FREAK INVENTIONS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 299, 1 October 1910, Page 3

FREAK INVENTIONS.

Great inventors have sometimes proposed very impractica'ble contrivances, Sir Henry Bessemer proposed a steamship in which the diningrooms, state-rooms, and all the interior compartments were to be suspended on roller bearings, so that the hull of the ship might roll and pitch independently of the interior structure. Such a vessel was actually made and tested, and. of course, proved a signal failure. Many freak inventions, however. have proved the forerunners of very important and useful devices. For example :—ln 1718 a breach-loading, rapid-firing gun was invented in London, which w r as mounted on a tripod, and embraced many of the principles embodied in modern machine guns. This gun was designed to throw both round and square bullets. The infacetiously stipulated that the round bullets were for Christians and the square bullets for Turks. His idea was to temper the wind a little to the shorn Christian ! THE WHITEHEAD TORPEDO was once a freak of the first water. The first Whitehead torpedoes carried only thirty pounds of high explosive, under the misapprehension that that would be sufficient to blow up a warship, and they were so erattic that they frequently turned round and headed for the boat from which they were launched. Nevertheless, the Whitehead torpedo has nowbeen developed to a very high degree of perfection, and it is to-day one of the most wonderful products of mechanical skill and ingenuity in the world. It will travel with great accuracy at a speed of thirty-five knots an hour for a distance of two thousand yards, carrying two hundred pounds or more of high explosive in the war-head. Fulton's first steamboat, before its trial, was looked upon by many of the wiseacres of the time as the freakiest of all freaks. Napoleon Bonaparte scoffed at FULTON'S APPARENT VAGARIES. Later, however, when, looking from the height of the barren rock of St. Helena, he saw a funnel emerge from the sea, with a trail of black smoke trailing along the horizon, he turned to Count Montholon, and said—"lt was I, and not Fulton, who was crazy. Had I listened to him. I should not now be here." Nitroglycerine was also a freak invention for some time after its discovery, until a way was found to make it pure, so that it would keep, and until Nobel made it into dynamite by absorption in infusorial earth, so that it could be handled and employed with safety. A few years ago an inventor tiled an application for n patent, for a method of ptinchinc railroad tunnels through hills and mountains by loading and tiring a twelve inch cannon into the hill. This method would ultimately be effective, but the expense would be something astounding. THE BETHLEHEM STEEL COMPANY has been tiring heavy guns into a mountain side for the last twentyfive years in testing them before turning them over to Die Government, and has punched a tunnel into the solid rock for a distance of some three hundred feet. That tunnel has probably cost a million dollars.— Hiram Maxim, in the "Youth's Companion."