It was a simpler time in 1955

I recently rescued about a dozen issues of mid '50's era Scientific American from the 'free table' outside a local used book store. I'll be posting stuff from them from time to time until I get sick of doing so. Here's a sampling from the July 1955 issue (and feel free to click on each picture to enlarge them so you can take in the full glory of the scans):

The gist of the cover story on coal was that we as a nation were under utilizing it. The article advocated for more mining and more research into what we could be doing with coal. In retrospect it's almost as if the coal industry wrote that article, and for all we know, they did. I love the cover illustration though.

The above ad is one of the creepier of the missile related ads that run throughout these issues. America was preoccupied with the Cold War and the defense industry wanted to make sure that everybody knew they were working hard to keep the godless Commies in their place.

We also wanted our allies to know how much they should be looking up to us.

Series of tubes.

Laura Palmer's dad, the early years.