TERRORS OF FOG.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 11 January 1928, Page 11

TERRORS OF FOG.

OVERCOME BY AN INVENTOR. A thick blanket of fog settled down over England'one day in November, 1.026. and for nearly a week shrouded tiie island. Airplanes first felt the effect; the passenger planes of Imperial Airways ceased flying to Paris, then the Government mail planes stopped. London traffic was crippled; taxis and busses groped their way through the log, clinging to the kerb in peril of running into each other and getting lost. As the fog cloud became denser ships in the Channel lost their way, suffered collisions, and finally stopped altogether. England for a time was isolated from the rest of the world by fog. Millions of dollars were lost through the tie-up of shipping and mails. The nation was blinded. This may never happen again, for a young Scotch inventor in London is conquering that ancient eerie enemy of man (writes the London correspondent of the San Francisco “Chronicle”). He can see through fog. He is rapidly perfecting an apparatus that will enable ships and planes and taxi-cabs to steer their way through fog. The man who is robbing the fog of its terrors is John L. Baird, who once made patent socks, later ran a jam factory in the West Indies, and within the last eighteen months has given the world television, or the electrical transmission of sight. . Now his latest discovery i:s noctovision. With it Baird penetrates both, fog and darkness with an invisible searchlight Abeam. Noctovision, when perfected, will free mankind from one of the greatest terrors of the elements, the only natural phenomenon that blinds him and renders him helpless to move about. It will save millions of dollars annually in such harbours as London and New York by releasing shipping and will save manv lives now lost in collisions. Baird recently gave a demonstration of his noctovision in his London laboratory. An admiral of the- British Fleet was present and several eminent scientists. Baird created artifically a dense fog. exactly reproducing the real t-liing-Ho had intended to post one of Ids assistants in the middle of it. hut tii*’ fog was so thick that a ventriloquists v dummy had to he substiutued The little group to whom he was demonstrating noctovision withdrew into an adjoining room and the dummy in the fo<r was entirely lost to sight. • Then Baird threw on the dummy an invisible beam of light from his noctovision apparatus, which looks something like a searchlight. Attached to this apparatus is a screen about two Copt square. Suddenly on that screen dots of light, appeared and shaped ' themselves into, the image of the fog- . shrouded dummy.