Notes and Comments.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 271, 18 October 1902, Page 3

Notes and Comments.

Mr Thomas A. Edison contributes to the North

EUTUBE OF MOTOR OAKS.

American Review an interesting

paper on the new storage battery on which he has been working continuously for three years. He speaks very highly of the invention which he considers is a complete success. Twenty-one of his nickel-iron storage cells, weighing 882 pounds, propelled an automobile with two men for 85 miles on level country roads, with one charge, the machine weighing altogether about half a ton. On another occasion it ran with one charge 63 miles over country roads, many of them very steep. The automo bile coats from £l4O upwards, and a sixty to eighty mile run costs two shillings. Eighty-five petcent of the suburban residences of New York have no carriage houses, and Mr Edison thinks that his new storage battery will enable half of these suburban residents to have "a serviceable pleasure vehicle at their beck and call, without hiring a coachman to keep it clean and run it, with no horses to eat their heads off, and no oats and hay to buy." He thinks that electric carriages will develop into two general types—one a light buggy type and the other a heavy touring carriage. He is now trying this nickel-iron battery on five different models of automobiles of varying weights. Each of them is to be run five thousand miles over country roads at an average distance of 100 miles per day.

In America, every tenth roter is a member of some

AMERICAN LABOUR UNIONS.

trade union or other. Every trade in the large cities has its union. In New York,

for instance, the Typographical Union, including all the printers in the city, has a membership of 5500. The cigar-makers in that city have ten union*, each having an average membership of 600. All the unions send delegates to a central labour union for the whole city, and they in turn have delegates for the National Federation, a great organisation made up of three-quarters of all the tradeunionists in America. The Federation was founded in 1881, and is now made up of 82 national and international unions, composed of 9494 local unions, 16 State federations, 206 city central labour unions, and 1051 unions not attached to national bodies. The Federation is not a political organisation, its single purpose being to advance the cause of labour. Its chief work consists in securing legislation in the United States Congress, in harmonising and directing union effort, and in urging union labour everywhere not to buy goods manufactured or sold by "unfair" concerns. Every month a long list of these " unfair " bouses appears in the American Federationist, under the heading, " We don't patronise." The demands of the Federation of Labour, as made in resolutions at their last annual convention, make interesting reading. Of the twelve demands,

New Zealand has already nine, one does not apply to our colony, and the other two we are either agitating for or have a better proposal. The United States is ihvays pointed to as a nation far advanced in democratic and socialistic matters, but they have a long way to go, evidently, before they catch up to New Zealand. The following are some of the demands of the American labour unions : —(1) Compulsory Education ; (2) A legal work day of eight hours ; (3> Sanitary inspection of workshops, mines and homes ; (4) liability of employers for injury to health, body and life ; (5) the abolition of the sweating system ; (6) the abolition of the contract system in all public ■works; (7) the municipal ownership of street cars, waterworks and gas aud electric plants; (8) the nationalisation of telegraphs, telephones and railways; (9) direct legislation and the principle of referendum in all legislation.