SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, 13 June 1918, Page 46

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

By “VOLT.’* -

An Electrical - Gun. An electrical expert, with a number of ingenious inventions to his credit, demonstrated recently in London his reasons for believing that the German "mystery gun” is an electrical contrivance. He performed an experiment with the aid of two low-power dry batteries, an ordinary wired bobbin, and a large French nail. The nail, lying across a couple of pencils to lessen friction in motion, was placed with one end just within the bobbin, and, with the aid of the batteries, a current was run through the coil. The result was that the nail was drawn with great force into the bobbin, until held there by the current. A second experiment, however, showed that if the cm lent weie cut off almost immediately the circuit was completed, the nail was thrown forward through the bobbin into space. If for the bobbin you substitute an electrifiable gun-barrel of great length, divided into a number of sections independently wired, and if you replace the nail by a projectile, at the same time providing adequately powerful batteries, it should be possible to develop enormous muzzle velocity by electrifying one section of the barrel after another in turn, the current being automatically cut off each section as soon as it had given sufficient impetus to the projectile to carry it to the next. Sunken Ships. When the war is over many interesting revelations will probably be gathered from the statements of many of the crews of the submarines that ply up and down under the surface and go down on to the bottom of the sea, as told in J{o//.<’ Life, the Hoy Scouts’ magazine, for February. Many strange sights flit past the eye of the lookout in the conning tower when the vessel is deep down. But strangest and most melancholy are the glimpses he gets of sunken ships resting on the bed of the ocean. In the North Sea, which is shallow in comparison with other great expanses of salt water, they form a danger to the underwater craft, which may sometimes only avert collision by a quick turn of the wheel. But sunken ships in the deep sea, such as the 1 acific and the Indian oceans, only go down a certain distance, no matter what their build or how ponderous their cargo. The idea popular among seafarers and tain scientists is that, having reached a certain stratum in those tremendous depths, they then drift about, slowly disintegrating, derelicts of the depths swarming with strange denizens. Modern Surgery. A wonder of modern surgery was seen by the King and Queen in the course of their visit of inspection to the Reading War Hospital. Private Beesley, who was a pianist before he became a soldier, had the thumb of his right hand shot away in action. The surgeon, foreseeing that this would be a great handicap to him again in civil-life, undertook to transplant the third finger of his left hand on the place where his thumb had been. The operation was quite successful, and Private Beesley expects to be able to play again as well as ever.