Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/420

 406

��Popular Science Montlily

��sufficient for thirty minutes' work

Pcrhaijs the most familiar thrill whicii finds its way through the dickering lens is the automobile smashup. One of the most thrilling feats in which automobiles ha\e figured on the screen this year took place in California recently, when a motor-car in which the heroine was hastening to her hero, speeded over a

��camera-man, being directly under the hurtling car, caught it as it fiew, meteor- like, through the air. And it nearh' crashe■ ^m

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� ��TliL Automobile Was Backed Up a Considerable Distance and Was Pointed Directly Toward the Gap, After Which the Steering Wheel Was Locked and They "Let Her Go!"

��broken bridge and leaped through the air to the ground seventy-five feet away. There was really danger in this picture; danger, not for the heroine, but for the man who was turning the camera-crank. The bridge was carefully smashed up previously and the central part taken out. The approach was built up much after the fashion that ski runways are prepared in order that the skiiers will fly into the air when they strike the runway. In the picture as it appeared on the screen, the girl dashed down the road- way, unaware of the fact that the bridge was destroyeil. Indeed, she drove the car at iiigh speed almost to the approach. In the mind of the audience, that car kept on going, with the girl inside, an a considerable tlistance down the road, il was pointed, or aimed, directly at the bridge and the steering wheel locked so that the car woukl not swerve. It was started — gained spectl, dashed out upon the bridge, hurtled over the gap and c.unr crashing down to earth very much broken up. The

��the industry (shall we say "art?") has adopted — Let thrills be as they m,^^ — safety first.

Sacrificed to Make a Motion-Picture Holiday

A motion-picture company reiently "staged" a costly picture in which one aerojilane swoojied down upon another in mid-air, dro|)|)ed a bomli and destroyed it. While the lower plane which was two hundred feet above the ground, seemed to be mo\ing at a fairh' high speed, in reality it was stationary, being suspended by strong but invisible wires between two cliffs. It seemed to mo\e because the nio\ie camera was mounted on an auto- mobile which was moving rapidh- below it. The narrow focus of the camera lens ]M'evcnte(l either of the cliff's from being shown.

The feat is interesting also for a tragic reason. When the airman in the upper ])lane dropped the bomb, he was directly above the destroyed plane. The explosion fonx'd an air wave up- ward which unbalanceil the moving plane, it toppled over and the aeronaut was crushed to ileath in his fall.

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