THE WASH OF LINER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3142, 6 November 1922, Page 7

THE WASH OF LINER.

(By Tarpaulin.) "Washing day" is mostly a subject for joke about cold meat and pickles. But 1 found a laundry romance in the docks at Southampton the other ray. It was a romance of numbers and speed. A procession of motor-lorries loaded l with crumpled linen passed into a backwater of the docks. There were many of them, and curiosity led me after them. They stopped outside a building that I knew to be part of an engineering firm's work. What on earth had dirty linen to do with lathes and rivets? Men flung bales and baskets feverishly from the lorries to an ever-moving belt that carried them up into a mysterious attic. I followed by an outside staircase, and when I opened' the door plunged into a faint odour of warm soap ,a murmur of machinery, and a rousing chorus of song. The whole length of the upper part of that engineering works has been adapter! for a laundry for the White Star ships, and the lorries were delivering a day's wash of the Majestic, totalling 126,000 pieces. The entrance was encumbered, in an orderly sort of way, with hillocks of red counterpanes, honeycomb towels, table-napkins, sheets, blankets, dishcloths. ' A woman, clogged and waterproofed, trundled a trolley up t<> » hillock, hurled armfuls of linen into it. and clattered away to one of, the ever-turning washing machines. Thence they passed into a high scientific mangle that squeezed the water out of them by centrifugal force ! The container whirls round at 1400 revolutions a minute, and the wet things in it. trying to obey the natural law of mechanics, squeeze and squeeze themselves against the sides with such pressure that the water from them gushes out of the gully in the base of the machine. The half-dried linen was tugged out a few minutes later, dumped in another trolley, and wheelcy away to the other end of the great room for ironing. It was the girls who stood before and behind the giant rollers who sang. They and the girl jugglers who did strange feats with wet table-cloths and sheets. It was uncanny, they way they picked up a clammy mass, held it by four corners, flapped it once, and then flicked il.g'racel'ullv curving through the air, to fall in ordered folds in the arms of a waiting girl, who laid it in the trough readv for feeding to the machine. At the other end of the rollers it came out, stiff, glossy, white—dried' and aired and ironed in one operation. The girls folded rapidly a.s the machine delivered the pieces, and passed them, sorted into sizes, to the packers' tables. Less than three hours after the first bale went into th laundry there were already stacks of clean linen ready tor reissue.

A. new airplane muffler has been perfected in Europe which does not reduce the efficiency of the motor. Silent flying has now become a fact after 18 years of effort by engineers. , ' The stillg of a bee caused the driver of an automobile near Cincinnati (USA.) to lose control of the car, with the result that it plunged over an Bft embankment and overturned, pinning its occupants underneath. One woman died. , The American Bible Society which distributes annually about five million copies of the" Bible in 150 different languages and dialects, is now sending Bible passages by Avireless. The Rev. Dr Cody, rector of St. Paul's Church, Toronto, who was nominated for the Archbishopric of Melbourne, who stands in the front rank «f religious and national leaders of Canada, preached before the King and Queen in the chapel at Buckingham Palace recently. He was Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario while still holding his rectorship, and hits church iis thronged every Sunday. He has a, particularly keen sense of humor, and there is nothing he loves better than a. good joke. All 1 telephones in North America stopped for one minute during tha funeral service of Dr Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was buried near his Cape Breton residence. In a grave hewn out of solid rock near the foot of a stately fir tree. Dr Bell was la*iid! to rest in his tweed corduroy working suit.