Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/917

 Popular Science Monthly

��889

��the dash. There was enough accuracy in his arithmetic to get the crossing but he left part of the rear mudgard aboard the cowcatcher. The engineer, who was the only extemporaneous actor in the event, took a week off at the picture com- pany's expense to recover from the shock. Not so long ago Anita King, in "The Race" went off the end of a broken bridge and twenty feet out into the water, while an officer was waiting in the Hollywood studio to serve an injunc- tion upon her to restrain her from carrying out the performance. Some one 'who had re- ceived a tip of what was to happen and who feared for the actress's safety had made a strenuous effort to prevent

the hazardous leap. Elmer Thompson

has just jumped

his car across a

twenty-seven-foot

gap in a bridge out

in Camarillo, Cali- fornia, in the taking

of a scene for "The

Secret Submarine."

The car lighted on

the forward wheels

with the rear ones

elevated like the

hind legs of a

bucking broncho.

It was touch and

go whether the

machine would

somersault or right

itself. It happened

to do the latter. In "The Trail of

Gibson is swung by

���Danger," Helen the derrick of a rapidly moving wrecking train, from the saddle of a horse, to the deck of one of the cars.

This combination of cameraman, cut- ter and realistic actor is responsible for more thrills on the screen than can be found in any three-ring circus, outside of the posters. The life of a moving- picture actor is a series of thrills.

��A Camera Which Can Be Tilted At Any Angle

IN photographing natural history ob- jects such as skulls, mounted fossils, etc., it is often necessary to take a view of the specimen as seen from above. In most cases the object can be taken off its stand and placed against a vertical screen with the side to be photographed toward the camera. Sometimes, how- ever, the object is so delicate that one dare not turn it from its upright position, or it is too valuable to risk handling, or it may be altogether too large to do so, as for instance in the case of a dinosaur skull weighing a quarter of a ton or a completely mounted fossil animal.

For such cases, there is in use by Mr.'A. E.Anderson, photographer to the Department of Vertebrate Paleon- tology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a camera of his own design, which can be tilted at any angle, or, in fact, turned upside down, as shown in the illustration. The camera has a ground glass eleven by fourteen inches and is provided long bellows. The

��Sometimes a fossil skull weighs a quar- ter of a ton; it cannot be lifted to be photographed. That is one reason why this camera was invented

��ith

��an unus

��ualh'

��stand supporting it is so constructed that the camera when turned upside down can project a considerable distance beyond the vertical axis on which it ortlinarily rests.

With the aid of this camera, Mr. An- derson has found it possible to photograph anything which presented itself, whether it was too heavy to be lifted or too deli- cate to be moved.

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