In The Smoke Room

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue X, 5 September 1896, Page 299

In The Smoke Room

GEORGE PAYNTER, the barman of the Atlantic steamship ‘ Etruria,’ has the record of having voyaged 2,889,612 statute miles. He has crossed the Atlantic 791 times, and has followed the sea fiftyfour years, serving on thirty vessels on the Cunard fleet. This is supposed to be a greater record than that of any other man now afloat. Out of fourteen new vessels (including torpedo-boats) to be added to the Japanese fleet, twelve of them are to be constructed in England and two in the United States. The twelve include four ironclads and four first and two second-class cruisers. The torpedo boats so far ordered, go to French and German yards, while the vessels ordered in the United States are second-class cruisers. A lock of Napoleon’s hair, cut when the Emperor was on board the ‘ Bellerophon ’ at Plymouth, in August, 1815, and sent with a letter to Capel Lofft, of Troston, Suffolk, was sold at Sotheby’s in London the other day for £3O. The American says that in an Irish Court recently an old man was called into the witness-box, and, being old and a little blind, he went too far in more senses than one, and instead of going up the stairs that led to the box, mounted those that led to the bench. The judge took the mistake good-humouredly. l lsit a judge you want to be, my good man ?’ he asked. ‘ Ah, sure, your honor,’ was the reply, * I’m an old man now, and mebbe it’s all I’m fit for.’ Professor Hinton, of Princeton University, has invented an automatic baseball pitcher. It delivers the balls at the rate of three a minute, and will fire them fast or slow, straight or curved, at the will of the operator. M. Edmond Blanc, whose horse Arreau won the Grand Prix at Paris, is the most successful owner of racehorses on the Continent. He was fortunate from the first, for he was little more than a boy when he won the Grand Prix in 1879 with Nubienne ; this victory being followed by those of Clamart in 1891, Rueil in 1892, Andree in 1895, and now Arreau—the latter one of the most popular wins on record. The city of Jerusalem is becoming modernised. There are now eight printing offices in the city. Li Hung Chang submitted to the Rbntgeu rays examination at the Charlottenburg Polytechnic Institute at Berlin on the 26th of June. It showed the track of the bullet fired by the would-be assassin of the Chinese statesman at Shimonoseki while the treaty negotiations between China and Japan were being entertained. The bullet entered the left cheek and buried itself in the tissues, slightly below where the missile is encysted. According to the method which is now adopted for reckoning leap years in England, December, January, and February will be the summer months about 720,000 years hence. Mr Wheeless of Washington, well-known as a prominent electrician, is working on what he believes to be an entirely new form of electricity. It is called by him electric steam and issues from the machine with the hiss of steam and with the same vapour. He has found that the new form of electricity will have almost unlimited power, before which all present electric motors will pall. He is not yet ready, however, to put his wonderful machine on the market and is busy investigating his discovery. A French scientist, M. Ragonneau, says he has duplicated the Hindoo trick of growing a plant from seed in thirty minutes. The Hindoos use earth from ant hills that is saturated with formic acid and greatly stimulates the germination o f the seed. By infusing ants in boiling water acid as strong as vinegar can be obtained. M. Ragonneau has achieved the best results and most perfect growth by using earth moistened with a solution of 5,000 parts of water to one of acid.