Science Siftings

New Zealand Tablet, 1 June 1916, Page 47

Science Siftings

By ‘Volt.’

What a Four Million Army Means.

Some startling figures were quoted by Mr. Herbert N. Casson in an address in London recently. He said Britain’s little Army of 275,000 became 4,000,000 in such quick time that we could not count the men as they came in. Four million soldiers meant'one soldier for every acre in Yorkshire, one- for every two houses in Great Britain, and thirty-three for every square mile of Great Britain. We had now an Army which, marching four abreast, would be 760 miles long. Let every man carry 500 sovereigns, and there we had the Army and the —an Army which would, reach from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. ,We could stand our Army round the coast line, elbows touching, and with every man bearing his own weight of silver we had the cost. - How Opium is Prepared. The preparation of opium does not to-day differ materially from the operation as described by distinguished travellers years ago. Incisions having been made in the capsules of the poppy the juice issuing therefrom is allowed to bleed into brass pans. The product is then alternately dried in the sun and kneaded with trowels on wooden boards until all excess of moisture has been got rid of. When the poppyjuice has been reduced to paste in the manner described above, and has been freed from extraneous • matter, it is divided into cakes of equal size, which are allowed to dry in a warm atmosphere before being packed for export. Opium thus prepared will contain about 11 per cent, morphia, suitable for medicinal purposes. When, however, the stuff is to be a smoking mixture rather than a drug, it is reduced to 5 per cent, morphia by adulteration. - Modern Explosives. To Sir Frederick Abel, then Mr. Abel, was due the solution of the problem which had so persistently baffled the efforts of his predecessors and contemporaries—that is, a process for the purification of guncotton. Indeed, its utility as a disruptive agent may be said to date from Sir Frederick’s discovery in 1865, a discovery by which gun-cotton is thoroughly purified, and the material converted into thoroughly compact homogenous masses. Cordite is much more powerful than gun-cotton, and is composed of nitro-glycerine, gun-cotton, and vaseline, which are dissolved by so many parts of acetone. These, says Chambers’ Journal, are mixed together until they form a soft, putty-like paste. It is then forced through holes in a metal plate, and emerges in long strings, whence its name ‘ cordite ’ comes.. A smokeless powder, cordite is commonly used in firing our big guns. Lyddite is ppobably the most powerful explosive known to man. It is largely composed of one of the derivatives of —namely, picric acid. To convert and develop the explosive properties of this new discovery to the purposes of war was only a matter of time and experiment for the expert chemists. They did not labor in vain, for they found that by melting the picric acid crystals until they turned into a fluid of the consistency of cream, and then combining this fluid with gun-cotton melted in alcohol, they got an explosive more terrifying and tremendous in its destructive powers than anything else know’ll before or since.