New Britain herald., 1924-10-21
BALTIMORE MAN
 HAS STRANGE FAD
Collection Of Impossible Facts
 His Pastime

Among tho strangest lads on rec
 ord Is dhat of prominent Balti.
 more banker, He makes speciality
 of collecting what he calls "impos-
 sible facts"
 "If the world were a perfect circle at the equator" he. will say, "and e
 steel band were stretched tightly around it the band would measure about 2f.O00 miles. But if you add only 121-2 inches to the steel band 1t would stand away two inches from the earth's surface around the entire 2i,000 miles circumference Every body would say that is impossible, but any mathematician will demon- strate that it is fact"
 Being a banker he loves to daily with figures and in pursuit of his hobby he is often guilty of infiicting cruel and unusual punishments on statistics Take the pointed matter of pins, says the Baltimore Evening Sun.
 'The world uses 500 million pins every week. Every year for the last 100 or so 1t has used 31 billion pins. Now pin Is practically indestruc- ible. Unlessit is melted up. pin will endure unchanged for--to be conservative-50 years. Yet fin that time the lost and discarded pins would cover the surface of the earth with layer two feet thick. :"
 Turning to a more gruesome sub ject, the banker deals with the ceme- teries and burying grounds of one of the large cities of the United States.
 There are "A large cemeteries in and about the city" he goes on, land, in addition, 35 small burying grounds of one kind or another As the result of painstaking investiga- tion and reference to the records of practically all the burying places mentioned, have determined that the total number of burials made in them amounts to 577,302.
 Yet my statistician reports that after a careful study of population and death rates. vbacked by the off, cial figures of the public health de- pertinent, it is certain that at least 900,OOo people have died in the city under investigation.
 About 320,000 bodies are unac. counted for. What became of them? Why should there be such a hug discrepancy between the number o; burials and of deaths?"
 The only clew he will give to tn, Identity of the city is that it has D population of something more than S-4 million and stands among the older settlements of the country.
 He is plainer when he turns to the 1920 census figures for Mary land and asks how it is possible that there should be in the state 24S,705 white married men, unwidowered and undivorced and only 245,30D white married women, unwidowed and undivorced? More than three thousand women appear to be miss ing.
 Al first" he says, T concluded that the three thousand Maryland women were visiting in New York or somewhere else when the census was taken. But no. There are more married white men, unwidowered and undivorced than married white women, unwidowed and undivorced, in every state-half a million more white husbands, in fact, than wives, And exactly the same cases prevails in the census figures for the Negro race.
 Here are the figures which the census bureau declares to be facts and yet on the face of them they are impossible.
 Tt would appear to be impossible that there should be more pleasure motor cars in the country than there are homes. Yet, with II million mo- tor cars Misunderstanding trucks and commercial vehicles - there were only 1O,60O,000 homes in the United States. Surely there are not 100000 people who are in the un- happy position of owning more than one car for pleasure driving.
 ''If you pursue almost any line of inquiry far enough. you are likely to find that by the time you have made certain of your facts they have be-