Untitled

Gisborne Times, Volume VII, Issue 316, 17 January 1902, Page 4

An Indiana scientist .having announced that he can compress summer heat into blocks for winter use, the New York World says : —“ No more chilly and profane 4 a.m. fire-building, no more frozen plumbing when the furnace goes out, no more ash barrels for December winds to play with, no more soft-coal smoke for health inspectors not to see. With a pipe, a book and a lump of canned sunshine one need not dream of Arcady ; he’ll be right in it. This rosy picture fancy paints ; in fact, there will be drawbacks. Trusts will be formed. Grasping mayors and air-shin landing commissioners will grant monopolies to amalgamated sunshine companies and win the denunciations of a blue-nosed and shivering populace. A strike in the sunshine cannery, after all stoves had been melted into automobiles, might work untold woe. But we’ll take the canned summer for better or worse—if the Indiana genius can really deliver the goods !” The fear of germs has become so popular that an English physician is led to say : “If we listened to all these scares, there would he nothing left to do but get into a bath of carbolic acid and stay there until starvation freed us from the dangers of life.”

The use of the magnet in lifting and handling masses of metal is said to average economy in time and cost of handling of between fifty and seventylive per cent. The magnets used in some of our larger American works have a lifting capacity of five tons. The Academy of Medicine in Paris is interested in a method of rhythmical traction, discovered by Dr Laborde. By applying his motor to the tongue Dr Laborde has succeeded in bringing back life in cases of drowning and suffocation where other means of relief had failed. A Dresden inventor has found a method to use compressed air in glass blowing. By this means it is possible to blow vessels as large as hath tubs and kettles—which were out of the range of possibility in the days when glass blowers depended altogether upon their lungs. 7’he people of French Indo-China are physically so weak that scientists have been looking for the cause in the various conditions of climate, diet, etc. The conclusion is that the absence of phosphates in the rice diet is responsible for the physical weakness, so the French Governor-General has ordered a cargo of phosphate to be introduced into the Indo-Chinese rice fields,