Moving Still Pictures

GOODS & SERVICES

At the American Machine & Foundry annual meeting in Manhattan last week, stockholders strolling by a color cutaway diagram of the company's complex new automatic bread-baking machine were startled to see parts of the still picture seem to move. Before their surprised eyes the machine showed how it mixes bread dough, pops it into an oven, and shoots out golden-brown loaves. Shareholders at the giant American Telephone & Telegraph annual meeting in Chicago (see State of Business) were treated to another picture in which Echo satellites seemed to move across the sky bouncing radio waves back to earth in a display that explained the company's proposed transatlantic satellite phone service.

These were among the first widespread showings of a new industrial training system that animates still pictures by a new use of polarized light. Industry and government are already using the system for everything from showing how the new Bulova electronic watch operates to training workers to launch a Titan missile from an underground base. F. P. Copper, of General Electric's light military electronics division, says of the animating process: "It's terrific."

Technamation. The system was developed by Technical Animations, Inc. of Long Island, whose sales have risen in five years from $7,000 to $600,000 this year. The company went into the black this year, but is spending its small profits in research. The development--called Technamation--is a method of applying transparent plastics to still pictures so that they appear to move when ordinary light, projected through a revolving disc of polarized plastic, is thrown on them. Motion can be controlled so accurately that a Technamated cutaway drawing of a jet engine shows the fuel flowing in and burning, the turbines and gears turning, and gases rushing out the rear, all in the exact timing of a real engine.

A.M.F. bought a Technamated training program to teach employees the workings of the underground silos that the company is building for the Titan. Explains Technical Animation's President Stanley L. Schwartz, 41: "They had to show why a valve is the right valve before the guy actually got to operate it." On three separate screens, trainees see a cross section of the whole silo, a breakdown of each of its operating segments, and what they do in action.

Low Cost. The theory behind Technamation is an old one, but Schwartz and Co-Founder Jack Ballance (who died a month after the company started) brought it to a commercial reality while they were civilians employed by the Navy to develop training programs, and later patented it. One big selling feature of Technamation is its relatively low cost, e.g., the Air Force spent only $1,200 to build a Technamated system for missile training v. $7,500 for a comparable mechanical one.

Technamation's widest application will probably be in the classroom. Schwartz is developing a course for California schools in which basic electricity will be taught through animated slides. He is also developing a method to print Technamated drawings in textbooks so students can see, for example, how the blood actually moves through the body.

One of Cape Canaveral's most expensive problems has been to keep the fierce heat of flaming rocket engines from destroying the expensive launching equipment on the pad. After each launch, it took several days and cost $150,000 in materials and labor to rebuild for the next shoot. Last week missilemen said they have found the answer: a flame-resisting paint for the launching pad made by Dyna-Therm Chemical Corp., Culver City, Calif. One coat of the $98-per-gal. paint lasts through the 6,000DEG F. heat of four firings, costs $15,000 an application. Convair has ordered all its missile parts subject to heat so painted, estimates that this will save $2,000,000 this year. Dyna-Therm has also designed a foam plastic insulator selling at $9 per Ib. to protect the mechanism of the mammoth Saturn rocket from the heat of its eight engines. It will be tested on steel flame deflectors on the pad under the next Atlas rocket. If it works, it will eliminate the costly water system that pours out thousands of gallons to cool the deflectors during a shoot. As production picks up, the company hopes to cut in half the price of its foam plastic so that it will be cheap enough for a wide range of civilian uses.

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