SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, 2 August 1917, Page 37

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

By "Volt."

Tallest Building.

The recently completed Wool worth building, in New York can claim the distinction of being the tallest, heaviest, and most costly single office building in the world. It towers 785 feet above the pavement, and boasts of some 57 stories. It took two and a-half years to erect, and cost, with its furnishings, £2,400,000. The building contains no less than 27 acres of floor space, yet it only covers a plot measuring 155 feet by 200 feet. Over 20,000 tons of steel were used in its erection, as well as 17,000,000 common bricks. There are no fewer than 34 elevators in this single building. They are divided into “locals,” which stop at every floor, and “expresses,” which stop at certain stories. Under the dome is a powerful searchlight, the rays of which can be seen 50 miles away, while from its upper windows one has a view right out to sea.

A Priest’s Wireless.

Rev. Joseph Murgas, Rector of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Slovak Church, Wilkes-Barre, U.S.A., the inventor of a system of wireless telegraphy, which he has covered and protected by twelve patents, is now at work experimenting with a tower twenty-two feet in height, from which he expects to get greater results than is now secured at the Government station at Arlington, near Washington, which is five hundred feet in height. In this connection it may be stated that Father Mux-gas is not actuated by any selfish motive. After being patented, his ideas become the property of Philadelphia capitalists, and from the sale of these patents Father Murgas erected a church for his congregation at a cost of 60,000 dollars. This simple Slovak priest is also a sincere patriot, for he has publicly declared that should the United States require his wireless station or the benefit of his knowledge they are at the Government’s service.

Jesuit Meteorologists.

Rev. Walter Drum, S.J., of Woodstock College, Maryland, has been giving the true facts regarding meteorological hurricane warnings, in reply to a recent report of the Chief of the United States Weather Bureau, which stated that the people were hitherto unaccustomed to such monitions. Father Drum proves that this report was most unfair to the Jesuit Observatory of Belen, Havana; for Father Vines, of its staff, was the first to discover the laws by which cyclones move, the very first to locate a cyclone before its approach. He taught the world how to track the dreadful trajectory of the storm, and to be forewarned against its approach. From 1870 to 1875 this painstaking meteorologist took his observations on the declinometer, bifilar, thermometer, and barometer, and noted the various meteorological elements of the atmosphere and the clouds. And, at last, after six years of hard work, he gave to the world its first scientific knowledge about hurricanes. From 1875 till 1893 Father Vines warned the people of Cuba in time to save hundreds of ships and thousands of lives that might otherwise have been lost in the down swoop of the cyclone. The successor of Father Vines, Father Gangoiti, located the Galveston storm eight days before its destructive work of September 8. 1900, tracked its trajectory, located the cyclone day after day. If the United States Weather Bureau had given heed to ■“Father Gangoiti’s warnings, and not to the absurdities of its own observers in Havanawho reported that the

cyclone was r moving N.N.E. of : Cuba, > and would spend itself in the Atlantic, —-the people of Galveston might have escaped their loss of life and all.