The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-01-04
WE'RE AHEAD OF us.
Ideas Now Looked Upon Us as New Date Back Many Hundred Years.

only revivals of things that existed a cen tury or two ago. They are 90 old they have beeh forgotten and revived again as new. t.
 That highly educated Chinese diplon-==ss, Wu Tng-fang, who is now on the way back to China with . bag full of curios. was the first to expose the antiquity of the new game of ping-pong. It was shown to him as an entirely new Idea, but the willy Oriental could not see 1t in that light and explained that while the game was c pleasant one 1t was not new. having been played by his countrymen since 900 B. c. As nearly as Mir. Wu could remember offhand. the game was invented by a Chinese priest. Mr. Wu is always sure of his facts and is too polite a diplomat to hepart from the truth to gain a slight advantage in pre- tending to know more than other people .about such simple matters as ping-pong.
 The world of science in London is just now greatly stirred over a substance called slectroid. which has the peculiar property of making plants grow at an amazing rate. Under the influence of this discovery they grow. bloom. mature and fade away in the space of few minutes. The scientists are greatly in- terested in the discovery and are trying to find some practical use for 1t in the botanical world.
 In The Journal de savants for 1885 can be found an account written by an en- gineer named Papin. which tells Of the discovery of a scientist named Wilde which causes flowers and plants to grow to full maturity in the interval of few moments. So 1t appears that the latest novelty to the scientific world of London was known over two centuries ago.
 The now poular military device known as the heliograph, which was used with great success by the British army In South Africa, was simply taken back to its old home again. This device Is an arrangement of mirrors by which sunlight Is flashed to one point to another ac- cording to a pre-arranged code or sig nals. It Is part of every hrst-class army, and looked upon as more or less of a novelty. There is evidence that 1t was uaed by the natives of Northern Africa eleven centuries ago. or about the year 900
 Even more ancient is the practice of homeopathy, which has now become recognized branch of medicine. There was healing by similarity" nearly 2.OOO years ago and curing by minute doses of poison. These and other pracuces died out TOT something over seventeen centuries, only to be revived in our own day as nine teenth century invention.
 If you go to the elevated railway sta- ton you pass through a self-registering turnstile, which automatically records the number of persons who enter. Yet this same device was used eighteen centuries ago to find out how many persons at- tended the big exhibitions given at the circus The same persons at the same date were using condensers aboard tneir trireme war vessels made exactly nke those which a modern steamship carries
 Raised type for the blind Is usually iooh- ed upon as comparatively recent oiscoS- cry. So 1t is in this country. In Persia' however. such type has been In use from time immemorial.
 Motor cars are by no means so recent in origin as is generally imagined. Ev- eryone, of course, knows that steam coaches were put upon the roads Of Eng land early in the reign of Queen Victoria and that they worked excelIently, only failing because of oppressive Legislation But the self-propelled vehicle is far more than seventy yeahs old. There is trust worthy record that Father Nerorest' Jesuit missionary to China in the year 15e0. invented and built a steam-driven vehicle for road use during his stay in the far East. It was, indeed, construct ed according to what is now considered a novel style-that of the steam turbine. A jet of steam was made to act directly upon A yaned wheel, which was affixed to a vertical shaft gearing attached to one of the axles.
 About the same date a 'Nuremburg man named Johann Haustach manufactured what he described as "a chariot going by spring and making 2.0OO paces an hour" The motive power was, in fact, that of a modern American clock-a big coiled spring The invention failed because all four wheels were fixed and not plvoted. So the machine was useless except on q straight road.
 There are hundreds of persons at work at present upon the perfecting of the n.y. ing machine, and Santos-Dumonts steer able balloon has attracted an enormous amount of attention. There Is still in ex- istence a letter written ot the King of Portugal in 17O9. ''I have invented a ma chine," the writer says, by means of which one can voyage in the air more rapidly than on land or sea. It will travel more than 200 leagues in a day and be in- valuable to send dispatches to armies in the most distant countries. Thanks to aerial navigation. we may discover the North Pole and such remote regions" Perhaps the most remarkable fact about this early navigator of the air is that not only was It's writer of the same na- tionality as the present Santos-Dumont, but his name was also Santos.
 The wearing of sunbonnets by horses during hot weather caused a tremendous sensation when the fashion first appeared three or four years ago. There is to be seen at Genoa an old Italian print, dated 1542, in which is depicted a man riding on horseback with an umbrella fixed over his own head and another over that of his horse.
 can claim to be nineteenth century inven- tions. In the year 1885 the Duke of Parma invested Antwerp so closely that the burghers were almost at their wits end They set to work and built q large ship, the hull of which they plated thlckly with iron, to protect it from Spanish shot. In its construction they embodied another peculiarity, usually supposed to be a modern invention. Roomy platforms were built upon It's masts. where sharpshoot- CTS might lie concealed--regular fighting tops, in fact The Dutch launched this slip with so certain a hope that by its aid the war would be ended that they christened 1t "Finis Belli''-the end of the war. Unluckily, the ship ran upon a shoal and was captured by the Spaniards before 1t could be gotten off.
 Steam navigation dates back to a sirni- lar period. In the reign of Charles I of Spain an inventor fitted up an old war vessel with paddles worked by steam and ran 1t at a speed of nine knots an hour. The King Is said to have been much amused and gave the man a present of