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  1. Jet Propulsion - November 27, 1944 Life Magazine

    Jet Propulsion - November 27, 1944 Life Magazine

    Excerpt from November 27, 1944 Life magazine

    Jet Propulsion Launches a New Era in Man's Locomotion

    You have to look twice at the airplane pictured above to see that it is flying without a propeller. Its motive force is the thrust of two invisible streams of hot combustion gases, jetted at high velocity from its engines. This plane is the Army Air Forces' P-59, the first U.S. plane to be flown by jet propulsion, Like the first horseless carriage, the propellerless P-59 does not suggest by its appearance that a new age in locomotion is at hand. The fact is, however, that the aerodynamic lid is off. With jet propulsion, aircraft have already climbed to new speeds and altitudes. The ultimate ceiling is as high as man's daring and ingenuity will take it. The principle of jet propulsion, demonstrated on the next two pages, is Newton's third law of motion: to every action there is opposed a reaction which is equal in force and opposite in direction. Anyone who has fired a rifle knows this reaction as the recoil that kicks the butt against the shoulder. A jet plano similarly recoils from the thrust of its jet. Jet Propulsion is the same force that propels a rocket. For the moment, however, a distinction has been drawn between rocket propulsion and jet propulsion in order to minimize confusion between the rocket and a new class of air-breathing jet propulsion engines. The rocket does not breathe air. It carries its own supply of oxygen with it. A rocket may thus conceivably travel outside earth's atmosphere. The reported 60-to 70-mile climb of the Nazi's V-2 rocket is miles beyond the ceiling of air-breathing jet engines. Two air-breathing jet engines are now in operation. One is the ingenious "reaction pipe" that drives the German flying bomb. The other, and by far the more important, is the gas turbine. This is the engine that powers the P-29 and has tied the main stream of aviation progress to jet propulsion. As shown on page 52, this ei ing part, its rotor, and operates with the utmost simplicity. It inhales air in huge quantities, compresses it and brings it to high temperature by combustion. Resulting hot gases spin the turbine which spins the compressor. Then, still hot and under pressure, the pipe. This pipe is the jet engine's "propeller."

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  2. American House Designer - August 26, 1946 Life Magazine

    American House Designer - August 26, 1946 Life Magazine

    Excerpt from August 26, 1946 Life magazine

    Royal Barry Wills Designs the Kinds of Houses Most Americans Want

    Scattered about the U.S. are some 1,100 houses which long before the housing shortage were receiving the longing stares of almost everyone who passed them by. They were designed by Royal Barry Wills, a Boston architect whose products seem to be an almost perfect fulfillment of the sentimen. tal American ideal of what a home should be. Most of Mr. Wills's houses are early American in design-Cape Cod cottages, houses with saltbox roofs or garrison houses with overhanging second stories. Besides designing real houses Wills has designed several hundred on paper and published them in six books which have a combined sale of 520,000, making him the nation's most popular architectural author. Solidly entrenched as the leading U.S. designer of small traditional houses, Wills has become a focal point for the distaste of many of the country's more vociferous but less popular modern architects. They call him a copyist and an opportunist and scorn his lack of enthusiasm for designing machines for living. "In rebuttal Wills maintains that good residential architecture should be primarily emotional and, like good art, be a part of the people and understood by them-a status which modern architecture cannot yet claim. On the following pages LIFE presents a portfolio of Wills houses in photographs and sketches. Like the modernists Wills tries to build as much practicality into them as he can but never at the sacrifice of such things as knotty pine panels, exposed hand-hewn beams, eight-foot fireplaces and windows filled with tiny leaded-glass panes.

