PRIZES OF TO-DAY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4185, 13 September 1939, Page 11

PRIZES OF TO-DAY

SOME LARGE SUMS UNCLAIMED Ours is an age of prizes and prize money, something very different from the age and spirit of ancient Greece, -when the athlete remained I the proudest man in the world and more than satisfied with his laurels. To-day the great majority of modern athletes and adventurers m any field of action for gleaming pots and belts and substantial cheques by way of reward. It is said that prize moneyamounting to nearly £50,000 is won every week of the year in Great Britain, but there still remain prizes which represent fortunes that the average adventurer has never even heard of. For many years there has been a standing offer of an award of £lO,OOO offered by a Californian newspaper for a non-stop flight round the world, and the prize money would probably be more than doubled by the contributions of various firms connected with aviation who seek the valuable publicity afforded by such a flight for their products. And in plan-

ning such an undertaking the adventurer 'would of course bear in mind

that he has merely to carry with him a particular kind of fountain-pen and make the fact known, for it to be worth an extra £5OOO to him from the pen manufacturers for the advertisement. And to-day there is money to be made in striving for the moon literally. In America there is an organization called the Society for Interplanetary Transport and a prize of £20,000 awaits the man who first makes a journey to and lands upon another planet. And he must get back to claim his prize. There are rich firms the would over producing anything from baby-soothers to machineguns who would willingly pay thousands if they could boast that theirs was the first product of its kind on the moon. Another prize waiting to be won is that of the French Academy of Science offering 500,000 francs for establishing communications with Mars. An American electrician, /who made a fortune in the manufacture of lighting-sets for motor cars, made himself a bankrupt in his efforts to win the French Academy’s reward. He built an enormous searchlight alt the bottom of a pit to attract the attention of the Martians,

but either they were short sighted or were impudent enough to ignore him. There was only one claimant for the prize who sent the French Academy of Science in a fever of excitement.

He reported that he had often communicated with Mars. Doctor Mansfield Robinson even went so far as to produce a gramophone record of what he declared was a Martian love song. The music of this love song compared very favourably with that of a patient undergoing a serious operation without an anaesthetic. It was a series of frightful, long-'drawn out shrieks and howls and representatives of the French Academy were convinced that even a Martian could hardly produce such fearful sounds for a love song, or anything else for that matter. An absent-minded mathematician was responsible for the offer of 500i000 francs by the Royal Gottingen Society for solving a seemingly simple problem. The offer still stands, for although the problem called the “Theorem of Fermat” seems a simple one it has never been proved. Many famous mathematicians have tested Fermat’s equation and although they can say for certain that he was quite right, they cannot prove it.