Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 78, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1910 — POPULAR SCIENCE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

POPULAR SCIENCE

A cent’B worth of electricity, at the average price In this country, will raise ten tons twelve feet high with a crane in less than a minute. A French chemist has advanced the theory that the odors from vegetation disseminated through the air diminish the actinic powers of the solar radiations sufficiently to affect photography. No coal is mined in this country lower than a depth of 2,200 feet, while several English mines penetrate 3,500 feet down, and there are mines in Belgium 4,000 feet deep. Eight inch seams of coal are mined commercially abroad, while few veins less than fourteen inches thick are worked in this country. In a paper read before the Institution of Electrical Engineers at Manchester, England, recently, the maximum output of the five power-stations at Niagara Falls was stated at 320,000 horse-power, distributed over a distance of 150 miles. This distance will soon be increased to 250 miles, and then, said the authors of the paper, such a system of distribution will be in operation as would, if it were installed in England, supply the whole country with the electrical energy it required, from one central station. Recent experiments by Dr. W. von Oeehelhauser, in Germany, have resulted in the production from the decomposition of ordinary coal-gas in vertical retorts of a gas possessing a lifting power of about one kilogram (two and one-fifth pounds) per cubic meter. The lifting power of lighting-gas has been calculated at seven-tenths of a kilogram per cubic meter. Compared with hydrogen, the new gas has a lifting power of in the proportion of 1,000 to 1,050. A balloon of 1,000 cubic meters filled with the new gas would lift 660 pounds more than the same balloon filled with ordinary gas. The effect of I chemistry on civilization, Bays Dr. Maximilian Toeh, has been greater than that of any other science. “Engineering made but little progress until steel and cement, two chemical products, were cheapened, simplified, and made universal.’’ Medicine owes to chemistry the discovery of synthetic drugs, and of anesthetics, and the progress that has been made in the study of metabolism. The twentieth century promises even to outstrip the nineteenth in chemical progress, which will lie in the direction of controlling foodstuffs, applying the raw materials in the earth, and refining' of metals. Practically all the Important Infirmaries and hospitals in England have their own electric generating stations, and the size of the installations, says the London Times, would surprise the majority of engineers. .The equipment has to be designed with unusual care,

owing to the special conditions which prevail in hospital work. Even where a public supply is available, the use of an independent system is justified on account of the, security which It gives against failure of current at a critical moment The installations are used for lighting, heating, ventilating, telephoning and other purposes, and many hospitals have laundries operated electrically. One county asylum has its own private electric railway for conveying supplies from the nearest railway station.