TO REPORT ON ARAPUNI

Taranaki Daily News, 29 August 1930, Page 7

TO REPORT ON ARAPUNI

SPECIALIST FROM SWEDEN - . MANY WORLD-WIDE JAUNTS. ■ Professor P. J. Hornell, of Sweden, who has been appointed by thg Govcrnjnent to report upon the position at (Arapuni, arrived at Wellington on ■Tuesday. With him came Mr. P. W. Werner, as assistant engineer and secretary. Professor Hornell, when interviewed, said that he was unable to say anything regarding his plans for the examination of the Arapuni development. That Professor Hornell is an engineer of very wide experience was made clear by a recital of some of the main works ard. investigations with which he has been associated. About 1900, said Professor Hornell, he worked with an old friend of his, Professor Richert, in the 1 organisation of a bureau of consluting engineers, which grew from a small staff ■ of three or. four engineers to its present position of the largest firm of consulting engineers in Europe, with 50 gradii-. ated engineers and a staff of over 80, jvith its head office in Stockholm and a branch office in London. The firm specialised at the beginning in three main ’ departments, water supply, canalisation uvd water power development. To these have been added a department of communications, Which embraced harbours, canals and railways. Its main activities are in Sweden, but its work has extended far and wide, to Norway, Finland, Russia, Poland and the Far East, Greece and Rumania, Spitzbergen, Africa and the Federated Malay States. From 1900 until 1929, said Professor Hornell, he was for certain periods a ' member of the staff of the University of Technology, Stockholm, lecturing on ’ hydraulic engineering, structural building and materials, and allied engineering subjects. In 1925 ho became a professor of the same university, but he . had resigned in 1929, as lecturing ren- . dered difficult the wider and more in- . ,t er estiiig field work in Sweden and ’ elsewhere. In 1901, in collaboration with Professor Richert, he worked out plans for a water power plant at Halvredsfessen, Norway, gaining an international prize, and in 1905 he gained the first prize' against about 40 competitors, for ; plans for an extension of the harbour i of Gothenburg. As he had said, the firm’s activities came under several main headings and though his position was at the head of one particular scctif", practical considerations made it imperative that he should attend to different classes of engineering for on his world-wide travels many points cropped up. To mention some of those widelyseparated works, said Professor Hornell, there was a darn project at Vladivcstock, with which he was concerned, but it was postponed on account of the war. He was commissioned to give consideration under the League of Nations to the question of Danzig as a port for Poland. Ho acted as consulting engineer from 1922 or 1923 till 1928 for the erection of a power plant of 80,000 k.w. at Volkov, Russia, and on the completion of that work plans were ' undertaken for a 90,000 k.w. plant at Swir. In 1908, he continued, he was “over to China and Japan,” and other little jaunts mentioned were five trips through ’ the Suez Canal, three to Siberia and six over the Bosphorus. One of his commissions in the East, st.id Professor Hornell, was to inquire into the development of the international port of Shanghai. That work • occupied two years and the report was submitted to the international commission in Shanghai in 1921, the representatives including those of England, the United States of America, France, Holland and” Japan. He himself was appointed as China’s representative. Such work as this, he added, covered rather wider scope than that of engineering. In 1920 ho was appointed by the Swedish Government to take part in the preparatory work in the setting up of the League of Natiojis Committee on Communications and Transit. He is chairin t of the League of Nations Committee on Water Power Development ’ land representative of Sweden on the • International Odor River Commission. Professor Hornell agreed that his work took him here and there, with • long distances between those places and . very often at very short notice, but one got used to that. On one occasion he lu.d returned home to Stockholm after a considerable absence, to be ordered off that same afternoon to Russia. Mrs. Hornell took it philosophically. ‘‘lt’s just as well,” she had said, “there will be .no packing. You have not unpacked yet.”