Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1886 — BIDDY AND WORKSHOP. [ARTICLE]

BIDDY AND WORKSHOP.

Ax electrical clock that runs without finding, is not affeqted by the atmosphere, cannot vary, and can l*e sold for 1 ofie-half this cost of the ordinary dock, has been invented in that, .enchanted region known as the Menlo Park, the home of the wizard Edison. Some soldering fluids are injurious to tools and also to parts that have been laid on the bench. The following fluid will not rust and tarnish any more than water: Take two ounces of alcohol and put into a bottle, add about a teaspoonful of chloride of zinc, and shake until dissolved. Use it in the same manner as muriate of zinc is commonly used. In spite of the alleged impossibility of operating telephone wires under ground the Bell Telephone Company’s report shows that 2,203 miles of telephone wire were put under ground last year in the cities of Washington, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Milwaukee. There are now 3,428 miles of telephone wire under ground in these cities. During a recent discussion of the estimates for the railways of AlsaceLorraine, which are owned and worked by the State, it was mentioned that the daily work of locomotive drivers varied from four to five hours on fast trains to ten hours on freight trains with switching service for a long time. The drivers had every fourth or fifth, or at the least every seventh, dby for rest. Pointsmen or switchmen have a day off ©Very two w.eeks. Attention has been called to the connection which exists between gas explosions in coal mines and certain atmosphere conditions, which is expressed by saying that the number of such explosions is very considerably greater under atmospheric pressure (under socalled barometer depression) than with a normal or high barometer. Numerous experiments prosecuted last summer at the mines of archduke Albert, in Ostran-Karwin, confirmed the views of the English experts and those expressed by Cowen before the English parliament in 1878, and Science predicts that they will produce a change of opinion in other countries where those views are not known. They show the great importance of the barometer in coal-mining. The order is already in force at Karwin, forbidding blasting at all dangerous points on the approach of a barometric depression, and, if the danger increases, all work is to be suspended. A series of experiments have been made with natural gas in the puddling and heating furnaces of the Beaver Falls Iron Company, Beaver Falls, Pa., which, it is claimed by those who have been conducting the experiments, demonstrate as an actual fact that which has heretofore been deemed an impossibility. By the peculiar construction of the heating furnace upon which the test was made the gas, after being turned on and lighted, succeeded in bringing tlie furnace to a white heat in loss than t wo4lpurs; with coke it generally requires t'foolye hours to produce the same degree ofhelt. The furnace was a cinder or ore bottomed fur a ace, and grew so hot that the cinders in the bottom melted and ran out of the tap-ping-bole like liquid, and had not the furnace itself been built of the very best quality of fire brick it would have melted down. The heat was concentrated and combustion perfect. In the stack there was but little flame and but few degrees of beat.