"DEAR TEACHER" Dean Brown My Grandfather was the orginal pipemaker to Queen Elizabeth. He manu¬factured seeds to put in beet jelly to induce it to be strawberry jam. The Pure Food Laws sank him. But I have inherited his talent. I am an invent¬or, scientist, mathematician, geographer, historier, and a genii, and that is why I am writing to you. And I'll be eighteen on the thirty-first of next June. I am offering you and your friends an opportunity to make at least tw¬elve per cent on your investments. When you read this letter you will over¬subscribe many times the stock I am offering in the "Brown Time Flies Back¬ward Turner Company Inc." Do you remember Kiplings "Backward, turn backward, Oh time, in your fli¬ght"? That's the idea exactly. I am going to turn time backwards. First: A bullet is expelled from a gun at a speed of a thousand miles a minute. Now if before I fired that gun I fired that gun out of another gun at a speed of a thousand miles a minute, when the gun I was first speak¬ing of got fired. The bullet would go two thousand miles a minute. Do I make myself clear? And if before I fired the second, I fired it from a third gun, when the first gun was fired last, the bullet would be going three thousand a minute. If I had twenty-five guns one inside the other and fired off the big papa gun and then each gun went off in its turn, wouldnt the bullet travel twenty-five thousand miles a minute, or wouldn't if? Thats perfectly simple, isn't it? Second; If I made that ball as big arid strong as the ball that Beebe went up into to study the higher atmosphere. I could get inside and travel all the way around the earths two-thousand mile circumfe ance in half a min¬ute . I know what you are go ng to say but you are wrong. I would not hit the moon because the bullet would not travel in a straight line! A bullet begins to drop the instant it leaves the gun, and by some simple calculat¬ions I can figure out the amount of explosives to use so that the natural dropping of the bullet will coincide it with the curvature of the earth, and the ball with me inside will come right around to where we started. But Third: I don't want it to stop there. I must arrange for the Vice President (you are offered the honor) to see that Big Papa Gun is gotten out of the way before I come around and hit it in the breech. How about all the other children of the guns chasing after me at speeds betw¬een a twousand and twenty-four thousand miles per? Wouldn't I catch up with all of them and hit them all in the breeches? (I mean the plural of breech. That shows how little you know about Geology. As each gun went off it would kick back and stop. If it didn't, the gun that it shot out would not go a thousand miles faster. So each gun would drop, big end first, and stick up like a power plant chimney. There'd be a line of them a thousand miles apart- right around the earth, so I could calculate my speed by count¬ing them. But Fourth: Look at any map or globe of the Pacific Ocean. You'll see a line at 180 Longitude marked "International Date Line. On the side to¬ward North and South America it says "Sunday." That means when you cross that line going west, say at 10 o'clock Monday morning, the instant you got over it would be 10 o'clock Sunday corning Thats right, isn't it? Now if I were inside my ball traveling west and got over to Sunday at 10 A.M., and then shot around the earth in one minute I'd cross that cate line again, and it would be "One Minute Past Ten Saturday Morning!" Just get the beg ideal I'd cross that once every minute and go backwards a day.