BEHIND THE GUNS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 November 1940, Page 6

BEHIND THE GUNS

SCIENTISTS IN WAR MUNITIONS PLANNING. WORK IN AUSTRALIA. The man behind the man behind the grin is the munition worker. But behind the munition worker stands yet another man—or woman —the scientist. Australia, according to a Department of Information bulletin, is mak-' ing full use of her scientists. Laboratories attached to munitions plants are providing full-time employment for many hundreds of highly-skilled engineers and chemists. About 500 scientists are attached to the Commonwealth munitions plant at Melbourne alone. This bulletin, released in New Zealand by the Australian Trade Commissioner (Mr C. E. Critchley), says that one of the major ’jobs of the laboratories is the testing of materials, purchased or manufactured, to ensure that they are in conformity with the specifications laid down by the services. Yet another function is to assist the munitions factories by helping them with problems connected with materials, plant or processes of manufacture. The laboratories assist further by maintaining standards of measurement and by checking and calibrating equipment to maintain its accuracy. “At the disposal of the fighting services and other' departments for advice on technical questions in general, the task of the laboratories generally is investigation, but they also engage in certain classes of production, or semi-production, the chief of which—in the chemical defence section —is the assembly and testing of service respirators made in the Commonwealth,” says the bulletin. “The servicing of optical instruments, such as binoculars, dial sights, and range finders, a great many of which are sent to the laboratories for repair, reconditioning and modification, is another highly important work.

“If you are privileged to take a stroll through the laboratories you will see a remarkable range of activities. Beginning in the chemical defence section, you will see hundreds of yards of canvas. It will form haversacks for respirators, and the experts will tell you that they are taking the whole of the canvas of this special type that is available in Australia.

“Here are the rubber masks for the respirators—they are being made all over Australia —and here are the triplex glasses for the goggles. Here, too, are the delicate valves which control the apparatus and here a curious sight, a series of gleaming metal heads, fitted with assembled respirators, connected with an apparently complex apparatus which applies a leakage test. “Go further and you come to the sections 1 laboratory. Here masked workers, surrounded by all the mysterious apparatus of defensive chemistry, are peering into a fume cupboard where the respirators are being tested against a concentration of poison gas such as no human would ever be likely to encounter; not a human being, but an intricate mechanical apparatus, is doing the breathing, however. “Out of this strange region you may go to the optical division which is teaching Australians a technique old in Europe, but new in the Commonwealth. One machine is slitting optical glass into strips, another is cutting it into discs which, attached to blocks with pitch are ground to lenses by a third machine and subsequently polished. "Not far away the allied job of cleaning, reconditioning and modifying optical instruments is going on. Range-finders are taken down and altered to new patterns, binoculars put in order. Already the laboratories have dealt with about 2000 pairs of binoculars. "In the metrology section you may see the gauges which arc the secret of high precision mass production. The laboratories are prepared to measure to one-millionth of an inch and regularly use this accuracy when rechecking their master gauges, while the standards which arc used continually in each of the munitions factories must be certified to at least a hundred-thousandth of an inch. The many thousands of gauges used by machine operators commonly demand an accuracy of a ten-thousandth part of an inch. "From metrology the privileged visitor may go to the gas furnaces and the pyrometers of the metallurgy section. He may see the physical tests of metals and their examination by Xray to reveal hidden flaws. • "In the chemistry section he will find all activity. In one room the chemical constituents of explosives are being tested. In another are beakers full of dyes for examination, and nearby a machine producing artificial daylight is testing the fastness of dyes in uniforms and hats. "A general examination is proceeding of rubbers, leathers, textiles, paints, cements and varnishes; and behind steel guards, viewed through triplex glass, explosives are being heated in further tests mysterious to the layman.”