The time may come when people who operate other kinds of machines will find television helpful in many ways. Meantime, scientists who know how television works also know how to make the most wonderful machines of all. Instead of saving muscle-power, these machines save brain-power. They solve very complicated mathematical problems at lightning speed. In fact, they are called “thinking machines.” They add, subtract, multiply, divide and do figuring that many college professors can’t even do. Partly for fun, and partly to discover new things, the thinking-machine experts have also invented mechanical animals. They’ve made turtles that can walk all around a room without bumping into anything. They’ve made a little wire-whiskered mechanical mouse that can actually sniff about until it finds something it is supposed to find--just the way a real mouse sniffs out a piece of cheese. The machine-mouse even “remembers” where it went, and it runs straight to its cheese the next time. The machines you’ve read about in this book are mostly outdoor machines, operated by one man or a small crew of men. These are only a few of the marvellous inventions that you can find at work every day. Of course, there are hundreds and thousands of others in factories, making cloth, shaping automobile parts, printing books, doing the important work the world needs done. But, no matter how marvellous and complicated they are, they will never be as wonderful as the men who have invented them and built them and used them. When we talk about machines, we’re really talking about people. FUNNY NAMES Some machines resemble animals in the way they look or the things they do, and so they have animal names. Besides the caterpillar with its crawler treads and the crane with its long neck, here are some others: [Illustration] ALLIGATOR GRAB--a tool used to pick up things that get dropped into oil well holes. CAMEL-BACK CRANE--this one has a hump in its boom. FISHTAIL BIT--a drilling tool which is shaped like a fish’s tail. KANGAROO PLOW--a plow equipped with strong springs so it can hop over rocks or tree stumps, instead of getting caught on them. SHEEP’S FOOT TAMPER--a heavy road roller with spikes that pack earth down, the way a flock of sheep does. WORM LOADER--a long screw that twists round and round to push its load along. INDEX airplane duster, 26 asphalt spreader, 65 bailer, 34 baler, automatic, 26-27 beet digger, 42 bit, 69 blower, 28 boom, 9, 49, 51, 55, 74, 85 “box seat,” 22 bucker, 53 bulldozer, 45, 55, 57, 61, 67, 74, 77 bull wheel, 73, 74 cable rig, 72 catcher, 53 caterpillar, 45, 46, 60, 67, 68, 74, 77, 85 cats, 68 cement mixer, 65 chicken picker, 24-25 Chinese drillers, 73-74 chisel plow, 32 clamshell, 49, 84 coal digger, 81 coal loaders, 81 coal mining, 9, 78-83 corn cutter, 25 corn picking machine, 21 corn planter, 19 cotton picker, 37-38 cotton planter, 37 crane, 10, 49-52, 54, 85 crawler tractor, 45