RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 178, 26 April 1938, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights On Current Events

(By

Kickshaws.)

Mr. Sopworth says he will not attempt to win the America’s Cup until England has a better tank for testing purposes. Well, after all, there’s the whole Atlantic Ocean. * The French Cabinet declares that the crisis cannot be solved by standing “pat.” This must be the carpenter who gets so thirsty cabinet building.

We note that Lord Londonderry tripped over a wire and broke his collar bone while the Prime Minister of England was fishing, but we wish to deny a rumour that the accident was caused by a fishing yarn.

In the news of the slaughter in Spain it seems incongruous that Franco should have been reported to have occupied Jesus and Christ. One has merely to accept the incongruity of names. Far more suitable it would have been if Franco had occupied Hell. — Unfortunately Hell is already full up. It is a peaceful happy village in the north of Norway. As the cruise ships stop some 20 miles away American tourists are tickled to death to buy a ticket to Hell. They send the tickets to their friends. The result is financially satisfactory to Norway. Enough tickets to Hell are sold to crowd four excursion trains daily. But only enough tickets are used to fill three coaches of one train. America herself boasts no Hell, but she has 17 Arcadias, and 13 Paradises. One may, furthermore, venture to wonder if the inhabitants of Kissimee, Lackawack, Wapwallopen and Wehadkee lead appropriate lives. What, though, about those who live in Battiest, Sheets Shinhoppie, and Funkstown?

All this talk about de-sterilising American gold or doing the opposite if there be such a thing, makes one imagine that America is full of gold. Well, she has about £1.500,000,000 of the stuff. It sounds a lot. It means that if it were rationed outiamong her people each one would get one teaspoonful of gold dust, or about £ll worth of gold. It isn’t very much t.» shout about. In fact, if the people of America owned all the gold in the world their share-out would be a dessertspoonful each. The folk of England, if they got a share of the gold in the Bank of England, would find themselves with half a teaspoonful of gold dust. It is just these teaspoonfuls that are at the bottom of financial problems. Yet, when all is said and done, a teaspoonful of food or honey might be considered worth all the gold in the world —on a desert island. Certainly if you offered a calf a bucket of gold dust or a bucket of skimmed milk it would go for the last-named. But, then, cows are not economists.

There is one awful horror that for generations has hung above the heads of financial experts and money wizards. They live for ever with a haunting fear that gold might suddenly become as plentiful as iron. Actually it is. or anyway very nearly as plentiful. Thu gold taken annually from below the surface is worth about £250,000,000. Yet there is a supply that is almost inexhaustible that has never been tapped. The 35,000,000 ounces of gold that are extracted from below' ground level are nothing to the 50.000 billion ounces in rhe sea. If this were extracted and divided among us we could throw away our teaspoonful of gold dust. At the present price of gold we would each have gold worth £175,000. That is, we ought to have this value of gold. Unfortunately, as soon as we all got our gold, its value would fall to the level of high-grade steel. We should have each 25,000 ounces of something which nobody else wanted like mad. This would be a pity, because nobody would want to quarrel.

"Until we have a testing tank like the Americans,” says Mr. Sopwith, "it is useless to try to build a yacht in England capable of beating America’s best.” This is a confession that the mathematics of flow are quite beyond theory. In the old days it was a hit-and-miss method. One built two vessels. One might be the Cutty Sark and the other a barge. Only experience could say which would be which. From these methods Britain emerged nearly 70 years ago into the tank era. The first was built at Torquay. The essentially practical method of ship design was introduced of making a toy ship and seeing how she went. Some IS years later a better tank was built which seemed to indicate that practice would never be able to wait for theory to catch up. Next there came a better tank on the Clyde, and later on at the National Physical Laboratory near London. Germany produced what was claimed to be a better tank and America built even better ones at Washington and Michigan. z There the tank race ends for the moment.

It seems strange that the nation that has always led the world at shipbuilding must now be unable to deny the contention of Mr. Sopwith that racing yachts cannot be tested out iu British tanks to compete with American yachts, The general arrangement is, however, the same. The model to be tested, yacht or steamship, is clamped at its proper level to a moving carriage above the water. The force required to drag the model through the water is measured. The arithmetic of testing is more practical than the theory of form design. The relationship that exists between the model and the real vessel is not simple. Roughly it is that the speed of testing shall be proportional to the square root of the length of the model. A model built on a scale of one in 64 would be tested at one-eighth the speed of the real vessel. As the resistance is proportional to the square of the speed the actual resistance of the model would have to be multiplied by 64 square to get at realitv. This gives a multiplication factor of 262,144. It is obvious, therefore, that the larger the model the less the size of this multiplying fuctor timi the more reliable the

“tn reply to ’ln Doubt’ regarding Spring-heei .lack, there was an individual who used to roam about the suburbs of Christchurch acting the ghost." writes "Interested Reader.” "But it was much more than 50 years—nearly 60. 1 was only a lad at the time, but there were all sorts of wild rumours about him. He could do the most impossible things, according to rumour. But thifre was one thing which he did. and that was severely to frighten several people. One rumour was that >t was Peacock’s ghost, another was that it was a wellknown resident, who died at Marton a few years ago. However, nobody really knew who he was, as far as I was able to find out.’’

I raise my glass Io the silent horde. Spread o’er the world’s expanse. To the unknown many who might have soared, But never had a chance. —Author unknown.