WORLD’S COMFORTS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 29 December 1928, Page 11

WORLD’S COMFORTS

■JI/TA'SS production is still in swaddling clothes, said Roger W. Babson, of the Babson Institute, as he set out to convince a group of Boston schoolmasters that their pupils will have more lines of new endeavour open to them within tht; next 50 years than any generation of the past.

“There is no mechanical reason, for instance, 9 9 said jMt Babson, “why wood pulp must be made into thread, and thread into rayon cloth. Pulp might be poured into one end of a machine, and by a similar process to newsprint papermalcing there might come out the other end a rayon shirt, wrapped in tissue paper and boxed ready for sale,” he asserted. This was but one of 50 opportunities held out by Mr Babson.

“There is a million dollars to be made in a noiseless street car,” he continued. “If one steel wdieel is necessary to transmit the current from the wire above to the motors, why should it be necessary to have eight steel wheels to re-transmit it into the ground? Why should we not have seven wheels of rubber and one of steel, with .but oneeight of the present clangor?”

GREAT ADVANCE POSSIBLE

Mr Babson talked easily of a machine which Avill translate languages upon which one of his friends is ncnv Avorking, of “horizontal elevators,” and of eventual certainty of gasoline sale being handled as a public utility, just as are electricity and gas. “ When the comparatively new short Avavcs and cosmic rays are completely mastered,” he said, “we may Avell eliminate artificial heat in homes and buildings. 'One might then enter a room containing two bulb's. The temperature might be ■ below freezing. By turning on one bulb the room would be lighted. By sAA'itching the other the body Avould be made tvarm. There is no need of heating a AA-’hole room if its inhabitant is warm.”

But with all these possible ad\ r ances, Mr Babson Avarned, more care than oA-er must be made to advance education, character building, and guard against a let-down on the moral side. The children of to-day arc certainly as good as those of .50 years ago, he asserted, but they have 100 times as many temptations. He advocated a strong censorship of the motion pictures, and a gradual building up of the home influence to where it Avas three decades ago.