INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 372, 25 April 1910, Page 2

INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE

FORCES THAT ARE WAITING TO BE MASTERED. Thomas A. Edison seems to suffer no loss of power or vision with advancing years. Not only has he achieved one of his greatest triumphs during the past few months, hut in a recent interview he foreshadowed some of the great inventions of the future. To a New York Independent reporter he said: Among the many problems which await solution in the future, one of the most important is to get the full value out of fuel. The wastefulness of our present methods of combustion is tremendous. A pound of coal has enougii energy in it to carry itself around the world. We are only able to extract a small fraction of its heat and power; the greater part goes to waste. Our best steam engines use about 15 per cent, of the energy of tihe coal tihey consume.

UNUSED FORCES. There are various methods being tried out to convert coal directly into electricity without the use of a boiler—eliminating fire and steam. Some of these are scientifically successful, though not yet commercially so. The only difference between rusting, burning and exploding is the speed of the chemical reaction. Everything in j\ature would burn up if it were not for the fact that nearly everything except coal is already burned up. Iron would 'burn and make good fuel—if in a very fine powder —but it has already been consumed in Nature'.' furnace. Coal is stored-up sunlight; it is the storage battery of the sun, to which we owe all our energy. Radium has great power. It has no appreciable limit or end. It is not combustible. We don't know how its energy was stored up. A carload of radium would have as much ener.-y as all the millions of tons of •.•oal mined in a year. Radium is the cause of Ihc earth's heat, according to the view of most scientists to-day. That explains why the earth, constantly radiating vast quantities of heat into space, doesn't cool down. The planet would Le pretty chilly after all these millions of years "if it had no radium in it. While only small quantities of radium have been isolated, it exists everywhere in water, rock and soil; it is universally distributed, and a little of it goes a long way. The possibility of harnessing; this force for our use is somewhat <f a speculation. A radium clock has 'been made, and it will go several hundred years without winding, POSSIBILITIES OP RADIUM.

I have a spinthariscope, which is a' tiny bit of nadium, of a size that will go through the eye of a needle, mounted over a piece of willemite. It has been shooting off millions of sparks for the. six years that I have had it, and I expect it will be shooting sparks the same way for thousands of years. There will be enough sparks given Out by that fragment of radium to cover and illuminate a cit-v. Some say they travel at the speed of light, others 12,000 miles a second. This speed is the source of .radium's power. Infinite velocity makes up for lack of mass. Microscopic particles projected at high velocity are equal to heavy bodies going a slow gait. The illustration of a wax .bullet being fired through a wooden plank applies to radium's emanations. Rankin said that spider webs running over two pulleys with the velocity of light would be capable of running all the machinery, in England; they would prove as strong as rubber and leather belting. Some day we might find immense deposits of radium, and then it will be a problem how to handle it without dangerous consequences. A large quantity of the stuff would kill everybody around.

There are lots of things besides ra-, dium that we don't understand. These five senses of ours are pretty dull de-1 teetives. We only perceive a little that, comes within the range of our senses. A thing drops below our level and we don't perceive it. Here and there, now and then, someone finds out a. new' thing we didn't dream the existence of. In this room and in your room at'this moment there are fifty wireless messages going through. Without instruments we cannot detect them. MECHANICAL PROBLEMS.

The power of our waterfalls is being rapidly developed. Maybe the utilisation of the tides will follow, but the machinery to accomplish this would require a vast investment. Tidal and wave power is, ol course, immense. Consider the force that jogs up and down a steamship like the Mauretania. More practicable, however, are windmills connected with storage batteries to lay up the energy of the winds in electrical form. Sun engines are very promising machines., They are built on the principle of absorbing the heat from the sun in water or other liquid, or concentrating the heat .by focussing the sun's rays through a burning glass on a copper boiler. In Arizona there is a thirty horse-power sun engine which is run by focussing the rays on water and using a steam turbine. In steaming volcanoes there is a source of power winch might be obtained and sent out by electricity. To get rid of friction in our machines is one, of the future problems. The only machine without friction that we, know of is the world, and it moves in the resistless ether.

The mono-rail does not appeal to me. It was.a fundamental mistake that our railroads were built on a 4 foot !)% ineh gunge instead of a 6 foot guage, which we will probably have to come to yet. The aeroplane of the future will. 1 think, have to be on the helicopter principle. A successful air machine must he able to defy the winds. If Wright's aeroplane had one-twentieth of its surface, the wind would not affect it. The helicopter principle is the only way to above atmospheric conditions. By increasing the velocity of propeller revolutions the size of the machine can be diminished and thereby we vanquish the hostility of tne wind. A helicopter could have foot-size planes distributed on a 100 to 150 foot circle and controlled from the centre bv wires.

wonders coming. The <<lothos of the future will be so cheap that cverv young woman will bo able to follow the fashions promptly, and thorn will be plenty of fashions. Artificial silk that is superior to natural silk is now made of wood pulp. ft shines hotter than silk. T think that ihe silkworm barbarism will 20 in fifty years, just as the indigo of India wont ■before the synthetic production of indigo in German laboratories. There is much ahead of us. We don't know "what gravity is; neither do we know the nature of heat, light and electricity, though we handle them a little. Communication with other worlds has been suggested. I think we had better stick to this world and find out something about it before we call up our

neighbors. They might make us ashamed of ourselves.

Art will be increased and distributed as we emerge more and more from the dog-stage. Society will have to stop this whisky business, which is like throwing sand in the bearings of a steam engine. In 200 years, by the cheapening of commodities, the ordinary laborer will live as well as a man does now with £40,000 annual income. Automatic machinery and scientific agriculture will bring about this result. Not individualism but social labor will dominate the future; you can't have individual machines and every man working by himself. Industry will constantly become more social and interdependent. There will be no mannaS labor in the factories of the future. The men in them will be merely superintendents watching the machinery to see that it works right. Less and less man will be used as an engine, or as a horse, and his brain will be employed to benefit himself and his fellows.