Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1888 — How to Demagnetize a Watch. [ARTICLE]

How to Demagnetize a Watch.

Magnetism is assuming the same rule with the watch-repairer that malaria plays in medical practice, i. e., as a cover for ignorance. When you take your watch back to the man you have just paid for cleaning it, with the statement that it loses five or ten minutes a day, and generally doesn’t mind its helm, he looks wise, says it has been magnetized, and charges you another and a bigger fee for removing the “hoodoo. ” Almost any one can demagnetize his watch. Lay it down on a table, with open dial face upward, and make a diagram of the polarity (whether north or south) at each hour number on the dial, and whether weak or strong—this by means of a small pocket-compass, or needle, remembering that the north pole of the compass is repelled by the north pole of the watch, and attracted by the south pole, and vice versa. Take the point of the strongest magnetism first and wave several times at a short distance in front of each pole the like pole of a small bar magnet. This will tend to neutralize the first polarity by induction of an opposite one, and thus, by a little practice, first one point of magnetism in the watch after another may be neutralized, using the compass each time as a test.

Sidney Woollett, the elocutionist, can repeat more than 300,000 verses of poetry; that is, he says so, and no one has yet been fdolhardy enough to ask him to prove it by repeating them.— Exchange. Sitting Bull says his race is passionately fond of showy ornaments. He himself has had the war-whoop ring in his ears quite often.