WHEN GOLD WILL BE DIRT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 265, 18 March 1911, Page 9

WHEN GOLD WILL BE DIRT.

\GF OF NICKEL BOOKS AND STEEL FUKNITURE. New York, January 14. Mr. T. A. Edison, in an interview published in the current number of the Cosmoplitan Magazine, makes some remarkable predictions of new inventions that will be given to the world before the end of the present century. Mr. Edison predicts the time is not far ' distent when inventors will have made j possible the following:— Cloth, buttons, thread, tissue-paper and pasteboard will be fed into one end of a machine, and suits of clothing, packed in boxes, will come out of the other. Steel will replace wood for making furniture. The cost of steel is only onefifth that of wood, and steel furniture is very ligbt, because so little of the steel is required. It can be stained in perfect imitation of anv wood color. Nickel will be used instead of paper for hooks. A sheet of nickel one-twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book paper. It also will absorb printer's ink. A nickel book two inches thick would contain 40,000 pages. It would weight only a pound, and the cost of the nickel pages would be ss. Huge farming implements driven by electricity will release the present agricultural 'tools. The future farmer will be a soil chemist, a botanist, and an economist. He will perform his present manual fork at a seat beside a pushbutton nnd some levers. The most interesting of Mr. Edison s predictions is that the old dream of transmutation of metals is certain to come true sooner or later, and a way will he found to manufacture gold.

The probablity that the way to manufacture gold will be discovered sooner or later causes Mr. Edison to believe the present financial system of the world will be changed. The time is coming, he thinks, when nobody will accept gold in payment for work, and no nation will issue gold in money, because anyone will be .able to manufacture it.