Miscellaneous

Lake County Press, Issue 2796, 31 July 1919, Page 7

Miscellaneous

,iis Jj- Over £IOO,OOO is given away to [ London street beggars every year. Ul In eighteen months the Food Minisip. try has circulated 2,000,000,000 forms. ; mt , ;c*r The total o'.' the salaries of members e( | of the House of Commons not in reeeipt of salaries as Ministers, officers . of tin* House, or officers of Mis: Majesty’s Household was during the' jh last financial year £199,140. IV ] j. One striking phase of the realities of the time is brought home to us by the fact that the British industrial ,” life assurance offices at the end of n four years of war have paid .t;7, 500,000 for 430,000 war claims. !• They have paid in one year someif) thing like £3,000.(KM), or' nearly as 's much as they paid during the first ’ three years of war. Some idea of tlx* I heavy calls which have been made upon the funds of the offices may be I ’’i gleaned from the fact that in" one is week alone sixteen offices between j. them paid over £47,000. •“I HOSPITAL THAT FLIES. 0 A hospital aeroplane is the latest t innovation at the Love Field Aviation School, Texas, p An emergency machine, manned by 0 a skilled pilot, with a doctor in the observer’s seat, is kept ready during all Quinrs of flying practice to enable, 11 medical Help to reach a fallen aviator. > The hospital aeroplane is always ready for instant use. The pilot and the doctor stay close at hand. Observers with field-glasses keep a f watchful eye on the men in the air, ] and the instant a flier starts falling (. information is telegraphed gftnnlJ taneously to the motor ambulance, ? the lire waggon, and the hospital aerof piano. 1 Often a forced landing occurs in a field distant from any road, and the ambulance can reach it only by tra- . veiling a long and roundabout way. 1 The aeroplane can save time not only by its speed but also by going direct to the scene of the accident. UNDERSEA SNAPSHOTS. Taking Submarine Pictures. An ingenious and at the same time simple apparatus is the sea chamber and tube by the aid of which the Williamson Brothers whose latest film production “The Submarine Eye,” is on view at leading picture houses —can descend to the floor of the ocean in quest of motion pictures. I The tube, which is 3ft. in dia- 1 meter, is made of bands of steel placed one above the other like the scales of a fish and united by rings of malleable iron. Over this frame is stretched _ a covering of waterproof canvas, thus forming a cylinder sufficiently strong to resist itlie pressure of the sea as the depth increases. . A Magic Tube. Tho diameter is sufficient to allow the operator to communicate with the outer world. Through this submarine chimney, as it is called, the operator can descend hundreds of feet without any difficulty in breathing. The upper end of the tube opens on , the deck of the ship and the lower ’■ li t lias a circular compartment sft. '• diameter, with a funnel-shaped indow The apparatus was originally built 7 the inventor. Captain Charles Williamson, not for the purpose of taking moving pictures, hut to exolore the bottom of the sea in search if sunken treasure, pearls, and ipougos, or to repair ships. How*ver, his son. Mr. Ernest Williamson, aw the possibility of employing the ipparatns In take submarine cinema lictnres. With tho assistance of powerful batteries of electric lamps it is possible to obtain magnificent photographs. Under favourable conditions pictures ; can he taken at almost any depth. As a matter of fact, many of'the scenes in “The Submarine Eye” were | photographed in 132 ft. of water. CRIMINALS IN WAR. > Crime has decreased greatly since s the war broke out, the reason being that a considerable proportion of men belonging to the professional criminal classes have been absorbed into the Army, Many of them, too, have » done well in it. One convict, a Liverpool man, with '> score or more convictions to his “credit,” won the Victoria Cross for one of the most conspicuous acts of gallantry on record, and has since f died for his country. Others, promoted on the field for bravery, have attained to non-commissioned and e even, in some instances, to eommis- - sinned rank. The past history of practically all 5 men of this type is known to the j heads of the Criminal Record Office at Scotland Yard, but these never pass on their information to the military authorities. To do so would be 0 manifestly unfair to men who, whatever their past faults mav have been, are now doing their best for ~ their country, and, incidentally, trying to make good on their own account. There is. however, one exeepi tion, and the rule in this connection | is a hard and fast one. No man of j known criminal antecedents is allowed k I to serve in the Royal Army Medical x I Corps, or, generally speaking, in any r 8 of the other departmental corps, j ~ i * IF ALL WERE SOCIALISTS. iv f t id | Your Share in Britain's Wealth. | The man who grumbles at his * share of the good tilings of life and ' je thinks how much luckier lie would be s- if they were only “equally divided” would probably change his tune if * his wish were carried into effect. I, If. for example, the entire income _ of the United Kingdom were divided n • among its forty-seven odd millions of I people he wotdd find that only eight five-pound notes would fall to his lot! 1 j ■ And bis face might grow long if | ho were asked to exchange his capital 1 I for the C33G which represents his 1 ’ share' of British wealth. For a man 1 cannot be considered enviable on a ‘

