NOTES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXXII, Issue 2803, 20 November 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

NOTES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES

A correspondent sends the London Evening Standard an interesting pendant to a recent note in that paper regarding Faraday’s accidental discovery of what later became the basic principle of refrigeration. It appears that Thomas Mort, the famous Lan-cashire-Australian who founded the Australian meat trade, based his invention of refrigerating machinery on his knowledge of Faraday’s work. It sKX»ns that Mort first gained the idea of preserving meat by freezing from reading a newspaper account of the finding, in a mass of ice in Siberia, of the perfectly preserved body of an animal which had obviously been there for many years. He astonished his family at breakfast by thumping the table and ejaculating: “ I've solved the problem of the world’s food supply.” Sixteen years later, after incessant work, he completed his refrigerating machinery.

“ Belshevisation ” and mechanisation of the Russian circus are proposed as an urgent necessity by Comrade Gregory Rosey in an article appearing above his signature in Pravda, says the Moscow correspondent of the London Observer. If this writer has his way, a moving conveyer belt, symbolic of mass production, will supplant the horse as one of the central features of the Russian circus, and Russian clowns will be instructed to employ their talents wholly in propaganda for the new Socialist State. Mechanisation of the circus is required, he writes, as a means of bringing before the masses the urgency of industrial development. Under his plan the principal acts would be performed on the moving conveyer. Mr Rosey expresses the view that the best Soviet writers should prepare a repertoire for clowns, so that their various acts will contain the proper amount of propaganda for Socialism. • • • * An evidence of the increased interest in the study of the English language during the last few years in Sweden is the foundation of a new professorship in English Philology at Stockholm University (says the London Observer’s Stockholm correspondent). Four competitors for the new chair lectured publicly, recently on various aspects of the development of the English language. Quite apart from the regular school and university study of the language, a large proportion of the younger generation is attending night schools to learn English, and this in preference to other foreign languages. In 1930 more than 1500 students at one such school in Stockholm chose English for study, while only half that number chose German, French, or Spanish. One of thejargest dealers in a popular English gramophone study course reports the sale of 15,000 such complete courses in Sweden. It has been calculated that more than a hundred thousand Swedes are learning English according to that method. • • • • The only part of the British community to have been discommoded by the change in national financial policy (says a London correspondent) are those subjects who are holiday-mak-ing on the Continent, or who habitually live abroad upon incomes derived from home sources. THcro is a fairly largo and gently floating population of colonels’ widows and elderly vicars’ daughters who ebb and flow with the seasons between Swis.i pensions and small Riviera hotels. These have found that their pounds fetched fewer francs than previously. The situation for them has not been really tragic, but their financial margin, m most cases slight at any time, has become temporarily precarious. Hoteliers in Switzerland especially will probably have a poor winter season, for comparatively few English people will be aki-ing this Christmas. English hotelkeepers, on the other hand, may benefit, for a currency ofT the gold standard will probably provide a useful reinforcement to the “Come to Britain movement. « • 0 • The collectors of State revenues arc giving no quarter those days — not amt they ever gave much within livtag memory (says a London newspaper). One source of income which is likely to be increased is that from wirolees licenses. There are eight million people in London, and yet only 000,000 of them pay the annual 10s for a wireless license. It is estimated that at least 400,000 Londoners are l&tening-in without paying out. Consequently the General Post Office’s radio sleuths aro on the war path, and the dodgers who are captured will be lucky if they escape tho substantial fines to which they have laid themselves open. It is interesting to find that Aberdeen, of whose inhabitants so many hard things are said, is the most honest city in Britain in this matter of paying for wireless outfits.