These Mayas, starting as a primitive group, several thousand years before Christ, established the foundations of a resplendent civilization. Indian artists adorned the white limestone and stucco buildings with beautiful exotic sculptures and paintings, and engineers built wide stone highways, probably for ceremonial use, leading to important places of worship. From a reel of film small enough to fit into a coat pocket, a complete play or opera can be reproduced, which otherwise would require 15 to 20 ordinary 12-inch disc records. Talking motion picture technique allowed Dr. Hewlett to achieve his result. In one of the principal methods of recording sound for the talkies, a jagged line photographed on the edge of the film is the representation of the sound.
Light passes through a narrow slit, through the film onto a photoelectric tube.
As the teeth of the jagged lines pass by the slit, they vary the amount of light reaching the tube, which in turn varies the intensity of an electric current. When this current is amplified and fed into a loud speaker, a reproduction of the original sound emerges. In a study made at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. D.A. Wells has found that Staphylococcus albus , the mildest of several germs that produce boils, are destroyed by these relatively low-speed electrons, moving at speeds of a few miles a second. All rights reserved. Subscribe to Science News .