NATIONAL SHOP WINDOW

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27385, 10 May 1950, Page 7

NATIONAL SHOP WINDOW

British Industries Fair GLITTERING ARRAY OF PRODUCTS / . NZPA—Reuter—Copyright LONDON, May 9. The British Industries Fair, the largest national shop window in the world, opened today to present, a glittering array of British products to the world. It has attracted 15,000 buyers from 100 countries, and British exporters are living in high hopes that devaluation will stimulate orders. The fair, which is spread over more than 1,000,000 square feet or stand space in London and Birmingham, is almost exclusively for overseas trade buyers. A helicopter service will shuttle buyers between the two cities. In all, 90 British industries are represented. They range from engineering and hardware products to toys, foods, plastics, pottery, glassware. and clothing. The Ministry of Supply has installed a working model of one of the piles at the atomic energy research station, at Harwell to show the use industry can make of radio isotopes. The largest exhibit is a rotary lithographic web-fed offset printing press capable of printing simultaneously, in four colours at newspaper speeds. This particular press, the second to be manufactured, will be installed in Melbourne. The first is already being erected in Copenhagen. Among the many new ideas demonstrated at this year’s fair are a “robot coffee salesman ” —a slot machine which offers four sorts of coffeeblack, black with sugar, white, and white with sugar—bY a push-button-selector, and “ a mechenical office boy” which folds, inserts, and seals documents in envelopes at a speed, of 3000 an hour. The importance which British manufacturers attach to dollar markets is shown by the number of exhibits which claim to be improvements upon existing American machines of the same type. Meanwhile at Dudley, Worcestershire, Senor Don Manuel Rianchi, the Chilean Ambassador to Britain, announced that the Chilean textile and coal industries had just signed “important contracts” for British machinery to modernise plant and increase production.