COOKING BY RADIO WAVES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 55, 12 July 1940, Page 13

COOKING BY RADIO WAVES

(Written for "The Listener" by

RONALD

McINTOSH

HE time does not seem far distant when the housewife will be able to do all her cooking by radio. An Austrian scientist recently placed a steak in cold water and subjected it to ultrashort radio waves. The result was a grilled steak. Then a fish was fried at freezing point in the same way. The ultra-short waves, pass-

ing through the water, set up warming currents in the food. This is but one of the many new uses to which radio is being put. It is claimed that workers in a factory which is equipped with loud-speakers, work faster and better than do those who are not able to work to the strains of music, but it is more surprising to find that animals, like humans, also react to wireless programmes. The milkmaid who sang at her task always got the best results from her cows, but nowadays, the scientific farmer has loud-speakers installed in the milking shed. With hens, also greater productivity is possible, provided care is used in selecting the radio programmes. They eact favourably to organ music, but speech, it has been discovered, disturbs them, and causes a falling-off in eggproduction. Kill or Cure Radio waves can kill or cure. The ‘wheat beetle lays its eggs in hay stooks, and with the natural development of heat in the stook, those eggs mature. Short-wave radiations passed through the stook render the eggs sterile without harming the wheat. Medical men have found that radio waves produced local-

ised heat in the body, and can be used for the production of artificial fevers in the treatment of pneumonia and other diseases. Perhaps some day whole cities may be lit by radio beams. An Australian research worker, Professor V. A. Bailey, has discovered that if a huge electrical discharge were directed towards the ionised air some 60 miles above the earth, a glowing pink cloud, some ten times the size of the moon. would appear in the sky. Ordinary road lighting would be unnecessary, for an area of 5000 square miles would be lit with the intensity of the full moon’s light. To achieve this artificial aurora, Professor Bailey estimates that a 1,000,000 kw. transmitter and a special aerial system about a mile square would be needed. This would require only 2,000 times the power used in the large American and Russian broadcasting stations, and even with their power, a noticeable effect could be produced if the radiations were directed vertically upward in a narrow beam.