

The first motion picture studio was built in 1892 and could be swung with the sun.

late a man on," he grumbled, "that he is getting old."

But the yearly interviews produced arresting copy. What was the secret of his success? "The abili ty to stick to things." What was genius? "Two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspira tion."

He believed intense brainwork was the real secret of health and longevity.

He had little use for physical exercise.

"The only use for my body," he observed, "is to carry my brain around."

He found recreation in changing his work pattern. After weeks on one problem, he would turn to another, and then to another.

W

HEN EDISON was sixty-seven a disastrous fire wiped out seven buildings of his great plant at West Orange.

The loss, estimated at $5,000,000, was not covered by insurance. But Edison was far from discouraged.

Indeed, the challenge of rebuilding seemed to take years off his age. He always liked working under pressure and he threw himself into the job of directing reconstruction. He had the wrecking crews at work the very next morning. And within two weeks the debris had been removed and rebuilding started.

Edison was nearly seventy when America entered the First World War, but at the request of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels he became president of the Naval Consulting

Board. He developed an apparatus to detect torpedoes, underwater searchlights for submarines, turbine-powered projectiles and submarine stabilizers.

For these and other wartime inventions-more than 40 altogether-he won the distinguished Service Medal.

No matter how hard the driving pace of his working day, Edison never lost his relish for ribald humour.

During the war when he was working under the greatest pressure, he always asked to see the "dispatch case" each morning. This was a telegraphed roundup of the day's best jokes then going the rounds in Washington and New York. Edison spread out the jokes and chortled over them before beginning the day's work. Often, an associate recalls, his laugh was "a roar you could hear all over the place."

For nearly half a century famous men from all over the world sent him their latest jokes. He methodically filed them all.

Edison resolutely refused to have anything to do with hearing aids.

Actually he considered his deafness something of a blessing. In the busiest factory, he could withdraw into his almost silent world and, undistracted, achieve the utmost concentration.

Edison's obviously oversize brain cells were coupled with a remarkably sturdy physique which enabled him to withstand the terrific pressures to which he submitted himself for most of his 84 years. His grandfather had lived to 104, and Edison, considering this, regarded himself as a comparatively young man even after reaching 70.

At seventy-five Edison cut his working day to 16 hours. At eighty he brought out his first long-playing phonograph record. For 38 cents the buyer received 40 minutes of music.

"I have enough ideas," he told interviewers,¡"to keep the laboratories busy for years."

Indeed, his prodigality of ideas was unprecedented. During his lifetime Edison was granted the astonishing total of 1,097 patents by the U.S. Patent Office.

Feature writers frequently sought Edison's views on God and religion.

"After years of watching the processes of nature," Edison told them, "I cannot doubt the existence of a Supreme Intelligence. The existence of such a God can, to my mind, almost be proved from chemistry."

But even on a subject such as this, his sense of humour refused to lie dormant. When a minister asked whether his church should invest in lightning rods, Edison drawled: "By all means. Providence is apt to be absent-minded."

Up to the very week of his death Edison continued the process of selfeducation which began on the day his mother took him out of school at seven.

Even on his death-bed, he was an avid reader of books on a wide variety of subjects. Three days before he died he was busily making plans for future experiments.

His curiosity was the despair of his physicians. He inquired into the whys and wherefores of his own sickness, and kept his own chart of his condition. He argued with them over medicines and drugs. Blood tests intrigued him, and he insisted on examining the slides and microscopes.

Death never had a more wide-eyed, observant victim.

Edison began his last Great Exploration on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84. On the night of his funeral, in response to President Hoover's proclamation, the lights all over America were turned off for a full minute in tribute to the man who had lighted them 52 years before. By a dramatic coincidence the date was the anniversary of the lighting of the first successful lamp in Menlo Park.

"What about life after death?" a reporter at the funeral asked one of the inventor's long-time associates.

"Did he ever say anything to you about that?"

"I can't remember exactly," the friend replied. "But if there's any way of getting through we should be hearing from him soon.".

Span

August I962

37

Chucky closes his eyes while teacher strikes drum. He "listens" with hands on drum then holds up fingers to show how many times she struck it.

