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Show GIANT FLASHLIGHTS ROCK WHOLE CITIES Aerial Photographers Use Powerful Light Bombs. Dayton, Ohio. When the convention conven-tion photographer says "Hold it!" and pulls the chain of his flash pan, he discharges only a pinch or two of flashlight powder. But when Lieut. George W. Goddard, army aviator, takes a flashlight of a ctty he explodes ex-plodes bombs measuring as much as ten feet In length and weighing as much as fifty pounds. The detonation is so great that It is not a few frightened girls who Jump and blink but a whole city that is shaking and hundreds of thousands of eyes that are temporarily blinded. Several night photographs from airplanes have been taken of Dayton and of Rochester, N. Y. Soon all of the nation's greatest cities are to be "snapped" as gigantic bombs are released re-leased over them with their warlike crash and rumble. High Explosives Used. The bombs are innocent looking affairs, af-fairs, resembling bolts of goods in a department store, but under the folds of cloth are separate compartments loaded with special high explosive powders concocted to give a quick brilliant light. Each of the compartments compart-ments is connected to an electric fuse which explodes them all simultaneously. simultane-ously. The bombs are carried under the fuselage of the airship and are dropped by the working of a lever as the plane reaches the designated point. There is first a discernible stream of sparks as the fuse burns and six seconds later comes the flare. So efficiently are the bombs constructed con-structed and so accurately timed, that, although of such large proportions, propor-tions, they are exploded completely in as brief a space of time as one-fifteenth of a second. So complete Is the explosion that there Is no afterglow. after-glow. Too Quick for Human Eye. Never has the minutest bit of the bomb's covering been found afterward. after-ward. The flash is so quick that although al-though persons on the ground see the illumination it causes, they do not actually see the flare itself. It is too quick for the human eye. In Dayton and Rochester photographers photogra-phers also were stationed at various points on the ground, in spires and on tall buildings to take panoramas of the surrounding country by the light of the bursting bomb. Some of these pictures have been exceptionally clear and have approximated daylight photographic pho-tographic work. The photographic plates are usually exposed when the warning trail of sparks is seen and are left exposed until after the flare. The shutters on the cameras carried car-ried by the planes In the test flights are usually four times as fast as those on the average commercial camera. cam-era. Some of these cameras are between be-tween four and five feet long with 36-inch 36-inch lenses, measuring nine inches in diameter. They take photographs measuring nine by twenty-three Inches. The usual height at which these pictures pic-tures are taken is 3,000 feet. |