Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1910 — Science AND Invention [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Science AND Invention

For the improvement of Blyth harbor, England, a specially constructed dredger has been employed which scoops up rocks of as much as twenty to thirty hundredweight each, and discharges them through chutes into a barge. The machine is furnished with a chain of buckets like an ordinary dredger, but the buckets are of a special shape, and the rims are re-en-forced with hard-steel cutting edges. The boulders are embedded in mud and sand, and more than 200 tons of such rock have been removed in an hour. The apparatus works with surprising ease and certainty. It has recently been discovered that the rare atmospheric gas neon readily becomes luminous under the influence of electric waves, and it is suggested that the property may afford a means of visually reading wireless telegraph messages. Prof. W. L. Dudley experimented with a tube of neon during an Atlantic voyage in July, and found that the gas glowed beautifully in response to the waves sent out from the wireless apparatus of the ship, but the received waveq .were apparently too weak to affect it sensibly. Further experiment may result in the discovery of a means of utilizing this property of neon as a detector of received signals. At present It is employed to measure the length of electric waves sent out. The length of those tested by Professor Dudley was about 800 feet. The Texas town of Rockwall, about twenty-five miles east of Dallas, derives its name from what appear to be the remains of immense walls of ruined masonry surrounding the town, but extending in many directions. Mr. Sidney Paige has recently studied these walls, and his conclusion is that they are natural formations, consisting of sandstone dikes, which under the influence of the weather and earth movements have been cracked and jointed ill such a way as to afford, in many-cases, a striking resemblance to artificial walls. The weathered sands, stained with iron oxide, between the joints have been mistaken for remains of mortar. The dikes rise out of a ■icb', black, waxy soil composed of original lime muds. They vary in thickness from an inch to two feet, and have been traced to a depth of fifty feet or more. Recent experiments by government experts have revealed an unexpected source of trouble in the process of sterilizing wood by the injection of preservative liquids. It is customary.;-to remove the bark from a stick of-tim-ber before it is subjected to creosoting, but it has been supposed that thin layers of the inner bark left unremoved would do no harm. Now it is found that such layers, no matter how thin, almost absolutely prevent the penetration of the liquid. In any case, the preservative usually fails to penetrate the center of the stick, hut forms an exterior antiseptic zone, which answers the purpose if there are no gaps in it. But if such gaps exist, owing to the presence of thin layers of bark, the teredo finds an entrance through them, and carries on its work of destruction in the interior of the timber supposed to have been protected.