AMERICAN NEWS

Evening Star, Issue 20056, 22 December 1928, Page 18

AMERICAN NEWS

AIRMAN'S DARING LEAP fFrom Our Own Correspondent.] SAN FRANCISCO, November 28. American airmen carrying last mail to various parts of tho United States undergo many sensational escapades in following their hazardous vocation, during winter time particularly; and Paul F. “Dog” Collins, known as premier “bad weather” pilot of tho U.S. Air Mail Service, leaped 4,000 ft from his disabled aeroplane over the village of Millstone, in Pennsylvania, about 6 o’clock in tho morning, and landed safely by means of a parachute in a small clearing in the midst of the densely-wooded country near Brockvillc. Collins ran into a lino squall that tossed his ship around like a cork in stormy water. A criss-cross wind ripped a lower wing from the plane, and sent it into a nose dive, but by coot thinking Collins managed to save the cargo of mail which he was carrying from Cleveland to New York. Before he jumped from the piano he shut off the motor to avoid an explosion when it landed. The nose of tho ship, which fell a short distance from where the pilot dropped to earth, burrowed its way into the ground, but the aluminium mail bag remained intact. Collins retrieved it from the wreckage and walked to Millstone, about thirty miles from Brockville. A garage man there supplied him with a truck, and he carried the mail to the (lying field, two miles outside the city of Brockville Collins, tho survivor of many a storm and gale over that section of the Alleghany Mountains which the air mail pilots call “Hell Stretch,” started out from Cleveland at 4 a.m. The mails from Chicago was four hours late, due to tho rough head winds that were blowing there. Collins said nothing unusual happened until he reached Clarion, Pennsylvania, the gateway of tho mountainous stretch. These he flew head on into the lino squall. As he saw tho crumpled wing flutter away from his plane he leaped from he cockpit. Tho wind favoured him in picking out a landing place. Ho dropped in a small tract that had only recently cleared of trees. The experience entitles Collins to membership in the noted “ Caterpillar Club,” composed of airmen who have cheated death with their parachutes. It was the first time Collins had been forced to make an emergency use of his “ chute.” “ HONOURING " GENERAL ALLENBY Clothes may not make the man, but they certainly have an appeal to the all-seeing eyes of the news cameras, “movie” or still, in America; and even such a personage as Field-marshal Viscount Allenby, of Megiddo and Felixstowe, G.C.8., G.C.M.G., hero liberator of Palestine, slipped by tho platoon of cameramen at the White House unnoticed on his courtesy call on President Coolidge because he went there in mufti, not in uniform. General Allenby has been much feted in his transcontinental trip over tho United. States, and he was acknowledged to be a big figure in an international sense even among Americans, who see “ big things,” and his Washington visit, of course, set the British Embassy on edge to see that it was all put through in proper form. That remarkably true to type soldier of Britain, Colonel L. H. R. Pope-Hen-nessey, C. 8., D. 5.0., tho Chief Military Attache, took charge. More than that, in honour of tho great occasion, he got out of moth balls the full-dress uniform of his regiment and rank, which rarely sees the light of day. Decked out in all the glory o! a red tunic, splattered with campaign and decoration ribbons, and set off with a plumed cocked hat, after ancient military modes, and with clanking sabre and spurs, the colonel was a sight to see when he fell in as aide to Lord Allouby for tho White House visit. Tho field-marshal himself was in a grey business suit, as was his wont. Half a dozen Embassy motor cars, escorted by spluttering police motor cycles, boro the British contingent to the White House. The actual exchange of greetings took just a minute or two; then General Allenby and his staff popped out to go over to tho State Department. But the camera squad was waiting in between. They swooped down on their British prey, and promptly singled out the gorgeouslyuiformed Colonel Pope-Henncssey as being the only roan in the party who looked like a field marshal, sartorially speaking. Disregarding his utterly bored looks and bewildered protests, they hustled him into position, posed him, and opened fire with clickinig shutters before anybody could intervene to straighten things out. Lord Allenby, in the meanwhile, had slipped through the camera skirmish line unrecognised, and was off across the street to the State Department. LIPTGN IN AMERICA Sir Thomas Lipton, who has