The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-05-10
TO MEAsUBn nn.loy1ov TIME.
Wonderful Invention by Professor Scrip
 ture of Yale.

Wonderful Invention by Professor Scrip ture of Yale.
 One of the busiest departments of
 Yale university is the psychological de- pertinent, over which Professor ID. w.
 Scripture presides. Some new inven-
 tion or apparatus is developed there every little while, and the world won
 ders at the ingenuity of the device.
 Professor Scripture has given report
 CT the particulars of an arrangement
 just contriVed for measuring a run
 ner's reaction time. It will be of great interest to the world of sports. In dis
 cussing the device Professor Scripture said:
 Everybody loses time. It takes time to think and time to act. If somebody
 touches you with hot poker or light ed cigarette certain period of time
 elapses before you are able to jerk your
 hand away. If some one touches your hand it takes time for the impression
 of heat to pass up the sensory nerve in
 the arm, through the spinal cord, into
 the brain. It takes still more time for
 the complicated brain processes to
 occur, which finally result in a nerv- ous impulse, which passes down the motor nerves of the arm through the
 muscles and causes them to move the hand.
 This time which is lost is called the reaction time. So far we have consid- cred 1t only physiological matter. Viewed from the psychological or men tai side, this process consists in feeling an impression of heat and in willing to draw the hand away Let us consider for moment if there were no reaction time. If you could withdraw your hand the instant anything touched 1t, a hot coal could be applied to the skin and you could feel. and yet there would be no time for the coal to burn the skin. The length of the reaction time Is in many cases a very important factor. Tn the runner it must be- made very short In the whale 1t is very conven- lent that the time is extremely long, The sailor can drive the harpoon into the whale. It takes so long for the im- pulse to run up and back the long nerves in the whale that the sailor has time to get his boat out of the way before the whale strikes with his tail.
 Tn running sprint races 1t Is very important to save even the fifth of a second. It has been proved by ex- pertinent that the time which elapses between the firing of the starters pistol and the actual starting of the run ner is long enough to influence the win ming of a race. This is the runners time. The sound strikes his ear, the nervous impulse goes to the brain, the brain processes must occur, and then the impulses must go out to his legs. The reaction time of a run ner may vary from one-sixth to over one-third of a second. The stopwatch- es record in fifths of second. So that the quick man may gain enough from his reaction time to just win the race.
 An arrangement for measuring a reaction time down to the thou | sandth of a second has been contrived in the Yale laboratory. The starters pistol is arranged so that an nIelectric contact is broken when the pistol goes off A thread is attached to the right | foot of the runner. This thread breaks | an electric contact the moment the run ner starts. Each of these electric con tacts makes a. spark on a smoked cylin- | der in such way that the time which | has elapsed between the first contact l and the second can be measured"