Super

Halted by the New York State Attorney General's office last week was sale of stock in Super-Utilities, Inc., a concern organized to promote the inventions of one Arthur C. Lingelbach. His inventions included an airplane capable of 1,000 m.p.h. and a therapeutic "Super-U-Wave" machine with "63,000,000 evolutions a second." Courtly, white-haired Inventor Lingelbach, whom the Attorney General found to have had a similar career in the securities business in other States, claimed past associations with Edison, Burbank, Henry Ford. His engineering achievements, he said, included the Packard straight-eight motor, the A.E.F.'s front line trenches, the DeForest radio tube, the machine for sewing seams in the back of stockings. Last week his company, in which some 8.000 shares of stock had been sold at $1 to $15 per share, had $3.68 in the bank.

Super-Utilities had been aided in its stock-selling campaign by a salesman whose name, according to a complaint filed by one of the suckers, was "the Great Suda, son of solitude of the Lost Isle of Atlantis." The earthly broker through whom the Great Suda's rumbling voice had been heard to talk up Super-Utilities was a plump, incisive Swede named Alma Nelson. Matter-of-fact was Medium Nelson when interviewed last week by the New York Herald Tribune's Hickman Powell. Seating him in her Super-U-Wave machine, turning on the current and observing that "our very breath was God," she explained that she was not really a medium at all, that she went in for teaching mystical philosophies when Depression starved her out of a waitress' job. Because she believed in Inventor Lingelbach, she said, she had talked him up among her seance customers. As for the complaint about the Great Suda, that was simply the product of a woman client's vivid imagination.

"If she saw Suda hovering around my head, I can't help it," said Miss Nelson. "I don't talk in a bass voice, so far as I know."

Meanwhile the Attorney General's office was petitioned by hundreds of Super-Utilities investors, who asked not for prosecution but that the case be dropped. Professing absolute faith in Medium Nelson and Inventor Lingelbach, they swore that they had bought shares "of our own free will and judgment without any undue or supernatural influence what-soever."

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