DOG PERFORMS A NEW DUTY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4432, 5 September 1939, Page 3

DOG PERFORMS A NEW DUTY

CABLE LEAKS FOUND A dog’s keen scent has rendered unnecessary the digging up of two miles of cable route in Kent to repair a There are 16 aerials at the new Post Office “ anti-sunspot ” transatlantic radio-telephone receiving station, being built at Cooling Marshes, near Rochester.

These are connected to the station by 16 miles of coaxial cables—that i§, cables in which the conductor takes the form of a large copper tube surrounding a small inner conductor. Air is pumped into this tube to maintain a high electrical insulation. The cables are laid in trenches and buried under 3ft of earth. When they had been laid some weeks it was noticed that the air was leaking through a number of minute punctures in the outer copper tube These leakages put the cable, and consequently the station, out of action, and might have led to serious damage by permitting the infiltration of water into the As an experiment a dog was used to find the leaks. The co-operation of Mr H. S. Lloyd, who trains dogs for the Home Office, was sought. He brought along a trained Labrador retriever, Rex, and a gas that smelt of cats was introduced into the air pumped into the cable. The dog went along the route and started to dig wherever ho detected o smell of the gas. Ho was succesful in detecting 14 leaks, and thus enabled the cable to he repaired without digging up the two miles of the route.