INVENTIONS & SOCIETY

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 291, 9 December 1936, Page 16

INVENTIONS & SOCIETY

> Whatever else is happening in the world, tho inventors still go on inventing. The latest of their products which have found their way into (he news are n mysterious liquid for extracting energy from the sunshine, and -a machine lor picking cotton, For the liquid Avocholor it is claimed that it can tia isier heat from the sun’s rays to watei and so run a steam engine—that it ci ilo in fact, replace coal rs a source of power. The cottou-picking machine can . pparcj.'t p’i-k as much cotton as 150 men. It- happens tlat mining coal and plating cotton aio two of the most ba--k breaking tasks that fiesh is heir to The prospect of eliminating them ought to be hailed as a benefit to humanity. Instead, it is likely to appear in the guise of a catastrophe The wholesale substitution of Avocholor for Teal is hardly yet to bo taken seriously.

The displacement of several million negroes by an apparatus of whirling spindles would seem by the reports to be a less remote possibility. If it happens, it will precipitate one of the biggest social problems that any modern country has yet had to deal with. It is said that the inventors of the machine (two brothers of the name of Kust) are seriously upset at the prospect, and talk of ‘establishing a foundation, supported from the profits of their invention, to study the problems of social adjustment . . . and to assist in lessening the shock’. But the difficulty is too deep-rooted in the modern world to be met by the sporadic conscientiousness of individual inventors. It is (as Sir Josiab Stamp pointed out to the British Association) one of the main problems which society of the future will have to face.