A ~eaf Boy f@els Music '"

CHUCKY McGEEHEE, partially deaf since birth, is open-mouthed with astonishment when he finds he can "hear" the beat of the big drum through his hand. Chucky, with the help of a hearing aid, can actually hear some sounds but many of his classmates at Theodore Roosevelt School in Compton, California, may never experience music other than by touch. While the school orchestra practises, these children touch instruments to catch vibrations. Even the profoundly deaf can feel the deep rumble of the bass viol, and rippling trill of the flute.

A Deaf Boy Feels Music

MUSICAL therapy helps overcome one of deaf children's most difficult problems, learning to utter sounds they cannot hear. I t imparts rhythms and accents otherwise lacking in their speech, and brings to their quiet world the wonders of music.

Chucky, now five years old, is learning to make good use of what hearing he has. By listening to musical instruments and records, and by dancing and singing, he is forming concepts of loudness, tone and rhythm and learning to discriminate between them .â&#x20AC;˘

Birthplace American AT

THE Saugus Ironworks, ten miles from Boston, Massachusetts, is a village that still looks as it did more than three centuries ago. Here visitors from all over the world, have gained an insight into the lives and times of the people who helped found a new nation and into the origins of American industry.

I t was in r 646-twenty years after the settlement of Boston and Salemthat colonists built the Saugus Ironworks, one of the industrial wonders of its day. The ironworks used the most advanced methods of iron-making then known. Its rolling and slitting mill was one of the few existing in the world at that time.

Actually, iron was made in the )Jew World before the Saugus Ironworks was established. In Greenland, the Norsemen were making it long before Columbus discovered the American continent. At several points in Canada and the United States, early explorers

of Steel

had worked up iron ores on a trial basis. In Virginia, unsuccessful ironmaking projects had been started before the Puritans landed in Massachusetts.

But, because the Saugus Ironworks can claim the first documented, successful, sustained production of cast and wrought iron in the New World, it is considered by the American iron and steel industry as the true birthplace of these industries, in the United States. '!\Then the Puritans sailed from England to America, they were forced to leave all but a few of their possessions behind, and as they cleared the land and built their homes, the lack of tools, and pots and pans was keenly felt.

The settlers began to search for ores.

The American Indians, who used only rock for their tools and weapons, were puzzled to see the members of the colony digging up and examining the

Birthplace

of American

Steel

muck in the bogs and swamps. The colonists' search was successful: they found "bog ores" to be widespread along the Atlantic coast.

One of the first to recognize the importance of this discovery was John Winthrop, Jr., son of the Massachusetts Colony's first Governor. With Robert Bridges, an associate, he returned to England with samples of the ore and tried to raise money to build an iron industry in Massachusetts. He had little difficulty in getting financial backing for his project and the "Company of Undertakers for the Iron "Vorkers in New England" was formed.

Winthrop began recruiting skilled iron workers for the new plant. He soon found that it had been easier to raise the necessary capital for his venture than it was to get skilled workmen to come to the ew World, but after some months he finally assembled a group of workers, and returned to America.

The enterprise was granted a charter by the General Court of Massachusetts with a twenty-one-year exclusive privilege of making iron within the colony, provided they made enough iron for the neighbourhood's use.

The charter granted the Company the privilege of using any of six good locations, each three miles square.

Saugus was chosen for its natural advantages. It lay on the main route half way between Boston and Salem, the two largest towns of the colony.

Nearby were ample supplies of bog iron ore, extensive woodlands to supply the wood for charcoal, a natural elevation to help charge the furnace from the top, and a navigable stream which could be dammed for the necessary water power.

The dam, which the workmen built at Saugus, submerged about a thousand acres of land, and the water wheel furnished power for the entire works. ""hen the water wheel froze in winter and the works became idle, the workmen used their time to repair and reline the furnace, improve the roads, and cut the wood needed for charcoal fuel.

So important did the colonists consider the industry that officials of the Company and their employees, were exempted from all public charges and taxation, from military service, and "watching for Indians." They were even excused from attending services at the church, provided religious services were held at the works on the Sabbath.

