Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 291, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1920 — Page 3

WIRELESS PHONE AIRPLANE GUIDE

Radio Gives Instant Response to the Inquiry “Where Ami?” DIRECTION FINDER'S WORK ■ ■ V* Five Time* a* Easy to Get Lo*t in «n Airplane a* In an Automobile, Because of the Greater Speed, Says an Expert. New York. —The airplane ordinarily . travels about five times as fast as an automobile or steamship, and this explains why it is five times as easy to get lost in an airplane as in land or water vehicles, according to John R. Cantley of the Wright Aeronautical corporation. “Difficulties such as this, however, seem to exist merely to give someone in the aeronautical game the pleasure of overcoming them,” he said. “The pathway to commercial aviation a few years ago seemed insurmountable, but now all obstacles have been cleared away. In the case of guidance the aero experts have decided to use the new wireless telephone. “There are no signboards in the air, and by the time an aeronaut had calculated his position by old-fashioned nautical methods he would 1 merely have placed one spot on the earth’s surface where he knew be was not located. Consequently the aviator, to supplement his air maps while flying in clouds, during low visibility, or over unknown territory, must have some fast way of reckoning his location. Radio is rapid, faster even than the plane, and is therefore the ideal aid to aero-navigation. Guided by Radio. "When the NC4" winged her way across the ocean there was a skilled navigator. Commander A. C. Read himself, In the forward cockpit with the usual instruments of marine navigation, but behind him was a radio man who operated, in addltto'h to the usual wireless with trailing antennae, a radio direction finder. The mechanism gave him the exact direction of the nearest destroyer in the chain stretching from Trep ssey to the Azores. Merely by heading in the direction from which the destroyer radio signals came the plane roared her way across the ocean. This was one of the first uses of the wireless as navigation equipment, and it was of course crude. In aviation everything is crude which Is more than a few months old, for never did any other industry progress so rapidly. "In addition to the landing field system which is surely coming in this country, as it is elsewhere throughout the world, as commercial aviation develops, there will undoubtedly be built up a system of radio stations at the landing fields and at other points. The carrying of direction-finding apparatus is of course burdensome in airplanes, since besides its weight it requires either an operator or part of the time the attention of the pilot, who should be free to handle the plane. In the stations themselves this apparatus can be Installed Instead. All that the plane will need is a simple radio phone sending and receiving apparatus. “‘Where am I? Where am I?’ the pilot will inquire, speaking into his transmitter. Somewhere down below, perhaps concealed by underlying clouds or mist, the stations will hear and almost instantaneously calculate the direction and answer. Does this sound far-fetched? Already navy radio stations use precisely similar methods, «ave that they use wireless telegraph signals and are dally giving locations and bearings to ocean steamships on the Atlantic coast The application to airplanes is a mere matter of establishing stations and installing equipment oh planes. _ “In addition to giving locations these

Painting Danger Signal Buoys

Unde Sam is preparing for a hard winter along our coasts. A good number of the danger signal buoys which clank their warning to liners are being Thia photograph shows one of the huge buoys being painted.

stations will be of great value to keep planes on long flights informed as to prevailing winds at various heights, changing meteorological conditions, cloud heights and so forth. The men in the plane will be In very much closer communication with the world while flying a hundred miles an hour five or ten thousand feet above the earth than tourists in an automobile below them. "Larger machines, of course, will probably carry their own operators, who may handle directional wireless apparatus as well as their radio mechanism, but small planes, machines corresponding to automobiles in passenger and freight capacity, can dispense with a radio man, yet have precisely the same directional advantages. "Leading airplane companies, such as are now making planes for service across the continent, or parts of it, will probably be compelled to erect their own radio stations, but eventually I believe ,the federal government will recognize its duty to aircraft as well as sea craft and establish a comprehensive system of stations. These stations will be of great value to air service flyers, mall pilots, forest fire patrols, etc., as well as to civilian flyers, and in addition could be used for other radio purposes as well. < Personally I am of the opinion that the air traffic will In the near future be all such stations could handle. The American people are far too progressive not to grasp rapidly the advantages of multiplied speed in the transportation of passengers, mails and freight.”

