NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1698, 14 April 1917, Page 1

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Gold coins will gradually fall into disuse, as the cost of printing and issuing notes of nominal value can tie hut a fraction of the total'expense involved by the abrasion of gold coin in the course of circulation. About 80(1 waistcoats made from 2,100 pairs of old gloves have been forwarded for the use of British prisoners of war in Germany from residents of Surbiton, through the medium of the Glove Waistcoat Society. Concrete is employed very extensively for barge-building. These barges travel for thousands of miles on the Central African lakes. The expense of steel barges would be very heavy, but concrete barges are quite cheap, and are easily made and moved. In the harvesting of ice at Sandusky (Ohio), which is one of the largest natural ice centres in the Lake region, electricity has been used to a great extent this year. Electricity is being used in the operation of practically all the hoisting, storing, and loading machines. In 1880 Mr O’Reilly Drase bequeathed £40,000 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer “towards extinguishing the national debt,” and a few years earlier Miss Helen Blake left £140,000 for the same purpose, The largest windfall of the kind, however, seems to have been (he £200,000 bequeathed by Mr John Austin in 1885. In otic of the most recent disasters to Zeppelins which visited England 11 brothers were burnt to death. An aged man recently in Amsterdam from Germany (old bow he brought up a family of eleven sons, every one of whom entered the air service l . The eleven young men formed part of the crew of one of the destroyed Zeppelins, and when this fell in (lames in England they all perished. The Chinaman who invented a type-writer for his native language Ims obtained a patent from the Pekin Ministry of Commerce to run for five years. Tlis type-writer uses 4,000 Chinese characters. The ordinary Chinese printing office uses about 0,000 characters, while a complete Chinese dictionary may contain as many as 50,000. The largest old silver wine cistern is to be found, along with many other notable pieces of old English silver, in the possession of the Tsar of Russia. It weighs SOOozs., and can hold sixty gallons. When funds were being got up, in 17J5, to build a bridge over the Thames at Westminster a lottery was organised, and this cistern was (he chief prize. A Mr Barren is known to have drawn it. but how it eventually joined the plate in the Winter Palace at Petrograd has not been discovered.