Before ironwork began, considerable thought was given as to what should be made from the first iron produced. An iron pot for cooking was selected. The community gathered to watch as the furnace was tapped and the molten metal filled the crude sand mould. When the iron had solidified, the mould was broken and the finished pot held high for everyone to see.

This same pot is now in the museum.

By modern standards, it is clumsy and a modern iron worker could make three similar pots from the same amount of metal. Nevertheless, it was the first product of an infant industry.

Many of Saugus' iron products were sold at the site. Some were hauled by boat or ox-cart to merchants in nearby towns. Others were sent to a central warehouse in Boston for shipment to Europe.

From the metal smelted in the blast furnace, pots and firebacks were produced. Produced too, were crude iron bars called SOViS or pigs. Many of these were re-heated and beaten into wrought iron. Some went to the rolling and slitting mill where they were worked into flats and rods. From the rods, the farmers made their own nails.

For over twenty years, the Saugus ironworks produced needed iron for a rapidly growing country. Finally the supply of raw materials ran out. In 1670, the operation was abandoned and soon fell to ruins.

The restoration of the Saugus works was begun in 1943. The American

Iron and Steel Institute provided over a million and half dollars for excavation and rebuilding of the site, and for returning it to its original condition.

When excavations began, the first thing uncovered, buried 2 I ft. below the surface, was the original water wheel which furnished power for the bellows of the blast furnace.

Exposed to air, it began to crumble.

An expert from Harvard U ni versi ty, Professor Elso S. B:ughoorn of the Biology Department, developed a unique process to preserve the wheel.

Sections were rushed to the Harvard laboratories where they were placed in large vats of melted paraffin wax.

A three-hour heat treatment vaporized the water in the wood which absorbed the wax, leaving the treated sections almost as solid as the day they were made.

During the excavation, over five tons of artifacts were taken from the ruins. These ranged from tiny brass pins to a 50s-pound iron hammerhead used in the original forge building. Iron pots and pans, knives, axes, saws, shovels, scissors, pieces of leather shoes and broken pottery provide an accurate picture of articles in use over three centuries ago.

The blast furnace when uncovered was found to be a four-sided hollow stone stack, lined with slate or some other heat-resisting material in which raw materials were loaded from the top. The molten iron produced by the furnace was discharged from an open

Saugus of three centuries

chamber or hearth, at the bottom.

The hearth was sloped so that the iron and the slag could be drawn off from two spouts. The blast of air which gives the furnace its name was produced by a giant pair of bellows operated by water power. Alternate layers of bog ore, charcoal and oyster shells, which took the place Of limestone, were used to charge the furnace.

From time to time, experts in various scientific fields were asked to help identify or authenticate relics found in the ruins. Examination of the original furnace water wheel showed a hair-like substance had been used in caulking. Tests made at Rutgers University and the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratories, showed that'the caulking material was hair from Black Angus cattle. The butt of an old oak tree, used as the base for the original forge anvil, was examined by experts from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation, who determined the tree to be 300 years old when cut.

Metallurgists of the steel industry did considerable re;iearch into the ,~omposition of bits 0f ore, slag, arid fragments of cast and wrought iron found in the ironworks' ruins. From these tests, they were able to determine that an. iron cooking pot, for

ago restored

years the prized possession of the Lynn, Massachusetts, Public Library, was the original pot produced by the ironworks.

While archaeologists sifted the ruins for physical evidence of the centuriesold ironworks, an intensive study was being made of written records of the early r 7th century documents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, by Professor Hartley and his colleagues of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These yielded a wealth of new data on iron working and the industrial economy of the colony at that time.

Today, the visitor sees the ironworks as it appeared in r650. High on a hill is the Ironmaster's house.

Much of the ironworks is operative.

Water rushes along wooden troughs to turn the plant's seven water wheels, which, in turn, operate a massive leather bellows, the giant forge hammer, and the rolling and slitting machinery. Visitors thus may see the actual beginnings of American industry in this quiet village. The Saugus works set an early pace for technological advancement. Choosing the mostup-to-date process known in their day, the men who established the ironworks, .began the technological progression which has characterized the U.S. steel industry for three centuries .â&#x20AC;˘

SOME asked

YEARS ago city officials the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright what to do about Pittsburgh, one of the leading industrial centres of the nation and at that time one of the drabbest and dirtiest cities.

