POWER ALCOHOL

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 28

POWER ALCOHOL

NO LACK OF MATERIAL

-The -chemist ; can-work '.wonders, even to the extent of producing alcohol, in a ; roundabout and-involved: way out of chalk; But there is no need to do anything in the nature of an apparent miracle. Power alcohol, can be made'from an enormous variety of raw materials, all of which can , be grown annually.

Talk'about the. impossibility of .producing an adequate supply ■is apparently based, on. the misconception that its ativocates suggest obtaining .it .only from obvious sources. ,As a.matter of fact, the contrary, view- obtains, and no one who'suggests the,use of alcohol in .interhal;combusti.on ■■■'■ engines proposes to obtain it from any source which would imperil, the food supplies. Alcohol has been obtained in ample quantities from the prickly pear, and more recently some investigations carried out on the Indian Vassia have had remarkable results. Recently a successful search, for raw materials for power alcohol was carried out in Australia. Prolonged experiments were made with a very large -number of vegetable'substances, two of the more important of these being sorghum and the zamia palm.

The sorghum, of which several varieties suitable for use are -known, can be crushed in a two-roller mill set very closely together, so that the stalks would pass through without actually stopping the. machinery. The.yield of spirit worked out irregularly, ranging, according, to the variety of sorghum, from just over 7 gallons to 113 gallons to the acre, the average being just over

52 gallons. This works out at an average of over' 4f. gallons per ton of clean cane, at the rate of eight gallons per ton. Amongst other materials . are all fruits and grains; most vegetation can be made a'source of alcoholprbduction. and certain varieties of ■ roots and of palms rich'in starch give a very high yield per ton of pulp.

There are five possible explanations for the failure of current to reach the coil, They are a loose ccrmecticn. which is the most common, a broken wire, defective switch, dead battery, or a poor ground connection.

"NUTS!" Intellect Sharpeners All rights reserved.. (By C. J. Wherefore)

Readeo with a little Ingenuity will find In this column an abundant store of entertainment and amusement, and the solving of the problems should orovlde excellent mental exhilaration. While lone of the "nuts" may appear Harder than others, ft will be found" that none will require a sledgehammer to crack them. Address corresoondwiee to P.O. Box 1177. WelUnfton.

A DEAL IN PLUMS. j Mrs. Grasping had a very good crop of plums from her trees this'year, and thought it would be a good idea to sell what she did not want, but she was not pleased with the offer made to her; The intending purchaser had mentioned a round number, so many guineas as it happens, for the lot, and she thought he ought to quote so much per pound. The man made no objection to this, but when he- had weighed the plums, he may have been amused in finding that what he had to pay was less than the amount he had offered. In fact the cheque fell short of the former value by the numbers of shillings and pence which- represented the number of pounds and shillings in the first, offer. To his partner he admitted that the weight came to 231bs more than he had estimated, but the sum he had proposed to. pay was the equivalent of the smaller number of pounds at a price one half penny per pound more than the price per pound at which he had now bought them. How many pounds of fruit were there, and what price did he pay? A BIRTHDAY PARTY. Tnree children~Alice, Bessie, and Charlie, had invited • their grandfather to a tea party on the occasion of his birthday. As this happened on a Saturday, when all three had no lessons to trouble them, it was a very joyful event. Their three ages added together came to 27, and Alice is onethird as old again as her sister. Grandfather is certainly a white-haired man, although not a centenarian, in fact his age is not more than equal to the product of the ages of Alice and her brother. What are the four ages? A WEEK'S RAINFALL. -My old friend, Mr. Q, - has been taking a great deal of interest in the amount of rain which has ■ fallen recently, and'has made a rain gauge out of the odds and ends he has ill his workshop. During the first six days, Monday to Saturday, it registered exactly six inches, that is 600 points, according to the notation usually adopted for convenience. Mr. Q says that on Monday it. showed an amount, which' he refuses to tell me, on Tuesday the amount exceeded this by 25 per* cent., and on Wednesday there was actually twice as much ■as -on Monday) On Thursday the-rainfall was exactly one inch more than it had been on one of the previous days, but he does not specify which. Friday's amount was only three-quarters of. that shown on the day before, and Saturday's result was a full onethird more than that of Thursday. He refuses to tell me the actual figures for any one of these days. Is it possible, to find.,them?.. . . ' ■ .' SUBSTITUTION PROBLEM. - The firm of Grinne and Behrit make it their practice 'to mark their prices an all goods in such a way that only their employees know the real amount. They manage this by using ;the letters of a word, which they reckon from left to right as equivalents of the numerals ! to 9 and 0. The. problem is to discover what this key-word is, and the following example of a sum in simple addition, is the clue offered:— SOY.S ODEG .