Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1893 — POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES.

A Remarkable Discovery. —Two German doctors have independently arrived at the conclusion that most persons struck by lightning, nnd to all appearance dead, could be recalled to liW by applying the method of artificial respiration in use for resuscitating the drowned. This method proved successful in the cast of a trumpeter who was apparently killed at Berlin in 1891.

The Strength of Ice. —The necessities of war have not uufrequently led to valuable discoveries of a practical scientific character. Of late the French Minister of War has been studying the subject of ice from the point of view of its capacity to maintain weights. He has found that when ice has become about an inch and three-fifths thick, it begins to bear the weight of a man who is marching alone. At a thickness of something over three and one-half inches it will bear files of infantry. When it has become twelve centimeters, or nearly four and three-quarter inches thick, it sustains light artillery or carriages, and at twenty-nine centimeters, or about eleven and four-tenths inches, it bears the heaviest weight that the transporting of an army requires. These conclusions of the French military authorities may have some interest for skaters, but it should be remarked that they apply oulv to young ice. Successions of colder and warmer weather, in the course of a few weeks, produce a change in the structure of ice which greatly weakens its power of resistance to pressure. Accordingly, the measurements and estimates given above should not be trusted in the case of ice that is not of recent formation.

The Size of the Sea.— One gallon of water weighs ten pounds, so the number of gallons in the Pacific is over 200 trillions, an amount which would take more than a million years to pass over the Falls of Niagara. Yet, put into a sphere, the whole of the Pacific would only measure 726 miles across. The Atlsntic could be contained bodily in the Pacific nearly three times. The number of cubic feet is 117 followed by sevetnecn ciphers; a number that would be ticked off by our million clocks in 370,000 years. Its weight is 325,000 billion tons, and the number of gallons in it is 73 trillions. Asphere to hold the Atlantic would have to be 533 1-2 miles in diameter. If it were made to fill a circular pipe reaching from the earth to the siin—a distance of 93,000,000 miles —the diameter of the pipe would be 1,837 yards, or rather over a mile; while a pipe of similar length to contain the Pacific would be over a mile and three-quarters across. Yet the distance to the sun is so great that, as has been pointed out, if a child were horn with an-arm long enough to reach the sun it would not live long enough to know that it had touched it, for sensation passes along our nerves at the rate of 100 feet a second, and to travel from the sun to the earth at that rate would take a century and a-half, and such au abnormal infant is an unlikely centenarian.

The rest of the sea includes the Indian Ocean, the Arctic and Antarctic Seas, and various smaller masses of water. It covers an area of 42,000,000 square miles and would form a circle of 7,500 miles in diameter. The average depth may be put at 2,000 fathoms (12,000 feet), and the contents at 95,000,000 oubic miles. It weighs 390,000 billion tons, and contains 87£ trillion gallons, while it would form a column leaching to the sun of 2,000 yards in diameter. If we now combine into one vast whole these various figures we arrive at Borne stupendous results in answer to the question, "How big is the sea ?” The area of 140,000,000 square miles could be confined by a circle of 13,350 miles across. The relative size of the areas of the surface of the earth, of the whole sea, the Pacific and Atlantic, are represented by circles the diameters of which are in the proportion to one another of 158, 133, 93 and 62 respectively; or by a crown for the surface of the earth, a half-crown for the surface of the whole sea, a shilling for the surface of the Pacific, a three-penny piece for the surface of the Atlantic. Supposing the sea to be formed into a round column leaching to the sun, the diameter of the column would be nearly two and a half miles. 'The Paoific would form 53, COO, 000 miles of its total length of 93,000,000, and the Atlantic 18.000,000. If it were a column of ice, and the entire heat of the sun could be concentrated upon it, it would all he melted in one second, and converted into steam in eight seconds, which illustrates the heat of the sun rather than the size of the sea.—[Cincinnati Commercial Gazette.