SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 21, 25 May 1922, Page 46

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

====== By” VOLT” ======= I y

THE AUTOMATIC NAVVY. Chewing up the concrete foundations of New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, London, at the rate of 176 square, yards in eight hours, an American pneumatic apparatus attracted crowds of city folk. Instead of four or five muscular fellows swinging heavy hammers on to the head of a chisel, two men are needed to place the machine in position, and the pick-point slides through a foot-thickness of concrete in half a minute! The pick-point is fixed into a vertical cylindereasily carried by one man —and a hammer works on its head at the rate of about 500 blows a minute. A pressure of 901 b. of compressed air, fed to the cylinder through rubber piping from a portable compressor close by, works the invisible hammer. The hammer forces the pick-point through the concrete, and the vibration of the whole apparatus breaks up the concrete so that no lumps larger than a man’s head are left. COLDER THAN THE NORTH ROLE. Nearly, if not quite, the most fundamental wrong idea about the north is (says Mr. V. Stefansson in the World's Work ) that the North Pole is the coldest place in ‘ the Northern Hemisphere, and that the Polar regions are far colder in winter than any countries that are now inhabited by the average kind of civilised European or American. Besides minor considerations, there are three main factors that determine what the possible minimum temperature of any 'place may be. These are latitude, altitude, and distance from the ocean. Me see at once that the North Pole has in a high degree only one of these three qualifications for being extremely cold. Certainly it is at a high altitude. But the North Pole does not lie high above the sea-level, for it is located in an ocean which Admiral Peary, at the time he visited the Pole, found to be more than 12,000 ft deep. And if it is not above sealevel, neither is it far away from the ocean, for it lies in the ocean. Possessing only one of the three main qualifications for being extremely cold, it naturally is never extremely cold. Those who theorise about it generally agree that the minimum temperature there seldom, if ever, drops 60 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. If the actual minimum temperature of the North Pole is a matter of theory, wo are in no doubt about the temperature of the north coast of Canada or Alaska. The other day I was reading over a report of the meteorological observations of my Arctic expedition of 1913-18, made by the second in command, Dr. R. M. Anderson. He says, “The lowest temperature of the winter was 46 degrees below zero,” or about like Saranac Lake, New York State, which is a winter resort. Temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero are rare on the north coast of North America, and there are many winters when 45 degrees or 46 degrees below zero is the lowest record. After asking the United States Weather Bureau for the lowest record applicable to the north coast of Alaska, I inquired for the lowest temperature ever recorded in some settled portion of the United States in some average American community where a good many average Americans live in average American comfort. They replied that in a small town near Havre, Montana, they had registered 68 degrees below zero. Almost as low temperatures have been recorded in Havre itself, and Havre is a typical American town of three or four thousand inhabitants, with stores and shops, with schools and little children going to school, with churches and people going to church at a temperature 10 degrees lower than it ever has been known to be on the north coast of North America, and about 10 degrees lower than it probably ever is at the North Pole. And Havre is not by any means the only place in Montana where the minimum cold is lower than on the north coast of North America.