EARTH’S HOTTEST SPOTS

Hawera Star, Volume L, 7 February 1931, Page 16

EARTH’S HOTTEST SPOTS

Tj'UBOPE’S and America's hottest is not so hot. In Massawa or Timbucktu, Sind or Salah ■ that is where the Fahrenheit frolics, mercury picks the high notes, and the sands of the desert grow cold only towards midnight. If you send someone to Massawa you can be sure you arc sending him to the hottest place on earth. Massawa is hot because it is on tnc Bed Sea; not because the sea is red, because it isn’t red, it is blue like any other sea; but because the Eed Sea’s shores simmer under the sun. autumn, winter, spring and summer. It is never cold in Massawa. Nor even cool! The thermometer goes no lower than 70. There are cities that run higher temperatures; Massawa’s rnaximums reach about 105. But for all-year consistent, steady, fever heat, the Eritrean port takes the palm. Its mean temperature, that is, the yearly average, January to December, night and day, is 80 degrees Fahrenheit! Parched Massawa is east of Suez, one of the first thirst-raising stops “on me road to Mandalay,” which is itself no summer resort. Mandalay and Rangoon, too, may be cool “when the dawn comes up like thunder,” but tne mercury lias hit 110 by noon in Mandalay, while Earigdon, with a humidity level of 93, is the -wettest large city in the world. Mandalay’s all year temperature is 81.9 degrees, hot enough and some to spare by comparison with Yuma, Arizona, an American-.hot spot with a thermometer average of only 7b Yet the United States, along with its golf records, skyscraper records, and flag-pole sitting records, held the heat record of the world until sizzling Azzia won it. Death Valley’s 134.1 degrees stood as the hottest ever recorded until 1925. when the little village of Italian Tripoli with the hot name topped it

City of Eternal Sunshine

iwith 136.4 degrees Fahrenheit. However. the other parts of the Sahara have reported temperatures, unofficial, as high as T 54 degrees! India’s high temperatures are notorious and the worst of them arc to be found in Jacobabad, in 1 the dcs'ert. of Sind. No place in the world probably has longer, hotter summers' than Jaeobabad. where the average temperature for May is 9-1. degrees; June, 99; July, 90; August, 93. India studied the problem of how to be cool in a heat wave centuries ago and solved it with the punkah, the forefather of the electric fan. Punkahs are huge flaps hung from the coiling and ceaselessly swung back and forth by a servant who sits outside the room monotonously pulling the rope. ■ Another native device to defeat the heat is conspicuous at Hyderabad where a visitor arriving in summertime sees what appears to be a flock of card tables flying over the city. On second glance it develops that the “card tables” are not flying, but are mounted/ at erazv angles above the roof tops. The angles at which the table-like squares hang are not so- crazy as they look. Each tilts in the same direction, which is toward the prevailing wind. Hyderabad’s theory is that the wind, striking the ventilator, will be deflected into an open shaft leading down into the house. The city lies in: the desert which cools 1 off quickly at night, at which time the “card tables” are expected to serve another purpose, that I 'of encouraging a draft that will carry the hot air up the shafts and out of the houses.

But the Far East’s age-old methods give way before the Occident's latest inventions. The King of Siam nas ordered a refrigerating device which w. make his palace in the tropics as cool as a European motion picture theatre.