POINTS of INTEREST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 150, 27 June 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

POINTS of INTEREST

THE FUTURE OF COAL GAS The opportunities awaiting the gas industry were emphasised by Sir Francis Goodenough, executive chairman of the British Commercial Gas Association, in a paper contributed to a conference at Galashiels. He said their youthful rivals, electricity and oil, were each making a bid for their field Of service. The gag industry rather welcomed competition, so long as it was fair. The extension of electricity, either in the home or in industry, need not and should not necessarily mean a diminution in the use of gas. At the present time only one sixth of the coal used annually in Great Britain went through gas' or electricity works, or was otherwise li treated” t-o render it smokeless. The rest was used ‘‘raw,” creating smoke and dirt and destroying life and property. While there might be some transference of gas business to electricity or of electric business to gas the still unconverted five-sixths of coal users were those to whom both industries should address themselves, each in the sphere of heat, light, or power best suited to them and economically useful to vhe public. The increase of 27 per cent, between 1920 and 1930 in the national consumption of gas and other statistics proved that gas was forging ahead in spite of competition. The day of the usefulness of gas in both home and industry was in fact onlv beginning. Their responsible men must not be satisfied until no smokecreating fuel was used, whether in the home or in industry in any city, town, or village in the land. WAR DEBTS AND WORLD TRADE “The chief question suggested by the various reasons advanced in favour of war debt revision is whether the economic maladjustments from which the world is now so plainly suffering would be materially lessened if the debts were either to be scaled down or even entirely cancelled,” the London Financial News remarked recently. “There can be no doubt that the debt payments have contributed to the mal adjustment. At the same time it would surely be an exaggeration to suppose that they have been a factor of the first importance. Moreover, in some degree the war debt payments have already led to the adjustments in international trade consequent upon the expansion of German exports. The cancellation of the debts would create a new factor of maladjustment. In a word, unless the revision comes quickly the argument from maladjustment will rather support the continued payment of the debts than their cessation. It would seem, then, that the war debt problem, as an economic question, remains as it was considered by the Young experts, primarily a question of German capacity to pay. There is, of course, an entirely different aspect from which the question may be regarded —the political aspect. From that point of view the all important consideration is the bearing of reparations upon the sentiment of the rising generation in Germany itself.” RAILWAY GAINS AND LOSSES ‘•The construction of a railway does not stand condemned simply because there is no prospect of its returning full interest on the capital cost,” says Dr. E. P. Neale in an article on the railway situation in New Zealand, contributed to the Economic Record. “The deficit (where small) may in some cases be less than the gain to the community generally in cheapened production (through ability to obtain re quirements or to dispose of products more cheaply) or in saving of time to travellers. The trouble is that those directly served by the line reap almost all the advantage, and the general public pays through the Consolidated Fund a subsidy to make good the railway deficits. It is because of this special benefit in favour of a few that there is so much pressure from local and sectional interests for construction of railways destined to be a burden (in the accountancy sense) or the general taxpayer. It seems logical that in the cases of new developmental lines some sort of betterment tax on those specially benefiting should be devised t-o meet such cases, cf an amount calculated to yield a sum not far below the money value of the advantages expected to accrue. Then railway construction projects would be viewed more nationally and more rationally; an< the evil of political pressure from spec ial local interest, would be removed.” CHARTING THE OCEAN “The whole maritime world lies inder a deep obligation to generations >f British naval officers who, often mder great hardships, and always out of the limelight, have enriched the world with great folios of charts which combine the highest product of technical skill and mathematical precision with the love of beauty of the true artist,” the naval correspondent of the Morning Post wrote recently. “Many a landsman must have marvelled at the myriads of ‘soundings’ that, cover the •anvas. Each ‘sounding’ has, in the past, involved a great labour in lowering and raising a lead line to depths varying from one fathom to five miles. Each sounding has been ‘fixed’ by observations of the heavenly bodies and is generally accurate within a few hundred yards of its exact position. To Langevin, the French inventor, marine surveyors owe a great debt. No longer need the load-line be raised and lowered by hand, or mechanically by Lord Kelvin’s deep-sea sounding machine. Soundings can now be accurately obtained by echo off the bottom, the echo being mechanically timed and converted into soundings. The delicacy of th n instrument can bo npnreeintod when is ren’isod ttm pcnAn,] for the reenntion of an echo in throe '*• it '• h""«lre>l.n nJ-fortieth onrt -'f a second, the speed of sound in water being 5000 ft. a second.”

