SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, 24 July 1919, Page 46

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

Organising Electrical Resources.

There is much discussion in Great Britain of superstationsthat is to say, of electric generating plants larger than anything yet installed, and supplying current in unlimited quantities to electric supply undertakings, railways, steel works, textile mills, and other big users over a very wide area. Electric supply is, in fact, being treated on a national basis, and enterprise on that scale implies manufacturing firms capable of turning out steam turbines of 50,000 kilowatts each, and constructing transformers, cables, and switch-gear for transmission of electric power at very high voltage. During the war the electrical manufacturers have been fortunate in their freedom to develop towards this position. So enormous has been the demand for electric power and electrical plant of every description that the war has been a powerful stimulus to their productive work. Incidentally, they have been reorganising themselves into larger groups, each working along certain definite lines and capable of undertaking the manufacture of alj, types of power station plant, cables, telephones, meters, lamps, and innumerable other accessories, the most ambitious schemes of railway electrification, complete contracts for hydro-electric and other power schemes, and for the electrical operation of collieries, textile mills, and so on. The electric cable makers of Great Britain, who set the standard of excellence in electrical transmission of power, have greatly developed their output during the war. In addition to these large combinations there are many strong firms specialising in various types of electrical plant and apparatus and continuously perfecting such machinery as steam, gas, and oil engines, electric motors, transformers and instruments, switch-gear, heating and cooking apparatus. The electrical manufacturing industry is, in fact, still better equipped than it was before the war to meet foreign competition at home and abroad, and also to carry out every form of electrical enterprise, from the financing thereof to the operation when completed. Ever-increasing attention is also being given to research, both by individual electric firms and by the industry generally, in association with the Institution of Electrical Engineers and other scientific bodies. Medicine from Trees. Ask any physician what is the most useful and most used stimulant to the heart and nervous system, and he will reply strychnia. Strychnia is an alkaloid found originally in the seed of the strychnos nux-vomica, an exceedingly poisonous nut-tree that grows in tropical climates. It is the most bitter substance known, and to its presence is due the disagreeable taste left in one’s mouth after taking a tonic pick-me-up. A tree which has various speciesseveral hundreds in factand is of some medical interest, is the acacia. The acacia senega! furnishes us with gum arabic, a substance that, while not possessed of any marked curative properties of itself, is of considerable importance in the making up of pharmaceutical prescriptions.