Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/681

 Popular Science Monthly

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���Toledo's baby moon is a ball of fire, eight

feet in diameter. It is an advertising device

Toledo Plants a Baby Moon in the Sky

"T IKE the Moon led astray in the

1 ^ Heaven's wide pathless way," wrote the poet Wordsworth many years ago, with- out knowing, of course, that in later years some emboldened Toledo folk would ac- tually abduct a young moon and take it to the top of a twenty-two-story skyscraper and fasten it there just for the sake of looking at it.

It goes without saying that Toledo's young moon is for advertising purposes, but the Toledo people get around that easy enough. "Doesn't the real moon advertise the fact that there is a sun on the other side of the world?" they ask. And there you are.

Fifteen miles out on Lake Erie, pilots of steamers can see Toledo's moon. En- gineers on trains, passengers, automobilists, and everyone approaching the city, wonder what the big ball of fire is. Everywhere is heard the question, "What is that great light in the sky?"

The baby moon is nothing more than a huge ball eight feet in diameter, lighted with eight hundred seventy- five-watt lamps, equivalent to seventy-five thousand candlepower. To operate the ball eighty horsepower is required. The ball has the appearance of revolving, due to a flasher which turns the current on and off, making the lights quiver. There is no word of advertising on or near the ball.

���How the tiny moon looks on a dark night on top of its twenty-two story building

As a Lineman He Has Climbed Eight Hundred Miles

THE next time you see a lineman scaling a telephone pole think of William Lane, of Rockford, Illinois, who has climbed over eight hundred miles in the last twelve years. Mountain climbing pales into in- significance compared with scaling tele- phone poles. It takes more strength to climb ten feet of pole with spurs and harness than it does to climb five hundred yards of steep mountain side. Lane's average as a lineman has been twenty-five poles a day, or something like one hundred and ten thousand times forty feet. He has had several falls, due to poorly-fastened spurs and harness, but no bad ones, he says.

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