MORE ENGINES IS RAIL NEED

Budget Set Aside $105,000,000 for 1,800, but This Is Short of Requirements. EFFICIENCY CAMPAIGN IS ON Efforts Directed Toward Quicker Repairs and Plans to Prolong Locomotive Life—Falling Off In Production of Engines. New York. —Expenditure of more than $105,000,000 for 1,800 new locomotives for American railroads will not meet urgent transportation needs this year, according to a statement ’ssued by the Assoclatiob of Railway Executives in its bulletin entitled •More Transportation.” Quicker repairs on disabled locomotives and efforts to Increase the years of service of each engine are badly needed. "In the program for utilization of the $300,000,000 revolving loan fund provided for in the Transportation act,” says the bulletin, “there are loans to some thirty-two companies amounting to $29,000,000 to enable them to acquire 636 freight locomotives and 277 switching locomotives, that will cost $58,000,000. Even if this is a maximum possible program for increase of motive power at this time, pending the availability of new locomotives, more service must be obtained from the locomotives we have. Heavier Loading Needed. "An immediate reduction in the number of locomotives now unfit for service is obviously an essential part of the “more transportation” program. Heavier loading .may be achieved, car movement may be increased, but adequate means to haul the traffic is indispensable. “On Sept 15, of all locomotives, 17.1 per cent were out of service for repairs requiring over 24 hours, and 6.4 per cent for repairs requiring less

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER, IND.

SQUATTERS IN AUSTRIAN PARK Take Possession of Meadows Where Royal Stag and Boar Once Fattened.

Vienna. —Squatters have taken possession of the famous Lainz-Tiergar-ten on the outskirts of Vienna, and where once the royal stags and wild boars fattened on rich meadows and under splendid oaks, huts are being erected and ground broken for crops. Some fiionths ago a group of men. mostly war invalids, formally demanded this park from the government giving notice that if their demands were not met within a certain period they would take possession. The demand was Ignored by the authorities, so when the period expired several hundred men marched quietly to the entrance and demanded admission. The keepers swung open the gates and the men entered and staked out their claims, placing 'a model hut in one of the open grassed spaces as a symbol of possession. It is said 1,700 families will take up claims.

94-Year-old Mail Carrier Drives Auto Over Route

Onancock, Va. —Elijah Mile* of Modest Town has Just celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday. He has been carrying the mall from Bloxom to Modest Town for 28 years, making two trips a day. When he first began he walked, carrying the mail on his back. Now Mr. Mlles usually drives an automobile. Mr. Miles reads his paper regularly and does not wear glasses.

than 24 hours. As a basis for comparison, although the repairs were kept on a different basis at that time, in September, 1917, 13.5 per cent of freight locomotives wereiin shops for repairs, or awaiting repairs. “It must be agreed that the number of locomotives out of service for repairs is too many. It is too many even if there were in service all the locomotives needed. But since there is a shortage of locomotives it Is all the more necessary that the last ounce of effort should be exhausted to reduce the percentage of locomotives out of service. / “The average number of locomotives acquired yearly by Class 1 roads in the four years ended June 30, 1916, was 2,554, and the average number retired 2,071, showing an average annual increase in the number in service of 483. In 1917 and 1918 the locomotives acquired totaled 4,951. In the same years 2,400 locomotives were retired. This shows an Increase in the number of locomotives in service of 1,275 a year, but this apparent increase was due to reduction in the rate of retirement. ' Drop In Production. “In 1919 the three largest locomotive building companies constructed only 946 locomotives for. standard gauge roads in the United States. This compares with an average of 2,008 locomotives built annually by these companies for the roads during the preceding eleven years. The’ companies In question supply three-quarters of all locomotives used by Class 1 roads.” Telling of the success of the other features of the “more transportation” program ,the bulletin says: “Average dally movement of freight cars has been increased from 22.3 miles in February to 26.1 miles in July, and incomplete statistics for August indicate a still further improvement. Average loading per freight car has also been largely Increased. The average for all roads for July was 29.6 tons, but for later months the average is not yet available. With respect to car repairs, the utmost efforts have been made. Improvement in this respect will be accelerated by the efforts to Increase the number of cars and on owner roads. For the week ended October 9 American railroads handled 1,009,787 cars, as compared with 982,171 in the corresponding week of 1919 and 959,722 in the corresponding week of 1918. This is the first time that car loading has exceeded the milllon-car mark this year.”

