a black foggy night was introduced to newspaper
men recently by its inventor, John Baird of television fame. He calls
the invention "Noctovisor."
It looks like a large camera and can be mounted on a ship or airplane.
It was announced that it would soon be tried on trans-Atlantic liners.
For the demonstration it was mounted in the garden of Baird's cottage,
overlooking the twinkling lights of Dorking. In the dark beyond those
lights an automobile headlight three miles away pointed toward the
cottage.
At a signal from the inventor a sheet of ebonite, as a substitute for
a supposed fog, two miles thick, was placed in front of the headlight.
Not a glimmer was then visible to the human eye, but it appeared on
the noctovisor screen as a bright red disc. It was supposed to have
particular value in permitting a navigator in a fog to tell the exact
direction of a beacon and to estimate roughly its distance.
The device is a combination of camera lens, television transmitter and
television receiver. The lens throws a distant image on the exploring
disc of the transmitter, through which it acts on a photo-electric
cell sensitive to invisible infra-red rays. The receiver amplifies it
for the observer.
MOON ROCKETS
Seventeen years of experimenting on a rocket designed by Prof. Albert
H. Goddard of Clark University, to shriek its way from the earth to
the moon, came to a glorious climax recently in an isolated and
closely guarded section of Worcester when the rocket tore its flaming
way through the air for a quarter-mile with a roar heard for a
distance of two miles.
Prof. Goddard said the rocket was shot out of its cradle, careened
through the air a mass of flame, and landed about where it was
directed to land, beyond the Auburn town line. Test of a new
propellant was the object of his demonstration, Prof. Goddard said.
Two or three times a week a small rocket goes up into the air a short
distance, not enough to attract great attention. But the latest was a
nine-foot rocket, shot out of a forty-foot tower. Near the tower is a
safety post built of stone, with slits for peepholes. The experimental
party stepped into the safety zone when the rocket was started.
The forty-foot tower is built much like an oil well derrick. Inside it
are two steel rails to fill grooves in the rocket. These guide the
rocket much as rifling in a gun barrel guides a bullet. Prof. Goddard,
when teaching at Princeton in 1912, evolved the ide
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