FUTURE WONDERS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 21 January 1928, Page 9

FUTURE WONDERS

SCIENTISTS TO FEED THE WORLD

LIFE-FORCE SWITCHED ON

AT scientists may one day do the work of the farmer and provide man and beast with nourishing food made with chem.cals is suggested by the recent research work of the biochemical school at Liverpool (writes Sir Lhilip Gibbs in the “Sunday Chronicle”). This is only one of tiie countless fields in wh.ch science is making immense strides. Some of the wonders that she lias in store for mankind are dealt with in this article.

More power is coming to man. Those scientists w.th whom 1 have been talk- • ing, and tvnbse books I have been reading, are exploring many new sources of power, or rather, the eternal , sources of power newly revealed. They have been getting anxious, I find out about the present reserves energy in common use, which are likely, to give out at some future date. They are anxious about the world .suppl.es of coal and oil and food. EASIER FOR THE UNFIT. As regards food, the balance between the industrial groups of men and the agricultural groups who provide the food of the world is no longer regulated with a margin of safety. Cities are becoming more crowded with people escaping from the f.ekls. Urban civilisation with its mental lures tends to absorb the enormous increase of population in some countries due to the activity of scientists who make life easy for the unfit as well as for the fit. By cheeking or exterpating the old epidemic diseases, t,hep- are keeping babies alive when formerly an enormous percentage of them would have d.ed, and they are increasing the chance of adult life by defeating Nature’s cruel old way of relieving the pressure of population. SYNTHETIC 1"U01). Motor ears, [gramophones, all the manufactured articles of industrial i civilisation are being poured out at an ever-increasing rate of production, but unless the people who make them can exchange them for food, they will die or .slink back to the fields to scrape a bare life out of the earch which cannot feed adequately so vast a multi-

tude as wi.l crowd the world of the future.

it is possible, and some of our .scientists seem to think it probable, that one result of our new knowledge will be. to replace the dwindling processes of agriculture by synthetic iood made in the chemist’s shop. This chemical food will contain the v.tal fuel required bv tne human machine, and its actions and reactions will be precisely similar to that of the chemical elements introduced into the uodr bv w’ha-t we now eat.

it is likely in the near future many new types or fruits and vegetables will be produced by scientmc grafting, and the same plant will be made to grow different kinds of food at the same time. STORED UP HEAT. That sounds like fa.ry-tale stuff, but Pio-essor Lucien Daneil, of Rennes, in France, has pioduced a hybrid successfully growing tomatoes above ground and potatoes below. Mankind (.says a great chemist) still ii\es ssiely on the energy derived from the sun. . . . Everything that moves, or has in it the potentiality of movement, possesses energy, and if we trace this energy to its source we find that in almost every case it comes from the sun. The sun’s energy, some part of universal energy, :.u stored up in the very atoms widen go to make up what men call matter. That is a new revelation which is going to have incalculable results. it was the discovery of radium Oy a woman scientist—Madam Curie — | which has set all the scientists search- 1 ing for sonic means of liberating and j harnessing that inexhaustible supply . of energy ' which is revealed by radio J activity. , SECRET GF RADIUM. j Radium beat, we-are now told, is a third of a million times as great, as the same amount of coal combustion. A pouiuj weight could be made to do the work of 150 tons of dynamite. There ■ s an unceasing supply of this energy in the matter that iies around us.

If the scientist can get hold of it, liberate and ultilise that atomic force — some of them think they are getting close to the secret—mankind will be put into possession of power so 'illimit-

able that all previous forms oi energy such as coai and oil and water will become negligible, and man himself will be the master of the very source and origin of power. Meanwhile not a year passes without some new method of replacing or intensvfying present forms of energy being tried out by the scientists. The chemists are at work on different -lornis of fuel which may be substitutes for coal and oil. Two Trenehmen, iProudhomme and Houtiry, are, it seems, verey near the industrial production of - artificial petroleum by a chemical synthesis from lignite (or brown coal) which France possesses in large areas. Other experiments are being made by engineers to ultilise one of the oldest forms of power in terms of modern industry. The wind may he used again to drive the wheels, and Haldane foretells the day when the country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors, which in their turn supply current a.t a very high voltage to great electric mains. Their surplus power will be' used for the electrolyte decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen—liquid hy-l drogen, lie says, 'being the most efti-i cient known method of storing energy. | The rotor ship is a new device to I chain the wind furies and make them industrious slaves of man, working more intensively than when they blew upon the sails of ships or mills. It was a German named Anton Flet + . ner who listened to a howling gale and said to himself, “What waste of energy!” He thought out the principle of a cylinder revolving in the wind and exerting a force at right angles to itself. Experiments are now being made to use the' rotor principle for driving engines to supply light and heat at a very cheap cost in countries where fuel is scarce.

Meanwhile a professor in i’etrogracl claims that he has invented a machine driven by direct solar energy. The object of all this search for energy is the old object of multiplying one manpower arid replacing still more rapidly and economically the burden of man’s physical toil by mechanical means so that he may produce and distribute the wealth of life more easily and quickly.