Nature’s Patent Office.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 7, 17 February 1909, Page 49

Nature’s Patent Office.

The block and pulley, or “tackle,” was a great mechanical discovery, but nature made every man carry several of these around with him at the very beginning of creation. Tho most important of these tackles is found in the eye. If you turn your eye to look at the tip of your nose you use this block and pulley, which is just as perfect as any erected on a ship to hoist sail. The muscle which moves the eyeball works' through the block easily and smoothly, and without friction, for nature has supplied to all her machinery automatic or mechanical oil inventions. These never fait to work unless we are sick, and then the danger of a hot box is to be considered. The invention of the safety valve for steam engines has saved thousands of lives and millions of dollars of property. It is an invention that stands prominently to the front in this age of mechanical progress. But nature supplied us each with a safety valve, which, for effectiveness, works better than any made by man. If we did not have this safety valve we would not live twenty-four hours. This safety valve is the perspirative or sweat gland, and, to make sure that we would not run short of the

supply. she has furnished the body with s(rft.-M of theni. If our temperature aw seven or eight degrees wo would die within a few hours, and yet we could not run, row, play tennis, ball or even walk -afely any distance without increasing our temperature to the danger point if we had no .safety valve provided so ingeniously by nature. The cup and ball socket and the airtight valve were first u-ed in the human body. If our hip joints and arms were not provided with aid-tight sockets we would get too tired to continue our work for any length of time in just holding these limbs together by mu--cles. It is the pressure of the air which holds them in place, and thus all physical effort is avoided. In the various air-tight joints and socket- found in the human body one may find nearly all the mechanical principles involved in the air break or the use of the compressed air for a thousand different things. Some one exclaims that nature did not discover ball bearings, a mechanical d* vice which has revolutionized the vehicular world. But the principle is dmosr developed in the ball of the le • bone and the socket of the hip. wh: are made so smooth and are so well oiled that they slide back and forth with practically no friction.—A. S. Atkinson, M.l) , in “’Harper’s Weekly.”