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Movie Timing Device Used at the 
National Air Races

MARKING the entry of science further into the sports world, the photo-timer, used to time and record all National Air Race closed events, is accurate to one-hundredth of a second, as compared to the stop watches which time in fifths of seconds.

The idea of the timer was conceived in Southern California by Olympic-minded engineers of Electrical Research Products, Inc., a Bell system subsidiary. They sent their plans to the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York for development. The result was a perfected machine, which has caused no small amount of discussion in the sports world, following its successful use at Cornell, Berkeley, at the American Olympic team tryouts at Palo Alto, the World Olympic Games at Los Angeles and the Cleveland Air Races at Cleveland. 

Known by some sports writers as the "two-eyed camera," the device employs an electrically controlled fork, which starts the electric clock, and prisms which deflect that light from the clock face to the movie film. 

The ordinary motion-picture camera takes from twelve to sixteen "frames" or pictures a second. Newspaper "still" pictures of races and athletic events are made with exposures that are supposed to be 0.0006 second, but that actually lie between 0.002 and 0.005. Last week about 100 engineers and scientists gathered in New York to see motion-pictures which had been taken at the rate of 2,000 a second, or about 125 times the usual speed. 

With this apparatus it was easy to show that the hand shrinks from a burning cigarette 26/100 second after the flesh has been touched, that it takes 11/100 second for the eye to complete a wink after a brilliant light is flashed in front of it, that 26/100 second elapses before a lighted cigarette burns a hole in an inflated rubber balloon. For special research work the camera can take 3,200 frames a second. By a slight modification of construction it is possible to go as high as 6,300 frames. What this means becomes clearer when it is considered that 4,000 pictures a second are possible only if the film moves with a speed of 200 miles an hour. 

The advance, marked by the demonstration made in New York last week, becomes obvious in the light of these past efforts. At last high-speed pictures can be taken out-of-doors in normal light and indoors with the aid of a 500-watt tungsten projection lamp and a simple lens system. Moreover, a time-record is made on the film so that split seconds can be read off like inches on a ruler. Unlike any of the heavy apparatus of the past, the camera can be swung on a standard tripod in any direction. This means that as a bomb falls from an airplane it can be followed down to the ground right to the moment of explosion. 

Through the courtesy of Electrical Research Products, Incorporated, this new Western Electric device will photograph and accurately time each and every race presented at this meet to the split-fraction of a second.  

3 Kilometer Speed Record
Major James Doolittle
Average Speed (Four Consecutive Trials)294.90 Mi. per Hr.
Start 30: 14.10
Finish 30: 37.30
Time 23.20 sec. 
Speed 289.32 MPH
RACE 3

Start 33: 25.78
Finish 33: 48.09
Time 22.31 sec.
Speed 300.86 MPH
RACE 4

Start 35: 42.10
Finish 36: 05.35
Time 23.25
Speed 288.70 MPH
RACE 5

Start 39: 58.42
Finish 40: 20.74
Time 22.32 sec.
Speed 300.73 MPH

Dine... and Dance 
at the Airport
AVIATOR'S PATIO
Open-Air Restaurant on the Plaza, to the right of the Administration Building. Follow the celebrities to the social rendezvous of the Airport.

1933- NATIONAL AIR RACES PAGE 35