Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/224

 208

��Popular Science Monthly

���A pivoted platform is constructed flush with the roadway in front of the bin in which the truck is to be unloaded. By turning a crank five tons can be dumped in a minute

��To Unload This Truck You Simply Tilt the Platform

A WESTERN milling company has found it profitable to use motor trucks which can be tilted in their entirety. The plan pays because the longest truck run is not more than eight hundred feet. All motor vehicles of any kind turned out to be failures because they lost too much time being loaded and unloaded.

Study the accompanying illustration and you will see that the tilting device consists of a pivoted platform flush with the road- way in front of the bin in which the load of the motor truck is deposited after it has been carried from another part of the plant. The fulcrum of the platform coincides with the vertical line through the center of gravity of the truck with its entire load. This makes it extremely easy for one man to tip the entire vehicle, simply by turning a crank-handle at the side of the truck. The crankhandle is connected by means of chains and gears with a large toothed gear sector bolted to the under side of the plat- fprm.

After the grain has been durnped, the platform and the truck swing back to the level position by a half turn of the crank- handle, simply because the truck is heavier in the front than in the rear when empty.

��How Much Do You See When You Look at an Object?

THE various committees and individuals interested in the "safety first" move- ment are agreed that although the move- ment is still in a progressively fluid state there is not much more that can be done until the individuals most concerned are taught to use their eyes more effectively. "Having eyes they see not," is the plaint of those who would safeguard the general public from the hundred and one accidents that daily occur.

It might prove pleasurable to compare notes on observation. Let two people, for instance, take the same walk or view the same object for the same length of time and then tell about. It will be found that hardly one out of ten will notice more than the most obvious facts. It was the custom of one of the old philosophers to give a new student some simple object — in one case it was the head of a fish — and tell him to study it and then tell all he knew about it. The student usually re- turned in about an hour's time v/ith a com- pleted paper on the subject; but the paper was generally returned with the remark that if it took an hour to learn such a little it would require a month perhaps to get a fairly good grasp of the subject.

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