ELECTRIC WONDER

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXIII, Issue 11549, 28 January 1932, Page 6

ELECTRIC WONDER

PERFECT METAL CONDUCTOR

SCIENTIST’S DISCOVERY

MONTREAL, Dee. 12,

Dr. .J. C. McLennan, of the University of Toronto, after nine sears of unrelentimr research, claims to have unravelled a mystery which has baffled .scientists for decades — how an electric current passes through metal. One of the mod momeidcus applications of. the discovery wi'l be. lie claims, the production of an alloy which will be a perfect conductor ot electricity. v Already Dr. McLennan ha_ found combinations of metals which have proved perfect conductors, although their temperatures have been higher than is the ease with certain pu) e mMa’-s. There fillovs were made into rings and carried an undiminislied flow of current for some hours.

The only handier]) to bo overcame before all electrical transmission equipment in tho world heroines obsolete is. Dr. Me Leiuian claim.-, the production of an. id by which will be a perfect, or nearly perfect, cdiductor at ordinary temperatures:. Millions of dollar- would bo saved every year in Canada if the perfect alloy was forthcoming it would mean an end of iln* tremendous waste which occurs 'through the drop in potential of current carried a considerable di stance.

A prominent Canadian scientist declared that the discovery will upset the present trend of industrial and social history. -‘No longer.’’ Ik* said, ‘‘will large factories have to be .situated near sites where the water-power is great, removed from the centres of population. Electricity will be carried hundreds of miles, if need he, to the centres of population. Power manufactured in the northern wildernesses of Canada will he math, available in cities a. thousand miles .south.’’ Dr. McLennan is me of Canada’s foremost scientists. He w.i,s horn in Ontario in 1867, the soil of David McLennan, of Aberdeenshire. He was educated at Toronto and Cambridge, and has been Director of the Physical Laboratory at Toronto since 190-L He wa,s 'Scientific advisor to the British Admiralty in 1919.