SCIENTIFIC AND USEFUL

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue VIII, 23 February 1895, Page 176

SCIENTIFIC AND USEFUL

EDISON’S DISCOVERY OF THE PHONOGRAPH.

The axiom which tells us that ‘great events from little causes spring ’ rarely received a more striking exemplification than in the case of the invention of the phonograph, which resulted from the accidental prick of a finger. True, the finger pricked belonged to Edison :— * I discovered the principle by tbe merest accident,’ states Mr Edison. * I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone, when the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger. That set me to thinking. If I could record the actions of the point and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing wonld not talk. I tried the experiment first on a strip of telegraph paper, and fonnd that the point made an alphabet. I shouted tbe words “ Halloo ! Halloo I” into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel noint, and heard a faint “ Halloo! Halloo 1” in return. I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered. They laughed at me. That’s the whole story. The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger.’

SHARK OIL. Shark oil is exported in large quantities from Iceland to Germany. It is of a fine colour, never becomes thick, and is said to possess similar medicinal virtues to cod-liver oil ; and no doubt it is often sold in the name of the latter product. A fleet of 100 boats is engaged in the industry every year, from January to August. They are schooners of from thirty to fifty tons, with a crew of from eight to ten men. The sharks are captured about twenty miles from the coast in winter, and in the summer about a hundred miles away, in deeper water. Every two or three weeks the boats return to port, with from 100 to 120 barrels of liver, which is boiled in dirty and evil-smelling hovels. The sharks captured by the Icelanders reach 20 feet in length and 5 feet in thickness. A liver yields up to five gallons of oil. The neighbonrhood of a shark-oil refinery is not to be mistaken, as the odour arising therefrom is far from pleasant. The fisherman earn about 35s per month, with a premium of 6d on each barrel of liver. The ciptain gets 2s 3d per barrel for the first hnndred, and 3 s 4d per barrel for all in excess. Sickness seems to be very rife among sharks, judging from the small quantity of healthy belongingto a healthy fish, compared with the greenish ones from the fish suffering from disease, and the red livers from the thin, ill-conditioned fish. The Icelanders only take the livers from the fish, and neglect the fins, skin, and teeth ; but that is not so in the Tasmanian fisheries, as in Sydney fins fetch £2B per ton. They are also saved in the Hawaiian, the Arabian Gulf, and the China fisheries ; in fact, in China tbe fins of sharks are considered a delicacy. The Iceland shark is not such a difficult fish to tackle as the tiger shark, the terrible ‘ bluepointer ’ of Anstralian waters, which, althongh smaller, is swifter, more ferocious, and furnished with a more massive jaw than his congeners however, a large number of fishermen fall victims to his voracity and violence. One of the chief sites of the sharkliver industry is Slamsand, but when the oil leaves there it is not fit for use, but is sent on to Christiania, where it is refined and freed from sanguineous globules and stearin filtered through paper, and packed ready for the market.— Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter.

GOLD IN THE SEA. In seeking to account for the origin of gold Professor Lobley, in Knowledge, observes Since the sea is the great receptacle for all solutions it was safe to conclude that it contained the soluble salts of gold, but the fact is not now a matter of mere deduction, but of actual knowledge. Sonstadt found, from careful experiments on the sea water of Ramsay Bay, Isle of Man, that sea water contains a little under a grain of gold per ton. Estimating the whole of the gold production of the world to the present time at £8,500,000,000 sterling, and taking the weight of the sea water of the globe at 560,000,000,000,000,000 tons as was estimated by Professor Wurtz, of New York, we find that the present seas of the globe contain upwards of 5,000 000 times as much gold as has ever been extracted f’rom the rocks; and consequently we mnst conclude that the seas of the globe in the past have been fully able to stock its mineral deposits with all the gold they contain. From these considerations it seems probable that gold was originally dissolved in the waters of the ocean, from which it was deposited, as the result of the decomposition of soluble salts of gold, by the action of organic matter, and that it was then eliminated from sedimentary rocks by segregation to other metallic matter, with which it remained associated until thermal conditions—caused by deep-seated position or not far distant igneous action—induced a chemical reaction, and likewise heated sufficiently the subterranean water of the rocks to make it an effective solvent of the auriferous compound. So the gold of the massive rocks was carried with silica by percolating water into the accumulating “ vein stuff” of rock fissures, where on cooler conditions supervening the anriferous compound was deposited in a solid condition, and the gold itself subsequently separated, by the segregation of the silica to the vein quartz, and left disseminated through the vein stuff as metallic gold in the forms in which it is now found.*