A big (but fun) waste of time

 I was listening to some episodes of Terry and the Pirates on Yesterday USA's re-stream of Max Schmid's "Golden Age of Radio".  This 1941 kids show was out of Chicago and sponsored by Libby's canned Tomato and Pineapple juices.

Libby's was trying to get kids to drink Tomato and Pineapple juice in 1941

  One way for Libby to gauge interest in the show and also sell some juice was to offer premiums.  The "Terryscope", a periscope was offered:

half of a Terryscope

the other half of the Terryscope

The idea was to attach a mirror to each half of the Terryscope, then fold it up and fit the two halves together, trombone style.  The kid could use it as a periscope to look around something.  Or by turning one of the halves 180 degrees the kid could use it to see behind them.

 I found those pictures on a web page for Hake's auctions:

auction for a Terryscope

Anyway, the radio ad mentions that there are real Chinese characters on the Terryscope  so I tried my go-to picture translation site:

https://translate.yandex.com/ocr?  

I zoomed in on these two characters first:

unfortunately low resolution

The site translated that to:

still not sure what that means

Then I tried plugging fengmu into Bing to translate:

getting closer

But this doesn't seem right, mainly because the first of the two characters shown below fengmu doesn't match the original, the second character, mu, seems right:

mu = wood

 

But the first character (looks like a squared off Q with a lamda inside) is totally different.  I tried just the first character in Yandex and got this:

nope, the new way is no-way today

Finally I tried looking at learnchineseez.com (nice site) and found this:

this looks pretty close to the original

I guess the translation is wooden prison ?  

I decided to save the other characters for another day or maybe I'll run into someone who can read Chinese ?

Best Regards,

Chuck, WB9KZY

http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm