NEWS BY MAIL

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXX, Issue 12244, 4 May 1934, Page 4

NEWS BY MAIL

GIANT THERMOMETER ON EIFFEL TOWER, Ever since the electrical engineer Jacopozzi, who invented the flood lighting of the public buildings and monuments of Paris, thought of using the Eiffel Tower for a display* of constantly changing and moving patterns of twinkling lamps, and persuaded tlie Citroen firm. to pay the cost of the illuminations for the sake of a discreetly interpolated advertisement, the tower has been the main feature in the night sky of Paris (says the “Observer.”) A year ago the enormous . face and moving hands of a clock outlined in light established the - habit of' looking up at it from the many places, all over the town, .from which it is not hidden by buildings in the immediate foreground. That will be confirmed by the fact that above the clock and reaching to the top of the tower has now been placed an enormous thermometer. The figures, which are in the Centigrade, scale, do not extend higher than 20deg. which is 6S degrees in Fahrenheit) or leaver than 10 degrees under zero (which is 14deg above in Fahrenheit); but that is probably as hot or as cold 1 as it is ever likely to be in Paris at night —unless, as.has been suggested it is political and not physical temperature which the apparatus has been put up to register. KING JOHN’S SIN ACCOUNT. King John hunted on Holy Day s and ate meat on fast days. Then ho fed 100 poor people to compensate for his sins. He openly kept a debit and crodit account with Heaven the “'Sunday Express.”) Henry 111 was a pious mail, who did not know the value of money. He provided ,for 500 poor people every day r , and once in 1243 he fed 10, 000 and on another day 15,000. , These tales of Royal alms-giving were related in «. lecture at Hornimail’s Museum, London, by Miss j.,D. Tliornley, M.A. The idle must have found life easy in those , days, she said. Food, money, and clothing wore given as a-matter of course. It was constant alms-giving by the clergy that led to the introduction of tithes. One old order declared that a man who did not pay liis tithe would be brought before God’s tribunal and accused of. “the murder of all poor people iwho died of hunger in the placed where lie lived.” : England in the 14th century had 1,000 hospitals, including alms-houses. PHOTOGRAPHING THE INVISIBLE. An Englishman lias discovered a secret process wlioreby the invisible may bo photographed—a secret which may reduce and in timo almost eliminate tho crime of forgery. Ho is Colonel W. R. Mansfield 1 (his wife is Charlotte Mansfield, the novolist), and for many, years. ho has collaborated with Sootland Yard in the detection of forgeries. Colonel Mansfield told the “Sunday Dispatch” that lie had found a - means of photographing wliat - was called “invisible fluorescence. ’’ The; invisible, fluorescence.will bring; buck',, for' example, writings whieb hfiyo long faded or erased. f . j