He facetiously said, "Abandon it and begin all over elsewhere." Instead, city planners coupled vision with determination and launched a rehabilitation programme tha t has made the city a pioneer and model in urban re-developmen t.

Spacious parks have replaced old slag heaps, slums and railroad yards.

Smoke and grime in the air have been greatly reduced and the threat of seasonal floods lessened. Many residents of former slum areas have been re-Iocated in other parts of the city.

New parkways, bridges, tunnels and parking facilities have cleared traffic

congestion, and gleaming skyscrapers of steel, aluminium and glass have replaced the dingy old buildings in the centre of town known as "The Golden Triangle. " Crowning the skyline is the new Public Auditorium of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, latest and most dramatic symbol of civic progress.

Designed to accommodate cultural, sports, trade and business events, its structural features, the magazine Architectural Forum says, "make it stand out as one of the noteworthy structures of the 1960's."

Flexibility is the key to the design of the dome-shaped, stainless steel building. 1 early circular in design, it is 415 feet in diameter and, at centre, 3 I 6 feet high. Its maximum seating capacity of some 13,000 makes it one of the largest auditoriums in the United

States. The unique retractable dome makes the building convertible from a closed arena to an open-air amphitheatre. Operated electronically, the dome will, at the touch of a button, open or close noiselessly in two and a half minutes.

Six of the eight pie-shaped wedges that make up the dome are movable.

Differing slightly in size so they may be nested into the stationary leaves, they rotate about a pin at the top as they roll at the base on a series of motorized carriages.

The core of the main auditorium is an area of 18,450 square feet that can be made into an ice ring for hockey or skating shows. It is ringed by between 10,000 and 11,000 seats.

When the auditorium is used for other sports events such as basketball, boxing or wrestling, the skating rink

Unique

Steel

is de-iced and portable floors of appropriate sizes are rolled out. Because these sports require srpaller performing areas, folding chairs can be added to raise the seating capacity to the neighbourhood of 12,000.

Conversely, when a maximum performing area is needed for a rodeo, horse show or circus, rollaway sections of 1,600 seats can be folded into huge wood-panelled closets on the wall. At such times the crowds are limited to the 9, I 52 fixed seats in the permanent, three-tiered grandstands.

The chief permanent tenant of the auditorium is the Civic Light Opera Company which will play there for three months every summer. For it and other theatrical presentations, the auditorium can be made into a theatre. Then, a section of some 2, roo

Building

seats is raised by hydraulic pressure and locked into position to expose the stage underneath. For such performances, an audience of approximately 7,000 can be accommodated.

Two large meeting rooms on the first level hold about 350 people each.

On the second level, a larger meeting room holds 850 people and can be divided into three smaller rooms by the use of movable partitions.

Perhaps the most significant fact regarding the building, in the opinion of structural engineer Edward Cohen, is that it was unnecessary to evolve any new structural principles in the auditorium's design. Although the huge retractable dome is the first of its kind, he points out that recent technological advances now make such unusual structures technically feasible .â&#x20AC;˘

Span

August 1962 47

"India can have winning athletes."

JOSH CULBREATH "R

EGARDLESS of what many others may think, I tell you this: given the training and much-needed encouragement, Indian athletes would fare far better at Olympic meets than they have so far done. And this is possible within a couple of years."

Joshua Culbreath, 30-year-old American Olympic star, was speaking. Josh is at present in Bangalore where he is coaching the Indian track team for the 1962 Asian Games, scheduled to open in Jakarta, Indonesia, on August 24.

In his home town of Norristown, Pennsylvania, Josh Culbreath is a teacher in a school for mentally retarded children. For the past year, home for Josh and his wife and their two children has been Patiala. In the massive Motibagh Palace, which now houses the National Institute of Sports, the American track champion has been training Indian athletic coaches under an assignment from the Rajkumari Sports Coaching Scheme. He expects to continue his work in India for another nine months.

The desire to encourage Indian athletes is uppermost in Josh Culbreath's mind. "I'm told," he says, "that India is a poor country, that many of its people are undernourished. That may be true. But, I'm told that, because of this, India can't have winning sportsmen.

