RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 258, 28 July 1930, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Kickshaww-f The Britlah Rugby player* taw been allowed to bring in their souvenir badges duty free. If they leave the rubber behind it Is understood a similar concession on that article will be wllbingly made by our Customs authorities. • • * Experts are busy trying to co-ordin-ate our transport problem. What with level-crossing accidents one would have thought It was already co-ordinated enough. An insurance executive in New York, seeing a supposedly dead man hurrying on his way to work, started an investigation and discovered! 39 other live persons for whom death benefits had been paid out. Before a grand jury 27 of these corpses testified that they had not known they were dead. The number of tricks and hoaxes in the underworld of insurance Is legion. At one time It was perfectly legitimate for anybody to take out an insurance premium on the life of somebody else as a speculation. The older the Individual the greater the speculation. •* . • Aged country yokels, when this habit was prevalent, on becoming 111 were not a little surprised to find specialists from London ministering to their physical disabilities. Supplies of costly soups apd rich food appeared by special messengers and as much care was taken of their comfort as if they had been pet dogs belonging to the wife of some millionaire. This system of insurance speculation, nearly as exciting as horse-racing, was made illegal in 1774. Since then, however, all manner of loopholes have been worked out and some cases at considerable profit A profitable deal of this kind was made at the expense of an ex-M.P. who had Insured his life for £lOO,OOO. He was unable to pay the second premium, £2582. The money was found by a speculator. Within two years the M.P. was murdered, and the man who had taken over the policy cleared £lOO,OOO.

Some years ago £5OOO was claimed and paid by a company on the grounds that a man whose life was Insured wag dead. A few months later the manager of the company, while visiting Paris, came up against the dead man in the street “You look well for a drowned man,” he remarked. The dead man then sheepishly explained that it was his brother who had been insured in the company. "I certainly passed a medical examination for him, but I am not and never was insured In your company.” The brother when discovered paid back the £5OOO without a murmur, and avoided a costly lawsuit

The pontoon bridge that has collapsed across the Rhine must be the first bridge disaster that has been mentioned In newspapers for many years. Tunnels collapse, buildings fall down, pipes burst church spires topple over, and even gasometers have been known to explode, but the collapse of a bridge In the fair execution of Its duties seems to be an occurrence so rare that it Is difficult to find any examples. A suspension bridge at Manchester in 1831 collapsed under the load of a company of marching soldiers. The rhythm of their step had set the whole bridge swaying. The steel cables broke under the strain where they joined the supporting towers, and the whole company was pitched into the river, lor this reason troops now break step when marching over suspension bridges. » * • Perhaps the best known bridge disaster, still vividly remembered in the small villages In the vicinity, took place In 1879 when the Tay Bridge fell. This bridge, which was over 10,000 feet long, consisted of 85 spans and was completed in 1877. From the start It was a “hoodoo” bridge, 20 lives being sacrificed in its construction alone. During a gale two years later a mall train passed on to the bridge but was never signalled at the other side. A signalman scrambled through the teeth of the gale until he came to a gap which, it was discovered afterward, was 3000 feet wide. Between 75 and 90 persons perished, but it remains a mystery whether the wind blew t > bridge away before the arrival of the train or whether the train, acting as the last straw on an overstrained bridge, was actually responsible for the disaster. At any rate, the Board of Trade inquiry curtly said that the bridge “had been badly designed, badly constructed, and badly maintained.

Since then all manner'of extraordinary bridges have been built, and, except for the collapse of the Quebec bridge while still under construction, catastrophes have been remarkab y few. Considering the amount of material built into some well-known bndges, it is astounding what a combination of mathematics and steel can give in longtesting security. The Forth Bndg one of the daintiest in the world, 51,000 tons of steel and 6,000,000 rivets woven into a structure capable of tdking the strains of two e^P ress .. tral ! 1 ® passing one 'another at 60 miles an. hour. S Another remarkable bridge m Florida which has given no trouble since it was first built carries a i ailway across 100 miles of open sea, and Svdnev bridge when finished will acXXLte U railway «. ten-foot footways and a 57-foot.road. • • • It is stated that most of the men at the top of the, tree in Canada started life with nothing. It the fir ®t that nroves the stumbling-block with St ’£« niiihmai™. "I “»■’ it much easier to make my second mi lion than to save my first hundred pounds.” confessed Mr. Andrew Carnegie. He had toiled for over ten years as bobbin boy at tenpence a day,. engine tender, telegraph hoy, and m«_ senger boy. before he scraped together that magic hundred 35/- a week he was drawing as railway clerk. * , Lord Lererhuime climbed toward h£ millions behind the grocer's shop at a Mr ned halfeleven Sir Thomas Lipton earned w t £lOO and’open his first, sms ■ Stobcross Street, Glasgow.* Man made a bridge, A spider spun a web, God hung spinning w^’ ds J n Man employed a cantilever span, Tlie spider a suspension; God a flying buttress pinioned to