BOYS' OWN COLUMN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 77, 31 March 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOYS' OWN COLUMN.

WONDERS OF THE MECHANICAL AGE. CEASELESS FLOW OF NEW INVENTIONS. Dear Boy«,— You and I have often heard what has by now become an everyday expression—"This Is a mechanical age, an age of machinery." Boys, sometimes I shudder when I read and think of what a mechanical age it is. Recently I read of some of the world's latest machinery mechanical men which can perform a number of acts at the word of command. What part will these human machines play in another war. Let us pray there will not be another, but listen. Twenty years ago a Mr. Thomas showed at a London theatre a safe which opened its doors at a whistle; to-day a professor has devised a way by which a spoken word will open the doors of his house. But whistle the wrong note, or speak the wrong word, and the mechanical slave will not obey. A mechanical man made by the Westinghouse Electric Company is one more wonder which answers- to the command of a voice. Orders are given by the operator— by telephone, too—repeated back by the mechanical man, the order is obeyed, and then finally he signals to the operator that he has performed the action and is ready for further commissions. Then there is an automatic dog, which comes out of his kennel when called with the right words. There are, in America, water reservoirs which automatically report their depth of water over the telephone. One of the most mechanical things in this most mechanical world is the automatic control of certain English electric trains. If a signal is set against an oncoming train that train will be automatically brought to a standstill. Yet the train itself sets the automatic signals for the train that follows it, and this in turn sets the signals for another, and so on. A year or so ago many tests were made of a wireless signalling apparatus that would bring an express train to rest. The tests were perfectly successful, and followed by those of the control of a boat by wireless. It is, indeed, a fact that a vessel can be sent to sea with no human being aboard, and that it can be steered and made to fire torpedoes and drop mines, by tha direction of a man on shore. Aeroplanes, too, may soon be sent into the sky, piloted, and brought safely back to their starting places solely by wireless direction. This is, indeed, a very mechanical age, and the ceaseless flow of Xil new inventions and f /« « discoveries will SoJ make it incredibly more mechanical as time goes on.