Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1892 — POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES.

—A recent invention is a horseshoe of rubber set in the recess of a metal frame. It is found to be very valuable for use on an asphaltum or other smooth pavement. Clocks that give warning.—A foreign watchmaker has patented a device by whioh an hour or two before a clock runs down the word “ wind” will appear at an opening in the dial. An Indestructible-Train.—A special train of five cars, constructed entirely of steel, is on exhibition at the Chicago and Northern Pacific station in Chicago. It is claimed that the cars neither cost nor weigh more than the old style, while being practically indestructible by fire or in a wreck. Paper From Corn Husk.—The husk of Indian corn is being used in the manufacture of paper. In some experiments to test this use the husks were thrown into a rotary boiler and after being mixed with caustic soda and thoroughly boiled they form a kind of spongy paste, full of a glutinous substance. This paste was then placed in a hydraulic press, so as to separate the gluten from the fiber. A compact mass of fiber was then obtained, which is worked in various ways.

Under the Sea.— ls the bed of the Atlantic were drained, a geographical writer tells us, it would be a vast undulating plain, with a middle plateau parallel to the North American coast, and another plateau connecting this central one with northeastern South America. The Atlantic is thus divided into three great basins. The tops of the sea plateaus are two miles below a sailing ship, and the deepest parts of the basins almost five miles. These plateaus are whitened for thousands of miles by a minute species of creamy shell, which cover their sides like snow banks. In the deepest parts the sea bottom is red in color, strewn with volcanoes and meteoric particles, and the deeply incrusted bones of whales, sharks and other sea monsters. In the black and silent waters of the abysses, lighted only by phosphorescent animals, vegetable life is nearly absent, while the scanty animal life consists of a few strange species which only in earlier geological ages can have been common near the surface.