ELECTRICAL RESEARCH

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 863, 6 January 1930, Page 16

ELECTRICAL RESEARCH

CARNEGIE INSTITUTE’S WORK IN AUSTRALIA NEW OBSERVATORY BUILT Special to THE SUN CHRISTCHURCH, Today. At present in Christchurch is Mr. Freborn Johnston, of the staff of the Carnegie Institute. For the past 19 years, with the exception of four years with the British Navy in the Great War, Mr. Johnston has been in the foreign service of the institute, conducting and organising its various branches of research work on land and sea all oyer the world. Now, after establishing the new observatory at Watheroo, 130 miles north of Perth, Mr. Johnston, with his wife and two children, is en route to Washington, where he will settle down to head office work and the compilation and reduction of the data of the past five years. To a “Sun” representative Mr. Johnston said that the observatory at Watheroo was a magnetic and atmospheric electric observatory. The experiments required a place removed from human influences, so the observatory was placed in the desert. The transportation of supplies and mails presented a real problem.

The object of the observatory was to try to ascertain the origin of the earth’s magnetic fields, and the underlying causes of the charges of electric currents which flow through the earth’s surface. Those currents were not apparent at ordinary times, but in times of magnetic disturbances they interfered with- telegraphs and telephones. Experiments w-ere being made to determine the effect of the sun on the earth’s magnetism, and to find the reason for the changed condition in which the earth exists. Recordings would be made at Watheroo in 50 years. At Mount Wilson, California, more extensive investigations of the solar system were being carried out. Plans were now under way for an extension from 100-inch to 200-inch reflecting telescopes, from which wonderful results were expected. The problem of origin was being attacked from different angles, and the latest advance was the use of the Coolidge tube, charged with 3,000,000 volts, by which it was hoped to shatter the atom. Also.in radio, experiments were in train. The most recent investigations concerned the Heaviside layer, a conducting layer which exists about 80 miles above the earth's surfa,ce, and which makes the use of short-wave wireless possible. At Watheroo a transmitting station lias been established and a series of experiments is being carried out in regard to the polarisation of the incoming wave for a short-wave wireless. Mi, Johnston said the research vessel Carnegie, destroyed at Samoa, would not be replaced. The main work for which she was commissioned had been completed, and the money was not at command for her replacement.