Eagle From Mountains Gets Lost in the City

San Francisco.—Country folks are not the only ones that get lost in large cities. A young eagle, fresh from the mountains,< and apparently on his first visit to San Franeisco, lost himself in the maze of tall buildings the other day and at two o’clock in the morning flew into a billiard parlor on Ellis street. ■■ The bird perched on the edge of a table and made a vicious defense against capture. The proprietor threw a sack over its head. The eagle weighs . six pounds and is gray and brown coloring. Mr. Moore will give the bird to the Golden Gate zoo.

REAL FACTS STRANGER THAN WEIRDEST FICTION STORIES

Imagination of the Most Gifted Novelist Outdone by Life's Real Romances —No One Could Have Imagined or Written Such a Stupendous Tragedy as the War the World Has Just Gone Through.

New York. —Among the bright-cov-ered magazines on the news stand* 1* one whose name announces that it is devoted to true stories, and a subtitle calls attention to the good old proverb that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Truth in this case makes the concession of trying to appear as much like fiction as possible. But it is not in the realm of imagination that one would look first for the verification of our ancient adage that truth 1* stranger than fiction. The news of the world as it is turned out day by day is to a very large extent concerned with the strange and unusual thing, often paralleling fiction, often going beyond it The variety of the possible combinations of circumstances is so great as to surpass the imagination of the most fertile flctionist, says the New York Times. Ask any one what events chronicled in the newspapers are or have been stranger than fiction, and the first answer will probably be the war Itself. The war, certainly. No one did and no one could have imagined or written down such a stupendous tragedy as the world has Just gone through. It is a case where the plain facts have far outdistanced the fictionists as well as the historians looking into the future. Old Bernardi, knowing what the German ruling class had In mind, knew that war with France and Russia was coming and the world as a whole had slowly been prepared through years for a European clash. But no one foresaw a conflict in which the whole world would be Involved, a war which would cost millions of lives and money running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

What Stranger Than Thl*? Not only the war as a thing in.itself, but unnumbered phases and incidents of the war passed beyond the imagination of the men who wrote before 1914. America’s part in it alone forms an almost unbelievable episode. What writer would have dared, a decade even ago, to have told of an American army of 2,000,000 men fighting over the old battlefields of Northern France and Belgium? What brilliant flctionist could have pictured the results of the* war? The restoration of crushed nations of Europe, the break-up of old empires? What revolutionary genius of fiction would have fancied a Russia under the Bolshevik! for nearly three years? Who could have given an air of reality to a romance In 1913 dealing with the fate of the Czar of Russia or Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany? The true stories of the heroic deeds of the war, the personal experiences and tragic incidents, are in many cases too strange and unreal to have passed unquestioned in the pages of Action. A gun with a range of seventy-five miles drops a shell into a Paris church at the moment it is crowded for Good Friday mass. No wonder that for day* the world would not believe that such a thing had happened! The first use of gas by the Germans against the British in the Ypres sector was another fact the world could not bring Itself tn believe without great effort. The first air raids, the first submarine attack on passenger ships and even the announcement that the German troops were marching on France through Belgium upset all the order of thinking in a supposedly sane world. A world which has lived through the days since August, 1914, will have no reason to doubt that truth is stranger than fiction. Outdoes Julea Verne. For years the imaginative story of Jules Verne on submarines, called "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” was a bromide among writers and talkers who wished to mention the ultra-fictional and the fantastically imaginative. Yet the vividness of that story contained nothing so picturesque and certainly nothing so true as that epic tale of underseas suffering and heroism brought into this port and Philadelphia from off the Delaware capes recently by the survivors of the American submarine 8-5. Disabled in a practice crash dive, the submarine was tilted by her Commander so that her stern stood out of water and while cataracts swept through her compartments as the doors were opened between them, officers and men climbed to the part of the ship that stood above the waves —not knowing that any part of the vessel was above the water line. Then fOr nearly thirty hours the crew batfled for life, without drinking wate., in heavy atmosphere poisoned with chlorine gas, and with only scraps of food to eat They ripped a bole in the steel plates of the vessel, put a red shirt on a pipe and waved their signal until help came. Then, each disclaiming credit for heroism by giving praise to some one else in the crew, thby were rescued by steamship captains and a heroic engineer who labored for hours to cut a large hole through the- submarine’s plate*. Every ship that comes into the port brings some story, perhaps sad. perhaps amusing, that matches Dana or. Cooper or Conrad. Truth, but’ like Artirm, !* the story of Jacob Cohen,