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  3. Apollo 15 Moon Rover - June 11, 1971 Life magazine

    Apollo 15 Moon Rover - June 11, 1971 Life magazine

    Excerpt from June 11, 1971 Life magazine

    Astronauts Also Recieve Special Corvettes

    Earlier this year, Apollo 14 had Alan Shepard and his version of a golf club. This July, Apollo 15 will have its own version of a golf cart. Folded, squeezed and packed into a storage compartment in the lunar module's descent stage will be a four-wheeled battery-driven moon car called the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). More simply known as Rover, the cart is built to travel at 10 mph and go 40 miles before its nonrechargeable batteries run down. The Apollo 15 mission plan calls for Rover to carry astronauts David Scott and James Irwin about 20 miles in three seven-hour explorations during their 86 hours on the moon. For safety's sake Rover will travel only three to four miles from the LM at any time, which is the distance an astronaut can walk if need be. Nor will the vehicle exceed 6 mph unless an emergency occurs or in the unlikely event its drivers find a smooth, fast straight- away and decide to hold the first lunar drag race. Within those limits, though. the cart will make it possible for Irwin and Scott to do more exploring than all the other lunar astronauts put together. To guarantee maximum opportunity for geological discoveries, mission planners have selected a landing site sandwiched between some 10,000-foot mountains and a 1.000-foot canyon. Wherever the LRV goes, a color television camera mounted on it and controlled from earth can transmit a full view of the landscape. After the last excursion, the Rover will be parked 100 yards or so from the LM with the camera turned on, so that earthbound viewers can have their first look at a spaceship blasting off from the moon.

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  4. Girls Medical School - December 10, 1945 Life magazine

    Girls Medical School - December 10, 1945 Life magazine

    Excerpt from January 18, 1943 Life magazine

     Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, Now 95 Years old, is the only one in the U.S.

    In 1847 bright, persevering Elizabeth Blackwell wangled her way into the Geneva (N. Y.) Medical Institution. Two years later she graduated with distinction, becoming the first woman in the U. S. to obtain an M.D. degree. But when her sister sought to duplicate Elizabeth's feat she found the school doors closed to her. Mid-19th Century America felt that no nice girl should be interested in the study of medicine. In 1850 a group of six Philadelphians, feeling that girls like the Blackwell sisters should be encouraged, founded the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania a block from the house where Betsy Ross sewed together the first American flag. They too, encountered prim obduracy. The American Medical Association refused to recognize the “irregular" institution. No professional journal would print its announcements. The county medical society excommunicated its professors. But aspiring women flocked to the school, which in 1867 changed its name to the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Although it once had many imitators, it is now the only U.S. medical college solely for women. Its battle for acceptance is long past. Currently 160 students are studying medicine in its well-equipped modern building which stands on a high tract in Philadelphia on which, a legend has it, Thomas Jefferson once hoped to build the Capitol of the U. S. Its 2,000 graduates are no longer merely tolerated but are highly respected by the medical world. Many embark on the hard career of medical missionary. America's first woman medical missionary was a member of the W. M. C. of Pa. class of '69. During the war the school's dean, Dr. Margaret Craighill, became the first woman doctor ever to be commissioned in the Army Medical Corps.

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  5. Walt Disney Goes To War. - August 31, 1942 Life Magazine