been paying another visit to the United States, has revealed to Westerners that ho has lots of hobbies besides tea and yachts. But they are all the same kind—all ladies. That is the reason ho is a bachelor, he said, while in Los Angeles. “I like ’em all,” he said, with his usual twinkle in his eye, “ I couldn’t seem to choose among them, so I didn’t choose at all.” Besides, Sir Thomas had another reason for confining his affections to “ladies'of the sea”—hie yachts. ft was his mother. In a reminiscent mood, the tog, gmlf Irishman, who is known throughout the world for his success as a tea magnate and his sportsmanship as a yachtsman, took an old daguerrotype of his “one love ” . from his dressing table, and told huskily how ho had never found another like the sweet-faced lassie there portrayed in garb of the early ’6o’s. “ It wasn’t only the pancakes she used to fry and the pies she used to bake; it was the sweetness and wisdom of her,” he said. “Never a time did I go-to her in trouble that she didn’t help me.” Vehement in his assertion that a Shamrock V. should enter the next contest for the America Cup, which, he pointed out, has been hold by American yachtsmen for seventy years, Sir Thomas related several anecdotes pertaining to the sailing careers of his previous racing yachts—all Shamrocks. “ There’s one man who doesn’t want me to sail another Shamrock into an American port,” he said. “His name is Belcher, and he lives in a little harbour town on the Atlantic coast. This is the reason for hia aversion to ray Shamrocks, according to a letter he sent me. “ It seems that when Shamrock 11. sailed into port his wife rose to the occasion and' presented him with a baby son; with the advent of Shamrock 111. a few years later a baby daughter was born to the same household, the letter said, and simultaneously with the arrival of Shamrock IV. still some years later a third baby made its appearance.” “That’s enough; don’t come again!” the letter begged, according to Sir Thomas. SYNTHETIC GASOLINE Germany’s new success commercially in making synthetic gasoline from soft coal, and incidentally also making soap from coal, of which the Standard Oil Company has acquired the American rights, was described to tho second international conference on bituminous

coal at the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh. The story was told by the man who is marketing this synthetic gasoline in German filling stations, Dr Carl Krauch, director of the German Dye Trust. Ho was introduced by Walter C. Teagle, president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Dr Krauch said that' coal gasoline may be changed in the making at will into “ the most diverse marketable products, such as kerosene, gas oil, and lubricating oils.” “We aro thus enabled,” he said," to adapt the process to the fluctuations of the market.” If anti-knock gasoline is wanted Gorman chemists can control their method of transforming molecules of coal, so that certain aromatic, basic substances affecting knocks are properly synthesised. The result is to put into gasoline a molecular structure that slightly affects the rapidity of explosion. “ At present,’ said Dr Krauch, “ wo have reached at our Leona plant an annual production of 70,000 tons of gasoline, of which 40,000 tons are obtained from coal. At the end of next year wo hope to be able to raise the production to 250,000 tons. The gasoline produced by ua has found a ready market, for the reason that in all essential properties it equals a good gasoline obtained from crude oil in the ordinary way.” Soap is produced because the dye trust found quantities of paraffin from liquid coal on its hands, with a paraffin market relatively small. Dr Krauch found out how to overcome the diffitios of extracting from paraffin some fatty acids that make soap. One of these steps enabled the chemists to do in a few hours processes which formerly required several days. Dr Krauch said he believes the German synthetic gasoline process is analogous to that used by Nature deep in the earth to transform peat and coal under heat and hydrogen pressure into natural petroleum deposits. Dr Thomas S. Laker, president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who sponsored the conference, forecasts a better and happier economic and social situation for those who live in mining fields, when the industries that rise from liquifying coal are established. ■■ MISSING LINK ” FOUND In 20,000 miles of tangled, unexplored jungle north of Capo Town, South Africa, dwell Stone Age men, who live hand in hand with animals, walk like gorillas, run taster than gazelles—the “missing link” race. in this impenetrated region