CHANCES FOR INVENTORS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXVI, Issue 17552, 23 April 1919, Page 6

CHANCES FOR INVENTORS.

MILLIONS AWAITING BRAINY

FOLK

Men have learned to fly and to see through a brick wall, but there fire still a few things they cannot do. No man has ever made an unsinkable ship, for instance. The nearest-approach is the best type of life*>oat, but even thrse life-savers are occasionally lost in heavy seas, and the fate of the Titanic when she collided with on iceberg, and of the Lusitania, when she was torpedoed, although they were provided with ,ill Lul> latesit safeguards, proves tjhat the unsinkable ship is still to be built.

Similarly, no man has ever succeeded in erecting a fireproof building. The i'erro-concrete idea comes nearest to thijs much desired end, but the fate of some of the New York sky-scrapers iiroves that even this material is not immune. If a building is to he habitaMe it will also be combustible, or. at least, thiit is the experience of builders up to the present moment, whatever the future may have in store. The man who should invent a piece <i glass which is malleable 'jnd unbreakble. a wine-glass, say, which could ie flung on a stone floor and remain intaot, ivould make the biggest fortune in tho world. SECRETS OF PHOTOGRAPHY. Rain production has begn the dream of innumerable scientists. The great dam at Assouan was built hocuse Egypt |is rainless, and. but for thp Nile, won d lie a desert like its neighbour, the vasJt Sahara, a tract as big as Europe. Central Australia is another almost rainless patch of the earth's surface. But if rain could be controlled by human agency, both these vast areas could be rendered fruitful. But the weather, generally, remains in the lianas of Da;ne Nature, and the wind still "bloweth where it listeth" despite anything man can do.

It eems a remarkable thing, considering the progress of the of photography and cinematography, that colour photography is stifl an undiscovered secret. There are processes by which a very natural camouflage of Nature can be produced, but the plate is yet to be made which will produce a landscape in autumn in all its wondro is tints, or take a portrait o* a lady with the natural colouring of hair, eyes, ana complexion, with the various colours of her costume "in the manner as she lives." TO SEE WITHOUT EYES. New legs and arms are being fitted m these days by the thousand, and wonderful feats of surgeiy are performed. A. man can even bo fitted with a false iaw, and false teeth are the commonest of commonplaces, and even some of his ! interior fittings can at least be partially | replaced. But the blind man still remuins blind and the deaf man deaf". By far the greatest boon to mankind would he some device by which man could be made to see without- eyes. When we think of the wanders of the microscope ,the telescope, and the spectroscope, it tioes not seem quite hopeless that a metibod will some daj' be' discovered of conveying vision to the bi'ain without the aid of the natural »ye. but as yet this great human benefaction lias nob come forward. Mirny inventions have as their object the linking of sound audible to deaf ears, but the s»i:rx»33s 'has been extremely slight hitherto. THE CRANKS' BEQUEST, Of course, there is still unsolved the old riddle of perpetual motion, which . thousands of cranks have spent their lives upon in the past. Scientists tell 'is that there is no pe*potual motion known even to astronomy, so that it is unlikely ili:iit it will ever be discovered on earth! Tim world, they say, is sl'i^K- <>li«ckin2 its sowd round the sun, and its diurnal revolution, but.s-n slowly as to lie imoereeptible within liistoric fcimes*. and the sun they Kay is a.dying fire which will lie extinct in a. fvw hundred billion years. Yet the discovery of radium, with its apparently inexhaustible energy, rnthpr slhoo'c the sco"n with which the ideal of perpetual mitioi used in he regarded, and if a machine could be constructed to go for twenty years,, on its own as it were, *fc would be "perpetual" enousjb. for ail ordinary purposes !