FOOD KEPT BY RAYS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17738, 26 March 1932, Page 13

FOOD KEPT BY RAYS

EXPERIMENTS IN HOLLAND MELBOURNE, March 17. Members of the Institute of Refrigeration were so impressed last night with Mr. T. Britton’s account of recent food preservation experiments in Doom, Holland, that it was decided t.O’ send a request to the inventor for further details. *

A man named Pope, stated the speaker, had produced an electrical field in which normally perishable? foodstuffs iverc preserved for an indefinite period, and decay, if already in progress, was arrested. All that was necessary was the running of electrically - charged copper wires through a chamber containing a mixture of moist and dry air. Short slowtravelling rays were ' thus produced, which in 10 days set up a field with a radius of 30 yards in which food would not decompose. These rays, which was produced by a generator taking no more 1 current than a house lamp, penetrated lead, iron, glass, stone and wood. The inventor ‘ claimed that potatoes which 1 12 months ago were called “new” wero still fit for cooking, and that yolks ’of eggs which had been broken months earlier were odorless and palatable when kept in the field. . Dr. D. Herdersche, principal of the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Amsterdam, had stated that, alter tho period of days required to develop the field had passed, dangerous bacteria would not-grow within t hat area.