Menzel Recording All His Lectures

Most lectures never get beyond the cars of their audiences; some never even get that far. But the lectures being given this term in Astronomy 1a by Donald H. Menzel, professor of Astrophysics, are being captured for posterity by a tape recorder that whirrs along all the time that Menzel is speaking.

The astronomer is not quite sure yet what he will do with the recordings once he has them transferred to permanent plastic records. He is considering using them sometime as the basis of a new elementary textbook on astronomy.

Menzel got the idea for recording his lectures from the dictaphone which he uses for regular office work and which he used in writing books. He has already written one elementary astronomy textbook, called "Stars and Planets."

His latest book was "Our Sun," which appeared last year. Originally it was scheduled for publication before the war as one of the Harvard Series on Astronomy, but work on the sun was "classified" during the war, so the book was delayed.