where the lion is king these “ monkey men ” hunt with arrows, live in holes, worship a grasshopper for a god, and know not that they may be the answer to the riddle of the universe. Dr C. E. Cadle, of the Cameron-Cadlo expedition of the National Museum of National History of Denver, told of this missing race in an interview given in New York. Dr Cadle not only has seen them, lived with them, and charted them, but he returned to New York on the liner Olympic with a photographic record, including moving pictures, of these seed men of the human race. “The lowest form of this tribe are pigmies, who stand in their nakedness up to your armpit,” said Dr Cadle. “ They represent the only true democracy in the world—where every man is his own boss. They take as many wives as they can support. As food is precarious. more than two or three wives is a luxury. “Families are small, for the women kill their babies if there are too many. “There is no law except the poisoned arrow. They are a slight, wiry race, like all hunting people. They axe vicious, unsocial, and child-like. They are as primitive as their ancestors of a million years ago. Their only sign' of civilisation is their folk loro, which is in terms of animals, plants, and the stars. “ When a youth desires a wife he will pursue a gazelle for twelve hours or so to show his prowess. Then he will drive the exhausted animal into the presence of bis intended. “He does not ask—ho takes his bride. They go to live before a windbreaker, a crude collection of brambles. “ Wo believed that this race will be one of the important links in the proof of man’s evolution from animals. I believe that within twenty years science will have an indisputable chain of evidence to support the evolutionary theory, which practically all scientific men firmly believe in.” BABY WITH TAIL The horror-stricken seventeen-year-old mother of a baby bom with a tail fled from her twenty-one-year-old husband at Knoxville, Tennessee. She said ho-wished the baby to grow to womanhood and bo exhibited as a human freak. When born late in October in a Knoxville hospital the baby had a tail 7in long. In three weeks the tail had grown half an inch. Dr Horace Brown, surgeon at Knoxville, said he expected to operate on the unfortunate infant, and promised to send the tail to Dr Adolph Schultz, professor of physical anthropology in Johns Hopkins, who is associated with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Dr Schultz had previously desired to got possession of the tail for study, as only twenty-five tail persons are known to medical science. When the baby was born the father showed unusual interest. The mother, however, was not made aware of the tail for several days. After its presence became known to her, the father, she assorts, boasted that the baby would make a prize exhibit for shows. When the baby was Jess than a month old the mother clasped the baby in her arms and hurried to her mother, more than a mile away. “ This is ray baby,” she declared, tears streaming down her face. “I am going to have this horrible tail removed. I hope I never see my husband again.” X-ray pictures of the tail showed that it has no bones, and is not directly connected with the spinal _ column. Physicians thought the operation would not bo serious—that is, for the infant. RADIO KILLS INVENTOR Dr Sabin Von Sochocky died in East Orange, New Jersey, a victim of the luminous paint which he had invented for the painting of watch dials in the plant of the United States Radium Corporation, formerly located in Orange. Deaths of half a dozen women who were employed in the plant to paint watch dials have been attributed to the assimilation of radio-active substances. Aplastic anosmia was given as the cause of the inventor’s death. He had been ill for several months, and eleven blood transfusions had been resorted to in an effort to save his life. Last May the United States Radium Corporation allowed five women alleged to be suffering from the same poisoning the £um of 10,000dol each, annuities of 600dol each, and the cost of legal expenses and medical treatment. The allowances were made in settlement of suits for 1, 250,000dpi. Physicians now said that deposits of radio-active matter in the bones of the victim had stilled fie action of the blood supply agencies of the body, and caused the death of Dr Sochocky, who was technical director of the United States Radium Corporation. Ho had been_ associated for many years with institutions using radium in the treatment of disease. He was forty-five years old, and a native of Austria. He came to the United States twelve years ago, and invented his formula for luminous paint in 1920.