SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



of progress. The changes will be as great as those that 

 followed the first use of metals. It is a really new idea, 

 much more revolutionary than communism, or disarma- 

 ment, or relativity. It is a fundamentally different con- 

 ception of value, and I don't dare dream of what it will 

 mean to transportation, to our ways of living, to our 

 whole economic system; what its effects will be upon 

 our political, legal, and social structures." 



This change in our thinking is rapidly coming to pass. 

 The airplane has hurried it. Already we have stream- 

 lined many old conceptions. Clothing, tools, automobiles 

 have all acquired the positive virtue of levity that Dr. 

 Dow foresaw. The prime specifications for a radically 

 new type of lawnmower planned for tomorrow are that 

 it shall "cost not more than ten dollars and weigh less 

 than ten pounds." Postwar models of oil-well derricks 

 and harvesting machines, typewriters and vacuum 

 cleaners, picnic hampers and eyeglass cases, and of 

 scores of other products, all feature this new attraction 

 of light weight. This recently approved virtue is at 

 once the most insistent reason for and a most pleasing 

 result of our constantly increasing use of plastics, ply- 

 woods, and the featherweight metals, aluminum and 

 magnesium. 



The South is ready with all these buoyant materials 

 for fabricating into goods to conform to our weight- 

 saving ideas. One of the astounding miracles of the war 

 was that what threatened in 1941 to be a critical short- 



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