who has been called the “Man Without a Country,” and the “Human Shuttle,” who sails the high seas from country to country, everywhere deemed an undesirable and turned away by the immigration authorities. With no country to go to, he sails from port to port, a citizen of Neptune’s domains, perhaps changing ships occasionally, but always traveling the seas. It is time for him to arrive back at some American port from Buenos Ayres or some other remote port—and for a few days the newspapers again will record his story which is stranger than fiction. Stowaways Are Common. Stowaways by hundreds come into this port from all the countries of the world and their stories have been told so many times that sometimes the newspapers omit any mention of them. They range from lads of 10 and 12 years old to old men with the vision of adventure in a new land still before their eyes—and some are women. There was recently the true story of the Greek steamship Thessaloniki that fought ninety-mlle gales for a week during the heaviest winter weather on the Atlantic, with engines disabled and food lockers empty, until help stood by to take off crew and passengers. The ship was never seen again. Then there Is the mystery of the Cyclops, which never reached her port and was swallowed up In the high seas. These are stories the reader feels to be far more strange than fiction, for while fiction seems to struggle t<? be real or realistic, the truth seems to struggle to be unreal and fantastic, or at least romantic. Plots of many of the great operas, of some great novels, and of many works of fiction not so great, are based upon police court cases, upon murders, thievery, or some other crime. Accompanied by music and surrounded by the jewels of the Diamond Horseshoe, the sordid crime story may become “high' art.” In many of the hundred or so murders in this city every year frequently there are a score which, before the police step in, arefijust as romantic as any love story in the fiction of Thomas Hardy—although Hardy carried his cases to the courts and frequently to the gallows. There are murders for love, murders for great spoils and sums of money, and stranger than any fiction are the unsolved murders committed In this city in silk, bond and whisky thefts. Strange Murders. Where in fiction is anything more fantastic than that unsolved murder of two Chinese government representatives in the Chinese embassy at Washington or some of the Chinese murders in this city? Or the Italian vendettas In this city, many of whose killings never find their way into print because the crimes are so numerous? And the “romantic murders,” with disappointed love as the motive, how many foolish swains can be found each year in a metropolitan district of 8,000,000, and how many suicides are committed after disappointments in a chief Interest in life? In the hand pf a master plotter and character sketcher they are romance, but In the police records they are merely sordid, unpleasant chronicles, but nevertheless, like fiction and true. A few months ago Major Alden G. McMurtry, an officer who was disappointed at not seeing service in France, entered the cellar of a mansion in Greenwich, Conn, and, firing at pistol flashes in the dark, after bullets had smashed his hand electric lamp with a tinkling ot glass, killed two burglars who were waiting there to slay him. There is the same sort

