Halley's Work Lives On After 300 Years

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28158, 22 December 1956, Page 7

Halley's Work Lives On After 300 Years

(By

E C. THOMSON)

LONDON. A friend once confided to me his hope that at least he would live until the year 1985. “How wonderful it would be.” he said. “How wonderful just to set eyes again on Halley’s comet.”

We in Britain have a proprietary interest in this celestial caller. Visible from the earth only once every 75 years, it was discovered in 1683 by Edmund Halley, one-time Astrono-mer-Royal and such a remarkable man in his generation that the Royal Society has just been holding celebrations in London to mark the tercentenary of his birth. To mention only one of Halley’s exploits, he pioneered 250 years ago the trails now being followed by the Commonwealth TransAntarctic Expedition, making magnetic maps among the icebergs from a ship he had borrowed from the Royal Navy. Halley's discovery of the comet, and his prediction, triumphantly confirmed 26 years after his death, that it would return in 1758, have overshadowed his other achievements. The Royal Society commemorations have not only revealed him as the world’s first geophysicist, but as promoter of a company for the recovery of wrecks with diving bells. It appears that, as a “gay type” in his youth, he spent merry days at the Deptford Docks, London, with the young Czar Peter of Russia studying shipbuilding. If Halley could reappear like his comet, what merry days could have been his recently on Clydebank. Scotland. The climax came a week or two back when Mrs Norman Robertson, wife of the High Commissioner for Canada, set the sirens bellowing in and around the famous John Brown Company yards as she launched the Sylvania. The new 22,000-ton liner joins her sister ships Saxonia. Ivernia and Carinthia next June, the fourth Cunarder for the Canadian service to be launched at the same yard within 33 months.

Colonel Denis Bates, chairman of the Cunard. described this as “a remarkable achievement of which any yard in the world might be justifiably proud”. Since the first of the ships entered service in 1954. thev have carried over 93,000 passengers between Britain and Canada.

Although the Sylvania, steaming into Montreal next summer, will appear externally to be the last word in modernity, her interior will provide passengers with the restful atmosphere of a more leisurely age. The decorations in Regency style will hark back to the early 19th century; the restaurant will reproduce the oak beam motif of London’s historic Clifford’s Inn, and the lounge will be modelled on the boudoir of Madame de Serilly. Though Halley never knew Clydebank, it is more than likely that his zeal for ships, took him to the Baltic Coffee House in the City of London, forerunner of the famous Baltic Exchange where Queen Elizabeth II has just opened an extension to the old building. The Baltic is the world’s largest centre for the chartering of tramp ships. But its business, as the Queen reminded her hearers in the inaugural speech, could trace its origins back to the vivid life of those London coffee houses in which merchants and ships’ captains used to foregather in the 17th and 18th centuries

The Baltic includes a coffee room today with new panelling presented by the Australian Government. Addressing the Baltic members and the Lord Mayor and sheriffs, the Queen said: ‘‘You have a proud reputation here for integrity and forthright dealing justly honoured in your motto, ‘Our word is our bond.’ This is more than an empty phrase for the exchange where everyday business with millions of pounds may be done by word of mouth. It is by traditions such as yours that the City of London became the clearing house of the world.” Ingenuity and Invention Floor space is fantastically valuable in the heart of the city, hence the ingenuity which has gone into devising a Banqueting Hall divisible if necessary into two separate rooms. A steel-framed wall rises silently from

a slot in the floor on five electricallydriven jacks, completely separating one half of the hall from the other. One can imagine such a contraption striking terror among the denizens of the old-time coffee houses, before the dawn of the age of int ention. Inventions, by the way, arc now flooding into the United Kingdom Patent Office at such a rate as almost to swamp the examiners. The torrent of ideas is now 40 per cent, bigger than before the Second World War. so Lord Mancroft. Under-Secretary of the Home Office, told the House of Lords. He was moving the second reading of the Patents Bill intended to allow more time to deal with patent applications. In the 1930’s there were about 21,000 applications a year. This year, said Lord Mancroft, there would be over 29.000. generally much more complex than 20 years ago. This, one supposes, is to be expected with the ever-expanding facilities for technical education and science. The inventions submitted today, to put it bluntly, are less harebrained on the whole than those of the previous generation. They are less concerned with old will-o’-the-wisps like perpetual motion and driving ships by the waves of the ocean. Years ago I remember seeing in the Patent Office applications for patents for a teapot with two spouts, and a gadget for waterproof wristlets “to intercept moisture running down oyer the hands and wrists while eating crayfish."

If inventors would eschew nuclear physics and stick to simple, homely ideas like these, the Patent Office examiners would not now be faced with a mountain of arrears!