RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 257, 26 July 1930, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL

(By

Kickshaws.)

Perhap* Mr. Forbes will tell just what happens when Income tax reach#* one hundred per cent.? • • • Honoraria for members of the Hons# of Representatives are set down at £80,600. The local Gag Company’* claim to produce gas at one-eighth of a penny per cubic foot remains unchallenged. Regarding the question of men who have held the positions during their lives of Prime Minister and Chief Justice, a reader gives two more Instances. Sir Charles Lilley, he states, held tins two posts In Queensland, while Sir James Martin did the same in New South Wales. Lilley migrated to Queensland in 1856. He was elected. > member for a suburb of Brisbane, retaining the seat consistently until he abandoned politics in 1874. Martin, on the other hand arrived in New South Wales as a youngster in 1821, and was educated in Sydney. Subsequently he took up journalism, became a lawyer, and armed with the combined knowledge of these two professions, entered politics, becoming Chief Justice in 1873.

Glenn Curtiss, one of the pioneers of flying, is dead. Among other things, he made the first public flight of a mila in the United States. One of the Wright brothers is dead, and one by one the men who saw aviation through its birth struggles are slipping away and leaving no more than monuments of stone to mark their lives. While we owe these pioneers a debt that can never be redeemed, it would be unfair to Imagine that they suddenly had inspirations all on their own, took to themselves wings, and in some cases crashed to their death as a result. Just as Marconi by no means invented radio, so the pioneers of the air by no means invented aviation. They arrived on the scene when by a happy combination of events the Internal combustion engine was In a position to prove to the world Its then unprecedented unreliability and lightness.

While not forgetting these air heroes of the beginning of this century, let us also remember such sbrewd personalities as Daedalus, who tried out a set of wax wings on his son, thereby causing him to crash in the Icarian Sea some hundreds of years B.C. A gentleman with a mechanical bent by the name of Archyatas is said to have made a mechanical dove In 400 8.C., so even in those far off days the foundation of aviation was being laid by pioneers long since forgotten. Bacon encouraged inventors by predicting, centuries before the time, that flying would become an accepted mode of transport.

Even a bishop, Wilkins by name, went so far as to prophesy that it will be “yet as usual to hear a man call for bis wings when he is going on a journey, as It is now to hear him call for his boots.” Despite the fact that this member of the clergy grossly under-estimated the power required to maintain a man in the air, the time may yet come when one buys a set of wings In much the same way as one buys skates, or skis. In 1843 a flying machine was actually Invented by a Mr. Henson, but for lack of means to propel it his Ideas were stillborn. Some twenty years later, at a meeting of the Aeronautical Society a member declared that, aided by apparatus and his own exertions, he had succeeded in rising from the ground and flown horizontally. Next year a man killed himself by dropping from a balloon in a parachute that failed to open, and In 1875 at Chatham a flying machine invented by Mr. Simmonds carried sandbags into the air to a height of about one hundred feet before crashing.

Some seven years before the end of last century a glider had actually made fairly successful flights at Harrow before going the way of all machines of the day. Maxim made a flight of 500 feet at Bexley, Kent, not long afterwards. His steam-driven machine carried two men, and if it did no more it served as encouragement for two more pioneers to lose their lives as a result of crashes. Lilenthal crashed on the Continent, and Pilcher was killed at Market Harboro, England. Moreover, a second machine designed by Langley dived Into the Potomac and was totally wrecked. The fact that none of these pioneers even flew properly, after all, was not their fault —they had no suitable engines.

Thousands have been killed in Italy as a result of an earthquake. Whole towns and villages have been destroyed, on a scale declared to be almost unprecedented. Considering Italy has had no fewer than 80,000 earthquakes during the last fifty years, compared to New Zealand's modest 2000, there can be little doubt that Mussolini rules one of the most shaky countries In the world. Indeed, the only other country with an equal record in earthquakes is Japan. Even a casual glance through the long list of Italian earthquakes indicates a loss of life measured In many cases by the thousand.

In AD. 79, of course, Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed as a result of a combined attack of earthquakes and Vesuvius. Even that catastrophe, although the best known, must have been comparatively puny compared to other efforts. In some cases lives lost are counted by the ten thousand. In 1137 in Sicily an earthquake destroyed no fewer than 15,000 persons, and as recently as 1841 14,806 were lost as the result of a shock which destroyed one town completely. In parts of Italy, indeed, earthquakes contribute a large proportion of the normal death-rate. In the course of 75 years, from 1783 to 1857, the Kingdom of Naples lost at least 110,000 inhabitants by the effects of earthquakes. This works out at a rate of 1500 a year, out of a total population of only six millions.

While our total of deaths from earthquakes has not yet reached twenty in a similar period of time, Italy seems to think nothing of wiping out batches of humanity at the rate of 5000 a time. One of the worst Italian shakes took place in Sicily two and a half centuries ago. Fifty-four cities and three hundred villages were overturned; no trace of Catania and its 18,000 inhabitants was found afterwards, and altogether at least 100,000 lives were lost Thia far exceeds the total of 30,000 lost at St Pierre as a result of volcanic disturbances in 1902. * ♦ • There once was an astrologer wh« fell, By inadvertence, down a well. “If you can’t see before your feet," they said, “How can you read above you? bead?”