To Cool Refrigerator Cars with Liquid Air.

Progress, Volume II, Issue I, 1 November 1906, Page 12

To Cool Refrigerator Cars with Liquid Air.

Armour & Company, of Chicago, have arranged with the inventors of a liquid-air producing process to erect a small experimental plant m Chicago for the purpose of testing the value of liquid air for the refrigerating of perishable goods in refrigerator cars. It is claimed by the inventors that liquid air can be made m quantities at a cost of about one cent per gallon, and that it can be kept in refrigerator cars for a period of approximately thirty days, with an evaporation of not over three per cent per day unless it is forced. The result of these experiments is looked forward to with great interest.

It is often difficult to ascertain who was the first inventor of a process in general use. It often happens that several minds have been at work on the same problem and have arrived independently at similar conclusions. Such, apparently, was the case in regard to reinforced^ concrete construction. Joseph Monier, who died recently, if not the sole inventor' of reinforced concrete construction was, at any rate, one of its earliest exponents, his first patent having been brought out in 1867. An Englishman patented, two years earlier, a system of concrete building which seems to contain the germ of the many systems oE ferro concrete or renforced concrete construction which have since attained such extensive vogue Mr Joseph Tall was the inventor in question,

More than half the total miners of the world were in 1905 engaged in getting coal Great Britain employing over 833 000, the United States 594,000, Germany 543,000, France 171,000, Belgium 138,000, Austria 119,000, and India nearly 93000. The total output of coal was 886 000,000 tons, of the estimated value of more than 295,000,000.