Science Siftings

New Zealand Tablet, 13 May 1915, Page 55

Science Siftings

By Volt.'

-'_'_ " Making Paper Out of Wood. ■-- Jl Making paper from wood, the discovery of Dr. Hill, of Augusta, Maine, is one of the world's most important industries. It has revolutionised the paper trade, and made it possible for a great newspaper to be sold at a halfpenny. An old hornets' nest caused Dr. Hill to make the discovery. His friend and neighbor, James G. Blaine, had told him that there was not enough cotton and rags in the world to supply the newspapers and other publications with their raw material. That was about forty.years ago, when paper was about Is 3d a pound. Dr. Hill took a hornets' nest to the superintendent of a near-by paper factory and asked him, 'Why can't you make paper like that?' They sat down together, took the nest apart, analysed it carefully, and decided that if a hornet could make paper out of wood, man ought to be able to do as much. The doctor discovered that the hornet first chewed the wood into fine pulp. They decided to make machinery and water do what the hornet's mouth did. Such was the beginning of the wood-pulp industry. The Printing Telegraph. ( f The time will soon arrive when a New Zealander's invention will enable the operator of a typewriter in the Wellington Post Office to actuate in Christchurch, Auckland, or any other distant city, a machine which will turn out a type-written copy of the message without further human attention. This invention, by Mr. D. Murray, formerly a journalist engaged in Auckland, has been adopted by the British Post Office and the Western Union and Western Electric Telegraph Companies of America for use between points where heavy traffic has to be handled. The chief advantage of the printing telegraph apparatus is its remarkable multiplex feature, which enables the carrying capacity of a circuit to be largely increased even in companion with the work of the quadruplex method, under which four messages can be sent simultaneously over one wire. A set of Murray quadruple printing apparatus has been ordered for Auckland, and one for Christchurch. Two similar sets have been ordered for Wellington, one to work Auckland and the other to Christchurch. They are expected to be completed in London ready for despatch to New Zealand about the middle of July, and would have been ready earlier but for a delay due to the war. Discovery of Calcium Carbide. Calcium carbide has had a curious history. The acetylene gas which it produces holds a position which is said to be about unique in the history of useful discoveries. Many people at the present time (remarks the Catholic Advocate) seem to consider that our knowledge of this brilliantly beautiful iHuminant is of modern date, while all that the last decade has brought forth has been little more than the discovery of how to produce the gas on a commercial scale and details as to its properties and . behaviour in everyday use. Curiously enough, Dublin has the proud distinction of having blazoned to the scientific world this very important discovery. At a meeting of the Royal Dublin Society in March, 1836, Edmund Davy, Professor of Chemistry to that body, first \ described some of its properties, and in the autumn of the same year he introduced his discovery to the British Association at their Bristol meeting. He explained how, in attempting to procure potassium by strongly heating a mixture of calcined tartar and charcoal in a large iron bottle, he obtained a black substance which readily decomposed water and yielded a gas which, on examination, proved to be a new compound of carbon and hydrogen. From the brilliancy with which the gas . burned in contact with the atmosphere it was, in Professor Davy's opinion, admirably adapted for the - purposes ... of artificial light if it could be procured at a cheap rate.' "''-'" -' g