AFTER THE WAR

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 50, Issue 3057, 2 April 1941, Page 5

AFTER THE WAR

VAST RE-BUILDING PLAN NOVEL TESTS BY SCIENTISTS British scientists are working hard for the day when the sound of the builder’s hammer will succeed the thud of the bomb. At the Building Research Station, , Watford, near London, they are looking ahead to peace time when Britain will multiply by many times the £200,000,000 which she used to spend on building in a year. Their work ranges over materials, for quality and suitability; over design, for light and warmth. They can tell, by consulting their electric man whether any given room, because of the materials of walls and ceiling requires much heating or little. This electric man is a cylinder with the same surface as an average human body. An electric current keeps him at body heat and a thermostatic control keeps this temperature constant. He is wheeled into a room and his consumption of electricity shows how much of it is needed to keep this constant.

And they have a section of the universe itself set up in miniature in their laboratory at Watford. An artificial sun is slotted in a vertical column and set at the appropriate altitudes of the changes of the seasons. A six-inch house model on a disc swung on pivots is orientated to season, latitude, and time of day. So the heliodon, this ingenious instrument showing the earth moving round the sun, tells the architect how the shadows will actually fall upon his finished house and show him where he may amend his design , to get all the sunshine there may be.