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Originally called Natural Vision, it enjoyed a huge if short-lived vogue – sixty-nine Natural Vision movies were made in 1953 alone – and people flocked in their millions to features like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Charge at Feather River for the dubious thrill ofhaving barge poles thrust at them and, in one particularly memorable scene, having a character appear to spit in their faces. So promising did the process seem at first that many quite respectable films, notably Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, were filmed in 3-D, though the fad was so short-lived that most, including Dial M, were released in the normal flat form.
    Before long it was all but impossible to go to a movie that didn’t involve some impressive-sounding new technical process. One after another came Vistarama, Superscope, Naturama, even AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision, in which, as you might surmise, the theatre was pumped full of appropriate odours at regular intervals. The problem was that the odours tended to linger and mingle in a perplexing manner, and the members of the audience situated nearest the smell dispensers weren’t particularly gratified to find themselves periodically refreshed with a moist outpouring of assorted scents.
    A year after Cinerama made its debut, Twentieth Century-Fox came up with a slightly more sophisticated, and certainly less gimmicky, process called CinemaScope, which required just a single camera with a special anamorphic lens. The first CinemaScope picture was The Robe. CinemaScope screens were roughly double the width of a normal movie screen and were slightly curved to give some illusion of depth. 17 By 1955, just two years after its introduction, more than 20,000 cinemas throughout the world had installed the CinemaScope system. 18 Hollywood would live to fight another day.

    Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series

19
The Road from Kitty Hawk
    The story is a familiar one. On a cold day in December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, assisted by five locals, lugged a flimsy-looking aircraft on to the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As Wilbur steadied the wing, Orville prostrated himself at the controls and set the plane rolling along a wooden track. A few moments later, the plane rose hesitantly, climbed to about 15 feet and puttered along the beach for 120 feet before setting down on a dune. The flight lasted just twelve seconds and covered less ground than the wing-span of a modern jumbo jet, but the airplane age had begun.
    Everyone knows that this was one of the great events of modern technology, but there is still a feeling, I think, that the Wrights were essentially a pair of inspired tinkerers who knocked together a simple contraption in their bike shop and were lucky enough to get it airborne. We have all seen film of early aircraft tumbling off the end of piers or being catapulted into haystacks. Clearly the airplane was an invention waiting to happen. The Wrights were just lucky enough to get there first.
    In fact, their achievement was much, much greater than that. To master powered flight, it was necessary to engineer a series of fundamental breakthroughs in the design of wings, engines, propellers and control mechanisms. Every piece ofthe Wrights’ plane was revolutionary, and every piece of it they designed and built themselves.
    In just three years of feverish work, these two retiring bachelors from Dayton, Ohio, sons of a bishop of the United Brethren Church, had made themselves the world’s leading authorities on aerodynamics. Their home-built wind tunnel was years ahead of anything existing elsewhere. When they discovered that there was no formal theory of propeller dynamics, no formulae with which to make comparative studies of different propeller types, they devised their own. Because it is all so obvious to us now, we forget just how revolutionary their concept was. No one else was even within years of touching them in their mastery of the aerodynamic properties of