little 1 over Iss. a week and the ii terest on £330. Not All Honey! There are in the British Isle 8,090,000 inhabited houses—sufficien to make two streets (four rows) lonj enough to connect London witl Madrid. IT is stake in these million of houses would he one-sixth of om >f them And similarly his share of Britisl railways would he less than a yard o ine and £2B in stock. Of Britain’s 121,377 square miles o: and lie would he entitled to about om md two-third acres—a nice little plot H) yds. square, from which, if he wen in industrious gardener, he could add luite materially to his income. Indeed, he would require every >enny he could earn; for, apart from ill other demands on his limited mrse, he would he called upon to conrihnte a little over £SO a year as his hare of the cost of the war. That he would actually have to pay for his one purpose alone £lO a year lore than his share of the national iconic! Very Much Rationed. Nor would he derive much consolation from his larder and wine-cellar. 11 is allowance of beer for twelve months in normal times would be represented hv 440 glasses—roughly one and a fifth a day. Of spirits he would have to lie content with four I bottles; and of wine with the equivaI lent of four uunberfuls. And for j these, at peace-prices, he would pay a little over £3 10s. His year’s allowance of tea would he 0 lb., which he would probably find ■ ample with the addition of 1 lb. of cocoa, and '. lb. of coffee. And to “sweeten” life for him he would find his sugar-ration of 80 Ih. sufficient for all reasonable purposes. Of the year’s fish harvest of the j United Kingdom his share would he twenty herrings, three haddocks, one mackerel, half a cod, ten other kinds of sea-fish, and an uncertain quantity of fresh-water fish. He would have to be content with the incense from only 2 Ih. of tobacco a year. THE ROMANCE OF POTASH. Feeding the Food that Feeds Ourselves Until quite recently one of Germany’s trump cards which she relied upon playing at the coming Peace I Conference was—potash. j This substance, though never oc- * curring free in Nature, is present in i any fertile soil, from which it is extracted by plants. When it has all been extracted, it must he replaced, otherwise the plants wither and die. * Now, before the war, practically the , entire world’s supply of this ' ex- 1 tremely valuable plant food came from the mines of Stassfurt, in Prussian Saxony, where it was deposited by the evaporation of a vast inland saltwater lake in pre-historic times. Without this potash of hers, Germany argued, our harvests would fail, so that sheer need of food would sooner or later compel us to accept her terms. But very early in the war our , diemists and scientific agriculturists realised the tremendous danger that threatened our food supplies from a potash famine, and they set themselves to overcome it. Potash from Pig Iron. 1 Kirst of all the potash-seekers turned their attention to the waste ( products of the blast furnaces used in ; ; the manufacture of pig-iron. It had long been known that potash existed , in the dust drawn from the stoves L and boilers of blast furnace works. I The only drawback was that there! was not 'enough of it. Potash is ' volatile stuff, and in the terrific heat ) of the blast furnaces most of it was driven off in the form of gas and so j lost. j The first obvious problem that the j investigators had to tackle, therefore, was to recover the potash from the , gas. This was accomplished in the 1 end by a system of first cooling and then washing the gas, so that all the ! foreign elements in it were precipi- I tated, including, of course, the potash. i By these means the quantity of potash in the dust was trebled, and j in some instances quadrupled. Still the investigators were not satisfied. ; They cast about for some method of increasing the amount of potash produced. After elaborate and exhaustive experiments, continued from the autumn of 1914 down to the'spring of 1916, it was found that by adding common salt to the furnace, potash could be produced in enormously increased quantities. ] Washed from Wool. | The drawback was that the supply ) was still too limited, depending - , as it 1 did. upon the quantities of pig-iron | made.) So once again the investiga- j tors get to work, experimenting in 1 regard to the by-products of allied *, and other industries. Success once more attended their efforts, and sometimes in quite unexpected direc- j tions: as, for example, the recovery 1 of large quantities of by-product potash in connection with one process of the. wool-combing industry, which is centred in Bradford. Up till comparatively recently the method used then> for washing raw woo] was to scour it in hot water with alkali and soap in three or four different vessels. The investigators discovered that by the simple expedient of subjecting the wool to a preliinary wash in cold water considei>le quantities of nearly pure potash ere recoverable, and many hundreds tons weekly are now being produced om this source alone. The salt process, again, has been iccessfully applied to other than last furnace works, notably those mnect >d with the manufacture of ■ment. The waste gases from the uncut kilns have been found to coniin large quantities of potash, and icse large quantities have been irther increased exactly as in the ise of the blast furnaces, by the Idition of salt. The net result of it all is that Briiin is in a fair way to become indeendent of Germany for her after-the-ar supplies of potash, and that Brisk industry and British agriculture re being benefited. “The letter-box is the gateway of nuance.” —Mr. AV. L. George. “The type of employer who looks earing.”—Air. J. ]?. Clynes, M.P. pun his workmen as so many items F personal property is rapidly disap