DEVICES TO WIN THE WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 December 1939, Page 8

DEVICES TO WIN THE WAR

I 4 300 SUGGESTIONS A WEEK. Inventors —including ex-servicemen who fought in the last war, and Ger-man-Jewish refugee scientists of high repute —are sending to the British Ministry of Supply at the rate of 300 every week, ideas and plans designed to assist in winning the war. No matter how crude or how old the suggestion made, every one is considered by a special department at the Ministry staffed by eminent scientists. The suggestions range from simply written letters, sometimes accompanied by pictures in coloured chalks, proposing the use of body armour, to elaborate schemes put forward with advanced mathematics and carefully executed drawings. Some of the ideas put forward have been previously suggested and developed successfully. It is not always possible to say so because of the risk of information leaking through to the enemy. All files, however, are kept, and after the war explanations can be given which cannot be given now. *

Wireless-controlled tanks, the use of chain shot against aeroplanes, and decoy lighting to deceive aeroplanes attacking at night are a few of the many ideas which reach the Ministry almost daily. No suggestion is turned down because presentation is crude, or because in minor respects the idea is open to criticism. Everybody engaged in the work of assessing inventions fully realises that the most unlikely looking communication may contain, in a crude form, the germ of some important device. Recently many people have given news of what they believe to bo Hitler's "secret weapon." The conceptions range from a monster projectile of incredible proportions, which it is alleged would wipe out an entire town, to a device which it is also said would infest. the British Isles with a plague of locusts. Men, the Ministry's records show, arc more fertile in invention than women. Employees in the Royal Ordnance and contractors' factories engaged in work for the Ministry of Supply especially are invited to make suggestions.