DIY History | Transcribe | Hevelin Fanzines | Vantage Point, issue 1, March 14, 1945

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Vantage Point, issue 1, March 14, 1945

instead of the street and their ears to the amplifying sounds of cyclotron tubes instead of the ground. For some strange reason they are paid very little to make sure that they can't do too much.
In some ways the effects of this form of strangulation are pitiful, for a scientist is actually a sort of perpetual motion machine that continually throws off one good idea after another, like sparks. There is no way of stopping the works for good. Millions were spent during the late twenties to find out how. One idea grows out of another. An improved radio tube is invented and five years later makes possible a television set. A wizard in the Middle West cracks an atom with a cosmic mallet and a decade after the event we are tossing B-29s at the Japs with superfuels in their guts that would give hell's heating plant a run for its Fahrenheit. Out of whirling spindles belt lines grow, and before you can say "overproduction," they've created good twenty times the value of all the country's ready cash.
To their great sorrow, our economic astrologists don't know the secret of halting the process. The sorcerers spoke the magic words a decade or two back and their apprentices have been running for buckets ever since. In the prower period, the country fell ill of this strange diot, and now, the only remedy the medicine men can think up to cure the impending sickness is another dose of the same poison, without providing room for the hundred-yard dash to the bathroom door.
It is a weird thing indeed listening to the panegyrics rising to the heavens from the lips of men who, during the depression, loaded their mouse-traps for any rat who thought up a better one. The classic story of American T and T who have openly confessed to the suppression of over eight thousand patent improvements on the telephone in order to jack up the cost of a call, is well known. The genius who first developed non-runnable Nylon may not have known it, but his life

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instead of the street and their ears to the amplifying sounds of cyclotron tubes instead of the ground. For some strange reason they are paid very little to make sure that they can't do too much. In some ways the effects of this form of strangulation are pitiful, for a scientist is actually a sort of perpetual motion machine that continually throws off one good idea after another, like sparks. There is no way of stopping the works for good. Millions were spent during the late twenties to find out how. One idea grows out of another. An improved radio tube is invented and five years later makes possible a television set. A wizard in the Middle West cracks an atom with a cosmic mallet and a decade after the event we are tossing B-29s at the Japs with superfuels in their guts that would give hell's heating plant a run for its Fahrenheit. Out of whirling spindles belt lines grow, and before you can say "overproduction," they've created good twenty times the value of all the country's ready cash. To their great sorrow, our economic astrologists don't know the secret of halting the process. The sorcerers spoke the magic words a decade or two back and their apprentices have been running for buckets ever since. In the prower period, the country fell ill of this strange diot, and now, the only remedy the medicine men can think up to cure the impending sickness is another dose of the same poison, without providing room for the hundred-yard dash to the bathroom door. It is a weird thing indeed listening to the panegyrics rising to the heavens from the lips of men who, during the depression, loaded their mouse-traps for any rat who thought up a better one. The classic story of American T and T who have openly confessed to the suppression of over eight thousand patent improvements on the telephone in order to jack up the cost of a call, is well known. The genius who first developed non-runnable Nylon may not have known it, but his life (4)