ARMED FORCES: Dick Tracy in the Army

In his tireless comic-strip crusade against criminals with brutal habits and oddly shaped heads, Detective Dick Tracy has had an invaluable mechanical ally: “The two-way wrist radio.” Its secret communicating power, unknown to the bad men, constantly helps bail Tracy and his friends out of trouble. In the current installment, for instance, it may prove very useful to a wealthy gentleman named Uncle Kincaid Plenty. Locked up in a TNT plastic vest with a time-bomb mechanism, Uncle Kincaid is being taken for a ride by a knife-wielding criminal named 3-D Magee. But the sounds coming over Kincaid’s open wrist radio, hidden under his sleeve, have just given Tracy and the boys at headquarters a valuable clue to Kincaid’s whereabouts.

Last week life imitated art again. The U.S. Army Signal Corps announced that it has developed a wrist radio with a receiving range of 40 miles. A wire (hidden under the wearer’s sleeve) connects the radio with an amplifier that looks like a hearing aid. The radio parts are minuscule —the mercury battery is not much larger than the point of a pencil, and the whole mechanism weighs 2 ⅝oz. Name of the Army’s wrist radio: the Dick Tracy.