    Walt Disney Goes To War. - August 31, 1942 Life Magazine

    Excerpt from January 18, 1943 Life magazine

    Walt Disney and His Studio Help Win The War

    Pictured below, with open collar and a day's growth of beard, is Walt Disney, whose studio in Burbank, Calif. is now going full blast to help win the war. Tacked up behind him are sketches for his Food Will Win The War, a short cartoon film made for the Department of Agriculture. Here Disney drives home the immensity of U.S. food resources. Looking at random, you see that America produces enough flour to make enough spaghetti to be knitted into a sweater covering the whole earth, or enough fats to produce a fat lady who could squash Berlin. Within a year Disney's studio has undergone a big change. He has just released Bambi, a pre-war project, which tells tenderly the story of a deer. Now 90% of Disney's 550 employes are making films that bear directly on the war. At least six major branches of the Government have engaged Disney to reach the public, usually with the aid of Donald Duck or Pluto the pup. But an important majority of Disney's war films are for training purposes. The Army has ordered a few such films. The Navy is Disney's best customer, having ordered more than 50 films on every war subject from bombing and gunnery to paratroop training. Walt Disney is both a visionary and practical artist. That is why his new training films are successful today, and perhaps extremely important to the future. Disney's artists are fine teachers because, primarily, they know how to hold your interest. By their highly perfected animated-cartoon technique, they can show you the inside of something-say, an antitank gun-where no camera could penetrate. They can take the gun apart, piece by piece. Step by step, they can show a mechanical process. They can show an aviator what to expect flying through thunderclouds or, in a film on malaria, they can make a germ-bearing mosquito so gruesome that nobody could ever forget it. On his own, Disney is making 18 cartoon shorts to be released publicly next year. Half of them are related to war. With no sacrifice of humor or variety, these films will crusade for the kind of world where a free popular art, using man's unlimited imagination, can flourish-where everyone has some chance to laugh and learn.

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  6. Crosby, Hope and Sinatra Do Radio "Dick Tracy" - March 12, 1945

    Crosby, Hope and Sinatra Do Radio "Dick Tracy" - March 12, 1945

    Excerpt from March 12, 1945 Life Magazine

    The Good Old Days of Radio


     In Hollywood on Feb. 15 Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and a notable cast put on the most gala performance of a Dick Tracy story ever known to radio. The occasion was an Armed Forces Radio Service Command Performance, which records programs for U. S. troops overseas. Bing Crosby played the square jawed detective, Dick Tracy, Hope the villainous Flattop, Sinatra the despicable Shaky. Title of the show was “Dick Tracy in b Flat," or "For Goodness Sakes, Isn't He Ever Going to Marry Tess Trueheart?” The show managed to do what Tracy's creator, Cartoonist Chester Gould, had never done: marry Tracy to Tess. The act opened with a Tracy-Tess wedding scene and song, “Oh, happy, happy, happy ... wedding day," which faded into the sound of an auto, the squeal of tires, a machine-gun burst and three pistol shots. Subsequent wedding scenes were interrupted by a bank robbery, a kidnaping, a holdup with 13 killed. At one point Hope sang a You're the Top parody, “I'm the top, I'm the vicious Flattop. I'm the top, Got it in for that cop. I'm a naughty boy, I'm the pride and joy of sin.” But the program's best moment was not in the script and will never be heard on the air. Unplanned and unrehearsed, it is shown on the next page.

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  7. Marilyn Monroe "Seven Year Itch" - May 30, 1955

    Marilyn Monroe "Seven Year Itch" - May 30, 1955

    Excerpt from the May 30, 1955 Life Magazine

    "Seven Year Itch"

    The important thing about the movie The Seven Year Itch is that it answers the burning question, can Marilyn Monroe also act? It is also true, of course, that the Fox film version of the stage hit establishes carp-faced Tom Ewell firmly as one of Hollywood's top comics. It is further true that the original George Axelrod plot about a summertime New Yorker who sends his family to the country and then discovers the pretty girl upstairs —is immeasurably helped by some cool Cinemascopic dreams (pp. 88, 90) that let the plot take wing from the hot Manhattan apartment of the Broadway version (Life, Dec. 8, 1952). It is, finally, true that Director Billy Wilder's Itch is an adult, uproarious farce—though it might be even funnier with a little judicious cutting. But to get back to the important matter: has Marilyn, in a slapstick but sophisticated role, really arrived as a comedienne? Well, she has.

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  8. Spring on the Farm in Pennsylvania - May 24, 1943

    Spring on the Farm in Pennsylvania - May 24, 1943

    Exerpt from May 24, 1943 Life magazine

    Spring on the Farm in Pa.

