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Half plane and half boat, an odd-looking craft, called the "Sea Flea," has been constructed for a flight across the Atlantic. It is designed to skim close to the surface of the water and forced landings will present no hazard, as the rig is constructed to float indefinitely. A speed of seventy-five miles an hour can be reached, it is claimed. On a test the flea crossed from France to England, a distance of twenty-one miles, in twenty-six minutes carrying three persons and the pilot.

 

Thirty-two hundred pictures a second! That is the performance of a superspeed camera C. Francis Jenkins has developed for taking photographs of rubber tires while they are in actual service, so that engineers can determine where the strain and stress are distributed when traveling at high speed under varying conditions, The camera differs in many respects from the usual motion-picture instrument. Instead of one, it has forty-eight matched lenses and the film moves continuously at the rate of 200 feet a second. The lenses are set in a disk which is rotated by an electric motor.

 



Applying the paint stripes to the automobile is usually left to experts because of the accuracy required. But with a striping pencil now on the market, a novice can perform the task without difficulty. The instrument is fitted with a specially designed base, which can easily be guided in a straight line by the car molding. A brass tube, containing paint, constitutes the pencil. It has a rubber bulb at one end for filling and distributing point at the other from which the lacquer flows by gravity. Interchangeable barrels are provided for making stripes of different width.

