I ENJOYED THE ARTICLE “Pinball,” by Linda Barth, in your Spring 2004 issue. It mentioned that in 1942 “a delighted [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia posed for photographs while smashing the machines with sledgehammers and watching their remains get dumped into the East River.” Fortunately, not all the remains ended up in the river. Some of the smashed machines were given to New York’s science high schools for parts. I was a student at Stuyvesant High School at the time, and we welcomed the donation. Needless to say, we managed to rebuild at least one machine, albeit without its colorful glass scoring displays. I took home a stepping (score-counting) relay that was left over and made a telephone exchange in my bedroom that tied together six friends who lived on my block in Woodside.

Monroe Postman
LOS ALTOS, CALIF.

La Guardia Confounded

I WITNESSED A FASCINAT ing demonstration of pinball play in a South Carolina courtroom about 25 years ago. I was appearing as an expert witness in a case involving several electronic game machines, including draw poker and pinball ones. The machines had been seized as gambling devices by a zealous sheriff. Under the law at the time, a game was not a gambling game if skill predominated and it had no payout mechanism. The machines’ owners, who naturally wanted them back, asked the court for relief. For pinball, they brought in a “guncher” to play the game for the judge. The guncher, who had considerable upper body strength, played with the heels of his palms on the corners and his fingers locked into the frame of the glass. As the ball moved, he gunched the table every which way and made the ball do his bidding. He never tilted the machine, and the judge ruled soon after that pinball was not a game of chance.

William J. Eccles
PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL AND
COMPUTER ENGINEERING
ROSE-HULMAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
TERRE HAUTE, IND.

Blood Simple

YOUR GOOD ARTICLE ON blood transfusions (“Blood on Demand,” by Roxanne Nelson, Spring 2004) started a memory train for me that goes back to 1941.1 was then part of a “walking blood bank” on the campus of Emory University. Blood was simply drawn into a glass bottle and immediately taken upstairs and administered to a patient, who might still be in surgery. We were paid the princely sum of $25 a transfusion at a time when jobs on campus paid 50 cents an hour. If we were willing to give a charity transfusion, we went to the head of the list. They made us wait a minimum of six weeks between transfusions.

While I was in medical school, in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1950, I saw a demonstration, on a real patient, of the process of direct transfusion, which they still occasionally used when they felt they needed to conserve the blood’s coagulability. The Swiss doctors had developed a delivery system that measured the amount of blood being transferred. The rubber tube passed through a cylinder while a rotor was turned, squeezing the tube and pushing one cc per turn, so 500 turns meant 500 cc.

Louis S. Moore, M.D.
NAPLES, FLA.

Oh, Brothers

I ENJOYED READING “GAS Stations in the Sky,” the article about in-flight refueling by Mike May in the Spring 2004 issue, but it didn’t mention that in 1930 the Hunter brothers, of Sparta, Illinois, broke the world aircraft endurance record by flying for more than 553 hours nonstop above Sky Harbor Airport in Northbrook. John and Kenneth Hunter flew the recordbreaking plane, City of Chicago , and it was refueled by Big Ben , flown by Albert and Walter Hunter. Both planes were Stinson SM-1F’s. The record-setting flight ended when the engine developed an oil leak.

Robert H. Hayes
SPARTA, ILL.

Oh, Brothers

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED to know that the record for the longest U.S. flight in a single-engine aircraft was set in 1949. Woody Jongeward and Bob Woodhouse took off at 7:15 P.M. on August 24, 1949, in an Aeronca Sedan AC-15 named City of Yuma and didn’t land until October 10. That was almost 47 days. The pilots received fuel and supplies not from another plane but from a Buick convertible, which drove along the Yuma airport’s runway.

Elias J. Vujovich
SOUTHlNGTON, OHIO

A Mighty Wind

STEPHEN BUDIANSKY DID AN outstanding job in his piece about the Skinner organ in Yale’s Woolsey Hall (“Air Power,” Spring 2004). It has been my observation over the years that most articles about pipe organs are cluttered with errors of fact and are heavy on breathless, exaggerated attempts to describe. Not so with Mr. Budiansky, and the organ he chose to write about stands apart as the stunning example of a lost period in musical-instrument design and construction.

Ernest Skinner was a remarkable man. While very strong fads were influencing almost every American organ builder during his career, he was steadfast and immovable, true to his New England Yankee heritage. He had a long life, dying at 94 in November 1960, and he spent most of it practicing his skill as an organ builder. But one of his lifelong failings was that he was not much of a businessman, and when it came to the balance sheet and profitand-loss statement, he was seldom connected.

In 1919 Arthur Hudson Marks, a millionaire chemist from Ohio’s tire industry, bought control of Skinner’s business, and he steered the company through the Roaring Twenties with profitable results. To save the business in the devastating thirties, Marks went after the second patrician American organ firm, the Aeolian Company, the leading supplier of home organs for the rich and powerful. He formed Aeolian-Skinner in 1931, but by then he and Skinner weren’t getting along, and Skinner had been ushered out of the firm completely by 1936. With his son, Skinner formed a competing business, the result of which was the first portions of the great organ in the Washington, D.C., Episcopal Cathedral in 1937. In the following years, meanwhile, it was Aeolian-Skinner more than any other company that ran roughshod over countless Skinner organs, revising them along organ reformmovement lines. That the Yale Skinner survived unscathed is truly a miracle.

Paul Sahlin
BURLINGAME, CALlF.

Propeller Perplexity

“THE WRIGHT BROTHERS: How They Flew,” by Richard P. Hallion (Fall 2003), is the best and most complete description of the Flyer ’s story that I’ve yet read. However, the pitch of the propeller blades is described as varying “from eight and a half degrees at the tip to four degrees near the root.” Yet the accompanying photos, as well as established propeller design, would suggest that the root pitch would be close to 90 degrees if the tip pitch were 8½ degrees. You ran a letter to the editor about this in the Winter 2004 issue to which you replied that a change was made to the Wrights’ propeller design between 1903 and 1905, but the accompanying photo still showed the hub angle of the 1903 prop to be very high. Can you explain this?

The editors reply: We erred on the letters page. In fact, the blade angle of the 1903 propellers—the geometrical pitch of their blades, which the brothers shaped with woodworking tools—indeed diminished from hub to tip. It was 38.5 degrees two feet from the hub, 29.3 degrees at three feet, and 26 degrees at four feet. However, with the propellers rotating under power as part of an airplane in flight, what counted was the angle of attack. That was the angle between a blade and the local airflow, the flow having effective speed produced by the airspeed of the aircraft and by the propeller’s rotation. That angle increased from the hub outward, as the article stated.

S. T. Griebling
AKRON, OHIO