THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1912. INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 10713, 3 December 1912, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1912. INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE.

The Standard has « series of articles on the inventions and discoveries of the near future. Electro-chemistry, we arc told may do wonders. It may give us "ships travelling at high speed without the aid of coal, oil or wind, but drawing their power 'from the water on which they move," and motor cars driven by the same inexpensive means. The necessary force would be provided by the explosion of oxygen arid hydrogen derived from water, just as the internal combustion engine of to-day is driven by the explosion of a mixture of vapourised oil and air. Oxygen and hydrogen, mixed, explode with great force, and -the problem is to discover some means , whereby water can be cheaply resolved into tlieso constituents. Electricity so resolves it, and scientists think that electro-chemistry will provide a cheaper method than that now in vogue. Electro-chemistry is largely used to-day to deposit metal on- metallic or other surfaces, but there is a limit to its application. Large surfaces have to bo painted to protect them against corrosive influence. The enormous cost of satisfactory protective painting may be realised by the factthat a staff of 90 men arc continuously employed in painting the Forth bridge. But according to the Standard painting for protective purposes is doomed. Iron will be protected in future by a coating of the magnetic oxide produced by electrolysis. A | bridge like the Forth bridge will bo permanently protected from corrosion after erection by a single treatment on electro chemical lines. 'Hie wonders of wireless may bo only in their infancy. Warfare in which guns will bo fired by wireless control, bombs dropped from crowless airships, and torpedoes directed by the samo mystic influence, is the prediction of a man who has already had some success m this direction, and the day is Coming when our clocks will be synchronised by wireless. Every day the I3ifi'e] Tower discharges wireless time 1

signals abroad at definite intervals, which can be. receives] in any part of England witli apparatus costing h-.it a low shillings. The aim of inventors now is to deviso some- simple moans by which clocks, both public and private, can be controlled by wireless from a standard master clock. The Standard thinks that the abolition of anxiety and inconvenience due to faulty clocks i« one of the applications of wireless that may find most general application in a few years' time.