Science: Eye

The biggest eye in the world winked open and shut last week, a finished article. It was a long-range camera for the Army air service, with a nine-inch lens (the largest ever ground for a camera) to photograph the earth from an altitude of seven miles or so. Experts of the Eastman Kodak Company (Rochester, N. Y.) had fashioned it, providing also a film specially sensitized to record light at the infra-red (long wave, dull light) end of the spectrum, a film taking exposures nine inches square, 100 exposures to a roll. Lieut. George W. Goddard will soon have the camera mounted in the rear cockpit of his plane, at the flying post in Dayton, Ohio, with a heating apparatus around it to protect it from the 80°-below zero weather of 35,000 feet aloft. Then he will ascend, take panoramic views showing 318 miles of earth at once, with little blotches for great cities, tiny veins for huge rivers.