i KITCHENER AS ORGANISER The conclusion that Kitchener’s cap- > acity for disorganising was beyond exaggeration is presented by Sir John Fortescue, the historian of the British Army, in an article in Blackwood’s Magazine. “Kitchener’s idea of organisation,” he writes, “was rather a spasmodic upheaval to meet an inline diatc exigency. . . . By 1916 it had, ap parently, begun to dawn upon him that other people besides himself possessed knowledge and brains cqua 1 to his own. and he became less Olympian and more open to counsel. The fact did him credit, but it was a thousand pities tha* he made the discovery no earlier.” While paying tribute to Lord Kitchener’s flashes of vision, Sir John Fortescue holds that his careless disregard for preparation and organisation lay at th root of both the Dardanelles and the Mesopotamia failures. “It sounds incredible, but it is a fact that Kitchener ordered the 29th. Division to embark without its first line transport. They would not want it, ho said, for they would only have to march across the peninsula; and actually the Director of Supplies and Transport was obliged to point out to him that a battalion encamped in Hyde Park would require transport to fetch water from the Serpentine. . . Never since the Crimean War had a military expedition been despatched in so haphazard a fashion.” He adds that “Kitchener was far bette’* as a civil administrator than as a military chief, and probably better as a diplomatist even than as a civil administrator.” ]f he had lived he might have played the same moderating role in the peace negotiations that Wellington had done a century earlier, and as he himself had done in South Africa. ENGLAND’S DESTINY An English translation has been published of a book by Dr. Herman Kantorowicz professor of law at the University of Kiel, whose purpose is to prove to his countrymen that Britain never aimed directly, or indirectly, at the encirclement of Germany. At the close of the book he surveys the position of the British Empire and tiie manifold possibilities of development, political and economic, adverse to its security. “Should these dangers be realised, the course of the history of England would lead her, not to culminate in a second Roman Empire, to decline into a second Holland,” he declares. “Many dangers will turn out to be imaginary, others may take a surprising turn toward the good; yet others, again, now unsuspected, may appear above the horizon; to-day it is less possible than ever before to foretell the future, exactly and in detail. The general trend of the stream of history can be discerned; it must remain obscure to a human observer for now’ it will maintain its tenor. Thus there still remains the hope for humanity, and the task for England, that her future may prove worthy of her past.” A CENTURY OF SURzJRx On the centenary of the death of John Abernethy, the famous surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, an address was delivered by Sir Arthur Keith, in the course of which he said that in Abernethy’s time the professional medical student evolved from the apprentice, and with that change the modern medical schools of London came into existence. The medicine and science of which Abernethy was proud had been overwhelmed. On the day of his death his ideas were being doomed and his puzzles and problems were on the way to solution. In 1831 Pasteur was a lad of nine, while Lister, a boy of five, was at Jpping. Between them they made the modern medical student in his first year wiser than Abernethy was after 40 years of experience. When he died the men were already living who changed all his teaching about re production; he knew neither the ovum nor the part played by spermatozoa. We could never 'ook at tumours as he looked at them; the microscope had altered our conception of all kinds of tissues—normal and abnormal. What had happened to Abernethy’s discoveries would happen to all of ours, great or small though our discoveries might happen to be. But there was one side of a man’s nature which could never grow old—never pass out of date or fashion. That was his character. Abernethy as a man would never be out of date. PAYING-WARDS IN HOSPITALS A scheme for meeting the needs of persons of limited means by providing accommodation for paying patients was announced at the 75th anniversary (Tinner of the West London Hospital. Prince Arthur of Connaught, who presided, said the scheme when completed, would prove an inestimable benefit to that large body of most deserving people who were embraced within the term “the middle class.’ For the past six years the hospital had provided accommodation in private rooms for 26 middle class patients. That, experience had shown that there was a very real demand for this kind of accommodation, provided that the charges (including fees for specialists’ services') could be kept down to a moderate level, and it had been decided bv the board that an additional block of 71 private rooms should be provided for middle-class patients, bringing the accommodation for those patients up to 160 beds. A flat, rate scheme of weekly charges had been adopted, with a minimum of £7 7s a week. That payment would entitle the patient to board, accommodation, nursing and treatment, bv the members of the honorary medical and surp-ieal staff (including operations of any TmtureL treatment, massage etc. These private beds would be pnti-nlv c-qr sunnorting and nnv snrnlnq derived from nntients who wore able Io pnv more than the minimum scale wmld be devoted to the upkeep of the ge-ieral wards.