The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-12-05

Il Ank Vh 4fo nlti9s an nOuEs OCto0tE o1 W highly successful tests of the first tur- bine locomotive made for English use:
 and November witnessed the marvel 1 lous performance. in England again, of 1 the gyroscope car, patented by Louis Brennan. Think of it!--a carriage forty feet long and thirteen high. weighing twenty-two tons. mounted on a single
 rail. and running freely about all sorts of curves and angles. It carries for-
 ty passengers with safety as complete
 and vibration far less than can the or
 dinary coach. and it's present speed of fifty miles an hour, 1t is said. may be Increased three-fold.
 The completion of Austria's Tauern railway crowns a genuine work of brains plus skill. Here was a line less than forty miles long, hitching up Cas- tein and Spittal. across and through the Aiaps. yet 1t has taken some $2,- 100000 to build it and eleven years la Dor: the tunneling alone demanded
 ninety months. Now 1t is proposed to pierce the barrier. conquered by Han
 nibal 2,1oo years ago. and by Mir. Bona
 parte of Corsica only a century back.
 not only at the Jungfraujoch. but through Mt. Blanc himself. The much talked-of line through the Andes will be in running order before another spring has come and gone.
 It's the American engineer, however,
 who, in his tunneling business. has made his mark highest and clearest.
 All worlds records in this sort have
 been bettered by the workers in the
 bores of the Chicago. Milwaukee and Puget Sound Road. under the Bitter
 Root Hills in Idaho and Montana. The
 drills began in November. '06. and the
 S.751 feet, just completed. showed a
 variant of only 1-300th of an inch off the true floor alignment. The Simpion tunnel is only 651 feet in length, and the St. Gothard but 456. :.
 And what of the AcAdoo tubes" borrowing under the river between New York and Jersey City? The first 'Pennsy" train ran through In No- vember and the trolleys had been bug zing there five months before that. The steel pipes; that bind the two States In amity give the train-sick traveller a cool plunge down a long, dark. subma- rine cave that might be fitted up with stalactites and stalagmites. Then. all most breathless he's discharged into an underground city of green. full of miniature stores, twinkling with eiec- tric bulbs.
 House and Garden.
 If you don't want to be on the go If home appeals most, and your own gar den calls for a spare hour now and then, 1909's brains have there. too, been satisfactorily employed in your service. Wizard Edison announces that he's ready to begin constructing $30, ,o00 cement houses for $1.20o by the pouring method;" Alfred Flanders. of Manchester N. H.. lays claim to an absolutely unreliable bottle: and a German experimenter seems to have conquered at last that ages-old prob lem of how to bore square holes. The Inventive Age" declares that his three cornered drill turns the trick perfectly
 All sorts of things have been. done with our time machines. England has inspected and approved one that runs for a thousand days without rewind- ing, and irrespective of the position in which 1t may stand; a clever German has patented a watch for the blind; read by finger-touch: and a Swiss me- chanic perfected experiments with a radium bromide solution, which makes A clock face far more luminous in the dark than phosphorus has done Fi- naily an ideal alarm clock has come out of Berlin. It has kettle, sauce pan, coffeepot and spirit lamp attach ment, which gets to work cooking breakfast synchronously with the alarm which wakens the person who is to enjoy it. Eggs and toast may be added little later: just yet it's only the drinkable part of the days first meal which had been compassed.
 Out-o of doors, Professor Harmon Morse, of Johns Hopkins. has succeed ed in measuring the osmotic pressure which raises the sap in tree; Berk- |, ley. Cal. grower has produced white strawberry; and Luther Burbank in | his "Wonderberfyn has 2 brought to-
 gether into @ harmless and es1oyabie fruit two species of nightshade plants each of which. heretofore. has been held as poisonous. Last. but far. far from least (the item might well have been recorded as the antithesis of the alarm clock just mentioned!) there's a Washington man who has devised a rooster muzzle; his idea is to kill the crow but save the gentleman behind 1t. But If the herald of the morning be allowed to speak his little piece. here comes a man who will photograph tho notes. Prof. D. c. Miller, of Cleve- land says he can do just that. His in- vention directly photographs sound waves, magnifying them 1000 times and recording them on films.
 Something like this Is described in | A May dispatch from Paris. where has | been tried new apparatus for the telegraphic transmission of pictures, | called the teleautocopyist. for which is
 claimed three-fold advantages over earlier inventions of the sort in that
 1t does not employ photograph. works
 with great rapidity, and does not de-
 mand an expert operator. Add to this | that Antonio Mantagua, of Rome. has discovered a method whereby photo-
 graphs may be either telegraphed or | telephoned any distance by means or
 ordinary wires and that two English men, Erban and Alberts. have with marked success welded the color pro-
 cess to the moving picture film. and | one sees that the twelve month has
 borne rich fruit for the enthusiasts | who press buttons.
 | In the Laboratories.
 The words physicists, too, have | been at work and proftahly Sir Will I liam Ramsay announced in March that | he had succeeded in transmitting four | different substances into carbon I zirconium, thorium. hydro-fuorcillic
 acid, and bIsmuth pr. E. s. Bailey of | New Orleans, month earlier than
 this, perfected a substitute for radium
 "Radio-Tho as he calls it, is made | of pitchblende, and is not merely
 cheaper and better than the rare ele- ment 1t replaces but wholly lacking
 all of radium's baneful effects. On
 February 10th, Cleveland scientists
 watched the operation of an oxygen | acetylene torch, which radiated a heat
 of some $500 degrees sufficicient to cut through a 2?inch solid steel plate | In 50 seconds or to weld aluminium, | heretofore regarded as impossible.