Earl Hanson and His Invention

Earl C. Hanson, American Inventor who served In the navy department of engineering during the war, with the receiving apparatus of hl* ne< Invention on the United States torpedo boat destroyer Semmes, while ht| ap> paratus was guiding the vessel through Ambrose channel. An apparatus on the ship receives impulses from a submarine cable laid for the purpose, panson invented an amplifier which renders the electric signal currents as understandable as a telegraph message. Receivers on each side of the ship gtv< out sounds through ear pieces, so the navigator can tail hjr the the sound in each ear when he Is over the cable. |

of fight In the oaseinent of •*Thefloose of a Thousand Candles,” by Msredlth Nicholson. Sherlock Homes fought his captors in the gas chamber and fooled them by placing bls lighted cigar tip on a ledge inthe dark chamber so that they rushed against the wall and he escaped. There is the fight in the roundhouse in “Kidnapped”—and scores of other fights of similar nature in other of Stevenson’s works and in those of other writers. But Major McMurtry’s act of heroism was not brain figment—it was truth! Get Great Wealth. Hundreds of instances have been related of persons having great wealth thrust upon them suddenly In the last few years, as well as instances of persons in humble circumstances who, by some turn of luck, made great sums of money merely by getting some recognition for their natural abilities. The latest Ouse of luck is that of Arthur T-2 Walker, private secretary to Edwartß'F. Searles, who was the heir of his employer’s estate, variously estimated at between >5,000,000 and >50,000,000, but which later estimates have placed near the first figure. He had worked twelve years for Searles at a small salary, was very shy, of, modest habits, and had no intimation that he was to be the heir to millions. Many fictional stories lately have had as their plots financial fights among wealthy men In Wall street, in business, or on the Stock exchange. Can any of these stories surpass In interest the true story of the fight for the last few months between Allan A. Ryan, son of Thomas Fortune Ryan, and the New York Stock exchange over the exclusion of Stutz Motors stock, and the long controversy over settlement with brokers who were “short” of the stock? And there are other true stories fully as good—of races across the ocean for large orders In foreign countries, for concessions and other big stakes. Legion, too, are the true stories of thefts of jewels and bonds in amounts running Into the hundreds of thousands. Who would have believed that any person could have stolen nearly >300,000 worth of gems from a safety deposit box In the crowded lobby of the Hotel Biltmore, get away and keep the theft hidden for months? Yet the loss of that sum of gems was discovered on June 13, 1919, by Mrs. Clarence Millhlser of Richmond, Va„ and even at first the authenticity of the story was doubted by the police and other men who have access to reports of big robberies. Among the jewels were thirty large pearls and a diamond said to be about 20 carats in weight. All but about >45,000 worth of the jewels were recovered by tho police and private detectives, and a man is now serving a term in Sing Sing. And there are other immense thefts of moving picture silks, .cash —and who hasn’t read the,stories of the bond thefts running in n millions? ' Stories of Heroism. True stories of heroism? Th< re was the story only two weeks ago of the fireman who had been kicked out of a fire department who saw a fire in a tenement and, at the risk of~ his own life, saved a family of sev< i frota death in the flames and wo reinstatement In the department f r himself. Hardly a week goes by that the fire -or police department do s not record some thrilling story of i eroisni among Its members. And then is another host of stories of the gallant traffic cop who saves the beautiful girl from sure death under her runaway horse’s hoofs and then i larries her. Can Irvin S. Cobb or Ellis Barker Butler match this true story ii these shaky days of prohibition —thli story that is writ In letters bold n the police records in the West Foi ty-sev-enth street station? A man w o had drunk freely of new brew 1< t his rendezvous in a daze, and, rt tching the street, leaned against a poi . He wanted another drink, and i m»embering that the prescription the place where he imbibed was to ] ress a button a certain number of tin ss, ho pressed a button; but this on i happened to be on a police sign; 1 and he didn’t get his highball fre n the angry cop who answered the si nal.