Los Angeles herald., 1909-05-17

Is prOuuCeu Dy any TWO Olner cOun~
tries except England.
At no other time in history has the
manufacturer ever been so progress
sive as the American manufactures of
today. 1t took five centuries to go
from the Spanish galleon to the Lusi-
tania. 1t required sixty years to de-
velop the railroad engine up to its
present high standard. But a single
decade has sufficed to evolve the auto
mobile from it's experimental stage up
to product of the highest usefulness
and greatest efficiency. And so it Is
in almost every branch of manufac-
ture No one century ever gave as
much progress to the world as the past
twenty years have given.
New industries are being born so
rapidly that the laymen can scarcely
keep track of them. Who ever thought
of wreeking a whole railroad train or
setting a house on fire i'm order to get a
picture a decade ago? Yet the moving
picture man came upon the scene and
those things became in order. And the
moving picture has in turn helped to
launch another industry. Not long
since there was a new glass factory
set up in the west. 1t used automatic
glass blowers. When it needed moro
capital it went into the financial dis
tricts in search of il. The financial
men were dubious. They could not un-
derstand how a machine could blow
glass. Then the glass makers be-
thought themselves to use the moving
picture man to prove 1t. They did so
and got their money without further
question.
American ingenuity can produce the
worlds mightiest electric engine, with
a horsepower far into the thousands,
and it can produce the smallest motor,
4rT, ,frI1f fa,Tr ,trra
This motor was made by a Texas man.
ufacturing jeweler. The field magnets
are of the finest sheet steel, and SO
small that they can scarcely be SEEN
The power is taken off by a brush of
nearly the same invisible dimensions,
and the finest silk covered wire is used
in winding the armature. The motor
is driven by a tiny silver chloride bat
terry The jeweler wears 1t as scarf
pin, and can make the little thing buzz
as busily as the biggest motor one
ever saw.
1t has been we'll that denatured al
cohol has come upon the scene as a
cheap fuel and a motive power for
small establishments which have hith-
erto used oil. 1t is estimated that in
the past half century the oil fields of
North America have produced enough
petroleum to fill the entire Panama
canal when completed. But the east
ern oil fields are expected to cease to
flow in important quantity within the
next decade. Denatured alcohol de-
pendent not upon stored up supply
which can never be added to, but upon
mans power to make it, is one of the
examples of what the world may eX-
pect as the great resources near eX-
tinction. Concrete comes along as the
substitute for wood. and it is expected
by one school of economic thought that
no resource will ever become exhaust
ed but that man will have a working
substitute for it.
The discovery of saccharine, one of
the most important of the coal tar de-
rivatives, shows how the scientist may
stumble upon something of inestimable
value to the manufacturer. A Johns
Hopkins chemist was experimenting
with coal tar to find some new prop
critics, more with view to assigning
them high names than with
the expectancy of discovering some
thing which would develop into a
great industrial asset. When he went
home to dinner he found that the
bread had remarkably sweet taste.
His landlady declared she had not put
sugar into it, and the other boarders
did not discover anything wrong with
theirs. 1t was finally discovered that
the sweetness was on his hands. He
hastened back to his laboratory and
examined everything he had there.
Finally he located it, and the saccha-
rine of commerce was the result. 1t is
so sweet that four pounds of 1t will
go further than q ton of cane or beet
sugar. One Gamer of corn was able to
save $4,000 worth of corn in a single
season through the use of saccharine
1t requires only one-fourth of a grain
to sweeten a can of corn, and the re-
suit is that a man never eats more
than a sixteenth of a grain of 1t at
one time. 1t is widely used in sweeting
chewing tobacco and other things to
which it is necessary to impart a last
ing flavor of sweetness. 1t is also used
as a substitute for sugar in the treat
ment of gout and kindred ailments.
Every day new things are being in
vented and manufactured. Thirty
years ago the number of articles made
in the United States was compare
lively small, and there were fewer
manufacturers in the whole country
than there are in half-dozen leading
states today. Now there are 10000 diff
ferent articles listed in the manufac-
turers' red book and they are made
by 600,0 900 manufacturers. The first
red book, published in 1885. weighed
three ounces. The current volume
weighs thirteen pounds.
Copyright, 1909, by Frederic ]. Haskin.)
TomorrOw-Gas Production.
menaces the Sixth ward by any