HUMAN NEEDS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4889, 12 October 1925, Page 4

HUMAN NEEDS.

INVENTIONS TO COME. A method of main.taing traffic and laying cables without constantly digging up the roadis is badly needed if only it were cheap. A means of providing a silent roadway which has good wearing qualities is almost a national necessity. The way to dispense fogs might be found if sufficient attention was given to. the realm of statistics and atmospheric electricity, writes Professor A. M. Low in the “Daily Express.” The Englishman's home may be his castle, but it is deicdedly cold in the winter I We burn coal which we pick in small pieces under the ground instead of absorbing its energy by converting it info oil and pumping it into a main generating station for distribution electrically over the country. We are not even content with the fact that England’s past greatness w.as based on coal, for we fritter it away on our. dwellings and allow most of the heat to go up the chimney, while our backs grow cold with draughts from the badly-fitting windows. There is a tremendous need for a simple heating system which could be fitted easily in any house, and which would warm, cook, and ventilate.

We have yet to find how a loud speaker can be both loud and truly accurate. What loud speaker or gramophone, with its wonderful range of music at pur choice, can really produce a song so that the living person might be at our elbow ? Where is the truly stereoscopic kinematograph and the colour photography-gwnethod which gives us in a hand camera a picture in its natural state of true colour ? How madly every office needs some means by which speech can be conveyed to paper without the intermediary of a typist, a box bf chocolates, and a typewriter! The pocket dictaphone has yet to be produced which would enable us to attend to our correspondence in the train instead of wasting half our time in getting from place to place. Television is badly needed in a more accurate form than exists to-day. New amusements and new games are required at a time of mental stress bn the curve of progress. Simple foods which could be taken during busy moments without inconvenience are necessary, while medical methods, let us hope, will not require another century before shortsightedness or a chill can be cured permanently and directly by simple means.

The inefficiency of artificial light is a scientific scandal, for our best lights seldom use more than two and a half: per cent, of the energy we. buy for them. The' remainder of the money that fills' other peoples’ pockets is mostly wasted as heat. Yet artificial light Sis one of the dividing discoveries between and civilisation. What happens to a small corner of London when the electric lights fail " Perhaps it is'that the span of life is insufficient .for our mental capacity; this, top- may be cured by grafting in the years to come. It is pathetic that we should need to exhaust ourselves with speech before we can convey a thought. It is worse still that tidal power.

etheric* energy, solar power, and the force of the wind cannot be used because there is, no known method of successful electrical storage, without great cost and loss. The whole future of the civilised races depends upon the constant speeding up of everything we do and everything we think. Unemployment might be cured by universal electrification and by the discovery of a means for transmitting electrical power through the ether to countries -which are barren of natural power and heat.