That's not true.

"What is more needed here is motivation, a change of attitude toward competitive sports. Get rid of excuses and develop the determination to win."

The Culbreaths are not the only foreigners residing at the Institute. As Josh says, it's a real United Nations in miniature. "Here we are a United Nations in peace, working for peace," he emphasizes. The teaching staff include, qpartfromJosh, another American, one Iranian, one Australian, an Englishman, two coaches from the USSR, and a badminton specialist from Malaya.

Josh is now retired from competitive sports. "I have had my laurels," he says, "the best laurels a runner can dream of. And I feel my legs becoming faster and faster

each year. But I don't have to run all through my life."

That is why he is in India, trying to impart some of his knowledge and technique to others.

India is where Josh Culbreath wanted to coach and he wanted it enough to decline several offers to teach in Africa. Josh saw Milkha Singh and other Indian sportsmen in action at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, where he himself ranked third in the 400-metre hurdles and won a bronze medal. There he was convinced that Indian athletes have a great potential in international sports.

Since then-and particularly since his first visit to India, on his way to Tokyo for the 1958 Asian Games-he has been determined to return to this country and work with Indian athletes.

A NATIVE

OF Pennsylvania, Josh blazed a trail of spectacular achievements for about fifteen years in national and international sports. He remained, from 1948 to 195I, the world's 400-yard hurdles champion.

Two years ago he broke his own record with a 51.2 seconds timing by winning the 400-metre Pan-American Games championship at Chicago. Another outstanding e\'ent of his career was winning the 195I Pennsylvania State championship in 200-yard low hurdles, which earned him number two ranking for that event in the United States. His achievements are numerous in several other track events, including high and broad jumps, 100, 200 and 400-yard dash events and relays.

Surprisingly, all this Josh achieved with a pair of deformed feet. He was born with an extra bone in each foot. Only recently he underwent corrective surgery.

Another aspect of his career deserves mention and has a special relevance to India. Josh's own life has been a denial of the popular notion that academics and athletics are incompatible. He himself has always been good at his studies and was graduated with honours both from high school and college, taking a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. He completed courses for a master's degree in education at Temple University in Philadelphia, before departing for India last year.

Life at Patiala is an active and strenuous one for both the trainees and the teaching staff of the Institute.

Josh conducts lectures in the morning from seven to nine-thirty and in the afternoon between three-thirty and six. In the afternoon sessions, he conducts his practical work with trainees on the field and performs as he instructs.

He does not want his students to accept any idea or theory on trust. He feels he must himself demonstrate what he wants to explain, and he does it with a facility and a seriousness that can be expected only from a master athlete.

The Institute, Josh thinks, isunique in Asia, providing scientific coaching as a means of raising the standard of sports and games. Though it commenced functioning only on March 28, 196 I, it already shows great promise. Apart from having ample accommodation for class rooms and laboratories for its future development, the Institute is laying out numerous playing fields-several of them turfed for cricket, hockey and football-a cinder track, clay and lawn tennis courts.

For the time being only those trainees are admitted who have had experience in bona fide coaching assignments. Josh says: "It's a grand idea to teach the teachers first-when they are really qualified, their students can't be poor, and gradually these teachers and their students will jointly work to raise the standard of sports throughout the country."

Josh's athletic training course at Patiala covers fifteen events, each lasting eight days. The main events in his course are 100,200 and 4oo-metre dashes, Ilo-metre high hurdles, 4oo-metre hurdles, and pole vault.

But Josh Culbreath does not view his assignment as all work. He applies the same energy as on the field to learning as much as possible about India, its customs and traditions. His love for India is genuine and emphatic.

He has named his infant son Ranga, after his old friend and the Institute's present deputy director Mr. T. D. Ranga Ramanujan. His elder son, four-year-old Qalil, speaks quite a few words in Hindi with an impeccable accent. "I want them to assimilate as much as they can of this country," Josh tells, "This experience is a part of their heritage." Since he is at Patiala,Josh has also grown a beard. "Why not? I'm in the Punjab. It seems so natural to me. And, frankly, I've always hated shaving.".