WHAT DOSE THE WORLD WANT?

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 133, 7 June 1930, Page 10 (Supplement)

WHAT DOSE THE WORLD WANT?

STRANGE USES FOR BRITISH INVENTION'S. Strance things happen when modern pita penetrate foreign For instance, tie grand etaffcaaeof tie Prime Minister's palace in Nepal is decorated with brightly-coloured slot machines, cash registers and automatic scales Why the Prime Minister has adopted this form of interior decoration no one really knows, except, perliaps the enterprising commercial traveller who sold the machines. Then there is the local potentate in Borneo who lives in an electncaUylighted and refrigerated _ palace th houses a fleet of expensive motor cars which the native ruler can only drive to and fro on a mile and a half of specially constructed road. Natives in par s of Africa use running knickers for shirts, while in China garters are sometimes worn for ornamental rather than useful purposes. Yet there are stranger things than these. An English manufacturer was mystified at large orders from the South American country tor pearl buttons sewed on squares of Ted flannel, until it was found out for him that the native Indian women did not use the buttons, but sewed the entire squares on their dresses. Yet they were more logical than the prosperous Chinese merchant who installed four pianos in the four corners of his parlour, although neither he nor any member of his family could play a note. But a better use has been found for petrol or at least for petrol cans. The five-gallon cans have become the. universal bucket from Kamchatka to Dakar. Water, from the wells of Beersheba, where' Abraham and Sarah drank, quenches the thirst of desert travellers to-day, but now the water is drawn up in oil.cans!