News Items

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43388, 22 October 1908, Page 1

News Items

The Austrian Ccurt is run on a truly royal scale. The kitchen alone costs £15,000 per_year,the chief at the head , of it being paid £2OOO a year, or as much as a Minister of State . . •

At Staffordshire Assizes, recently, Henry Jackson recov* ered £233 damages from a local firm of grocers for the loss of , his.; wife, whp died from ptomaine poisoning aftor eating tinned salmon sold , by the firm. The cost of generating the electric current for lighting Rotorua is according to the report of the engineer in charge, 2.81 per unit. Consumers are charged 81 per, unit. There; was a working profit to the. Department last year of £1074.

An experiment was made some time ago by a woman,;who iu order to test the sustaining powers of chocolate, lived upon it sixty. .days and. lost 151 b in weight, in the interval, a , ■• i Bacon: Do you think it proper for, a man to say things behind his wife’s back ?• Egbert: Well, if he’s trying to buttonher dress, how can he help it ? Beachy Head was once a lofty hill two miles from the sea coast. The Kings cook gets £2OOO a year, aud he has to work only about two hours a day. A penny is estimated to change hands about 125,000 times in the course of its life. Accounts of the Yarmouth Corporation which have just been published show.that during the past year the income from the beach reached the record sum of £3522. The balance wheel of a watch says a jeweller, swings back aud forth 300 times a minute, 18,000 times in one hour, 432, 000, times in a day, and 157,-

680,000 times in a year. Telescopic funuels are one of the imrnprovoments which arM projected by ~ the designers. <4 the new Dreadnoughts. Tie; idea of these is that,a ship, upon getting intio close touch with the enemy, should be ah le. to lower the upper section of her funnels and thus have as little top-ham-

per as possible for shell to m ko

havoc among. The so called incombus ide lamp wicks are those that are treated with a chemical substance that prevents charring. Boric acid and ammonia are used, one recipe being as. follows :—To half a gallon of water add l-7oz. of boric acid and 6oz. of strong liquor ammonia. Soak the wicks in this, and then dry them. To distinguish soaked, from unsoaked wicks a little dye can be put in the solution.

The diamond was first burned by Davy and Faraday in 1814. It was held on a platinum rod in a glass globe of 22 cubic inches of pure hydrogen, aud the duke of Tuscany’s burning glass—a lens of 14 inches and oue of 3 iuches separated 3|ft. —concentrated the sun’s heat. In three quarters of an hour the stone burst into a scarlet llaine. Out of focus it blazed four muiutes, and was consumed in two more trials.