THREE NEW MARVELS IN INDUSTRY.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 December 1921, Page 12

THREE NEW MARVELS IN INDUSTRY.

“On the Mersey, an acetylene burner has been introduced for welding shipplates instead of riveting them. Two men with the burner can do the work which used to be done by twenty-five, and the union concerned has decreed that twenty-three men must be employed to look on. Can any business prosper under such conditions?” asks Mr. Lovat Fraser in the Sunday Pictorial. A REVOLUTION IN PLOUGHING. Sir David Hall, of the Board of Agriculture, says that the whole future of British farming is bound up in the application of machinery and power to food production, and he indicated that the Government are not disposed to rest content with paying lip service to the potentialities of the motor tractor. With the £1,000.000 which has been placed for education and research Sir Daniel Hall hinted that power farming was destined to receive “no benefit. “If the experience of Mr. S- F. Edge, as enthusiastic a farmer as he is a motorist, is normal, then the farmer's conversion may arrive at an earlier date than Sir David Hall ceems to contemplate,” says the Scotsman. “Mr. Eage farms 2,000 acres, YOO of which are arable land. Previously he employed 30 horses, with one man to every pair. This year he has done all his work with four traetprs and two small motor lorries. Horse ploughing cost'him £2 5s per acre, ploughing with steam tackle cost £2 per acre, and tractor ploughing 30s per acre. “With the downward trend in fuel and other prices, Mr. Edge forsees the day when he will be able to plough with a motor tractor at a cost of 10s per acre.” A CEMENT GUN. “The eement-gun is a decided advance in engineering, and will doubtless come to play as important a part in future work as the mechanical concrete-mixer plays in construction projects. There are more than three hundred thousand concrete-mixers in u9e to-day, and, while it may be some time before so many cement-guns are in use, their number is steadily increasing,” writes H. E. Howe in The New Stone Age (University of London Press, 12s 6d net). I ihe desirability of knowing just how j the reinforcement is distributed after I the concrete has been poured has led j to the development of special teats,.schne of which involve the use of the X-ray, with which concrete joints may be examined and any displacement of the reinforcement located. .~rv... “It was while coating forms upon which to mount the skins of animals for museum purposes that Carl E- Akely felt the need of a more flexible and easier way of spreading plaster of Paris. He turned to compressed air as an aid, and perfected the mechanical device now known as the cement-gun “Akely hit upon the simple scheme o-f conveying the dry material to the nozzle by means of compressed air, and of introducing in the nozzle a spray of water under pressure twenty pounds greater than the air-pressure. In this w{iy hydration and deposition is secure 1 coincidently, making it possible not only to spray as thin a coat as may be desired, but also to build up this coat to any desired thickness.”