    Spring came late to much of the U. S. soil this year. In Lancaster County, Pa.. the month of April felt like March, and the first few days of May were like a cold and cloudy April. Then, within the last fortnight, the tardy spring came racing up the Shenandoah Valley from the South. Apple orchards burst into foamy pink-and-white bloom around the fat Lancaster County barns and spic-and-span farmhouses. Tractors and teams crawled across the Lancaster County fields, churning the limestone-bedded soil into a carpet of soft, deep loam. In the barnyards pungent clouds of steam rose where farmers were gathering up the winter's deposit of precious manure (see nect page). The pictures on this and the following pages show how the spring of 1943 looks in Lancaster County, richest farming county east of the Rocky Mountains. (Los Angeles County, Calif., which has a far more favorable climate, is first in agricultural production per farm acre; Lancaster is second.) Spring in Pennsylvania has a different look than spring in California or spring in Kansas. But wherever it is and whenever it comes, spring on the farm always finds men and animals and weather working together to renew the riches of the earth

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  9. The Phonograph is Celebrating it's 75th Year - November 17, 1952 - Life Magazine

    The Phonograph is Celebrating it's 75th Year - November 17, 1952 - Life Magazine

    First It Said "Mary"

    At this season of the year in 1877 a group of inventors and mechanics in a laboratory in New Jersey were in the midst of one of the most astonishing experiences in the history of man. They had before them a little machine, handmade for something less than $18, that could talk. It did not say much, its first word having been, as the world knows, Mary, followed by had a little lamb. Moreover it could do little else but talk, which makes it by modern standards a poor thing. But at that time and to those men, who had been listening to the machine since August and in November were still overwhelmed with awe, it was something in which the hand of God was clearly discernible. Thomas Edison, who had thought of it, called it a speaking phonograph. Just now his invention is old enough to have a diamond anniversary. Unlike almost all other great inventions, the phonograph had no antecedents. The idea simply evolved from scratch in Edison's great brain over a period of time. When Edison's thinking about his idea crystallized, he made a pen-and-ink sketch of it, scribbled make this in the corner and handed it to an assistant named John Kreusi, a skilled toolmaker who turned out the first models of many of his inventions. Kreusi dutifully made the thing, having only a dim idea of what it was intended to do and no confidence that it would do it. He finished his model on Aug. 15 and brought it to Edison in a spirit of great doubt, which did not diminish when that great man, who lacked the gift of phrase of Telegraph-Inventor Samuel F. B. (What hath God wrought?) Morse, began to bellow nursery rhymes into the recorder.

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  10. Marines Come Home From Korea - March 19, 1951 Life magazine

    Marines Come Home From Korea - March 19, 1951 Life magazine

    Exerpt from the March 19, 1951 Life Magazine

    One burning September day in Korea, during the fighting along the Naktong River, Cpl. Robert R. Hale, of B Company, 5th Marine Regiment, led his men up the razorbacks and over the bodies of North Koreans that lay in the brittle field grass. Later that day, after LIFE Photographer David Duncan had taken his picture (upper left), Hale was shot in the hand. Then, in the attack on Seoul, he was hit again by a bullet and a searing fragment. Last week, on a gray Naval transport, Hale came into San Francisco harbor along with 1,166 other Marines from Korea. He was a sergeant now and recovered from his wounds. But at the Changjin Reservoir, where his nose ran from the cold, the mustache he had cherished all through Korea had frozen. So when it thawed he had shaved it off. Like Sergeant Hale, many Marines aboard the transport were back because they had been wounded twice. But 690 of them were the first troops to return under the new Marine rotation plan which will bring veterans of Korea home for leaves and then assign most of them to training cadres. The Marines were neither bored nor excited by the Welcoming ceremonies arranged for them-the Marine band, the speeches from officials who stood near a World War II sign of welcome painted on the dock shed, the motorcade through the city streets. Only a few of them waved at the girls from the cars, and even on liberty that night, prowling through the nightspots, they were on their reserved behavior. It was only during those first precious moment at the foot of the gangplank on the dock that the emotions of the returning Marines came to the surface. Met by friends and relatives, they dropped their seabags and were suddenly swept up in the wonderful feeling of relief and utter joy at being home and in the arms of their people.

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