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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

47.   American Crossroads

     As an added attraction in the car, they had one of the very early X-Ray machines, so Friday afternoon at recess, I dismissed the school and walked to the depot with the older boys and girls. The pupils had a wonderful time with the X-Rays looking at the bones in their hands, and the nails in their shoes. I believe everyone of them learned much from the experience.

     On the following Sunday, after church, the Minister called one of the school directors aside and in a disturbed voice said, "I understand that the teacher dismissed school and walked down to see that California exhibit without your permission. That was bad enough," he continued, "but why did he show the boys and girls that infernal machine they call an X-Ray ? You know it must be the work of the evil spirit because if human eyes were intended to see through boards, Nature would have given them that power." That was less than 50 years ago. Today, doctors everywhere are constantly using this "infernal machine" and many other similar scientific devices in their successful fight against disease, and the X-Ray is an everyday tool in industry even to internally examining slabs of steel a foot or more thick.

Farm     As I look down Main Street here today, I see many automobiles parked where the hitching rails used to be - over there is a Motion Picture Theatre and nearly every home and farm has a telephone and electricity. Large airplanes pass overhead and the smaller ones can land here. A thousand radios bring us the best in music and entertainment as well as news from the fighting fronts. The farmers in the neighborhood are very up-to-date and because of fine highways, are an integral part of the community. In town there are churches, new schools, paved streets - as well as sewers, waterworks, natural gas and all the other things that have followed in the wake of the automobile and electric power.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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