THE YOUNG ELECTRICIAN

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21986, 9 January 1937, Page 15

THE YOUNG ELECTRICIAN

Electricity for Boys. By Ellison Hawks. Ivor • Nicholson and Watson Ltd. 387 pp. (7/6 net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. The author, as editor of “Meccano Magazine” and as the writer of books on popular science has had wide experience, the benefit of which is shown in his latest work. On the theoretical side the subject matter is carefully chosen and clearly expounded. The experiments selected can be carried out with home-made apparatus, in a few cases elaborate, but not beyond the capabilities of a keen boy of average mechanical ability. The second half of the book is devoted to engineering applications; and here again the same clearness of description is to be found. The generation of electric current in different types of modern power stations .is fully described. The development of the telegraph precedes a description of the telephone. A long account of the development of wireless telegraphy follows. X-ray, i television, and the transmission of pictures by telegraphy are modern developments that are discussed. With one or two exceptions the book is free of the mistakes in definition which are so often found in popular works. Such a complete introduction to the subject should rouse the interest of any boy.

ABOUT POLAND Sfo Longer Foies Apart. By Henry Baerlein. Longmans. Green and Co, 340 pp. (15/- net.) Perhaps the earnest seeker after information about Poland should be warned not to try this book. After all, there are year-books, there are sxhaustive studies from this angle and from that, with statistics, maps, j bibliographies, and acknowledgments to the kind nobleman who read the whole in manuscript and the painstaking young lady in spectacles who compiled the index for nothing. And after all, those of us > who like Mr Baerlein’s wit. his skipping mind, his carefql frivolity, his easy skill in whisking up fantastic much from (probably) prosaic little, and his range of observation and his close, quick look and, in Johnson’s phrase, his “snatch of opportunity”—after all, we are enough (it is to be hoped) to pay him well for his' book without support from Mr and Mrs Pump, who regularly attend those interesting Thursday afternoons of the Problematical Europe Circle (with tea and lettuce sandwiches). We shall be satisfied, richly, by his long conversation with Szapszat. the Bishop of the Caraims —not only Bishop, indeed, but Archbishop, and honorary General in the Persian Army; by folk tales, as of the Poles who go out on St. John s Eve and spread sheets to be saturated with the dew of the meadows: by the sad account of the insult offered to Poland when the French Military Mission brought their own ladies: by the miracle that brought back the Radziwills from Lutheranism into the Church —■ “The Prince and his two boys were at a table and the windows open, so that all the pious people coming out of church could see them. They were very gay, especially the Prince, and a large dish of meat was being brought into the room. It was a dish of chickens —they had been cut up, to. make it easier to help ’ oneself. And all at once the pieces flew together—it was a great miracle, you understand . . ; ... Then the estate official crossed himS6lf> "And to the amazement of the Radziwills and of the pious people coming out. from Mass the birds began to sing, they were alive.” There is the admirable discourse of the lieutenant on provincial French cooking. There are the stories of the foundation of Warsaw, which only goes back to ordinary hunters, and of Cracow, whifch more proudly goes back to the remoter days of dragons; (Now it has 54 churches, eight synagogues, 34 monasteries and convents, and at least one Turkish bath.) There is the curious discovery of ships of the Polish navy at Pinsk, inland a long way from the sea; and here arises a valuable discourse on the work of the Baltic Institute to make the Poles sea-minded, each one conscious and proud of his own ,006 of an inch of national seaboard. Mr and Mrs Pump, if they were to read this book, would even find something about the drainage of the great marshes of Polesia and about the new thing in Polish nationalism —the awakening of national consciousness in the middle class, which is a political phenomenon that Mr Baerlein learned of from the village stationmaster whose wife gave them little glasses of plum liqueur and a plate of savouries, “a round of toast on which was melted cheese, and on the cheese a tiny section of tomato ... hot and most delectable.” There is another thing: “If ever you want to make a Polish person understand that you are wild with him, then simply shout ‘Dog’s blood!’ It will be quite sufficient and your man will crumple up.” Mr Baerlein learned that —only he knew it already—from Teofil, who manufactured soda-water in the United States and, on his revisiting the land of his birth, struck acquaintance with Mr Baerlein one night’in the streets of Wilno. So he became the companion of this Polish journey and the beguiling, simple chatterbox of many of these amusing pages. '