Evening star., 1939-11-23
Of Stors, Men
And Atoms
Notebook Of Science Progress
In Field, Laboratory
And Study
By Thomas r. Henry.

The gas mask, now required part Of
nearly everybodys wardrobe in France
and England-so much so that one feels
positively naked on the streets without
one-is more than century old, 1t is
shown by an item cleaned from one of
his foreign chemical journals by DR..
James H. Hibben, chief of the chemical
division of the United States Tariff Com
mission.
According to this note an English
miner named John Roberts demonstrated
a very efficient device before the Royal
Society of Arts in 1925 and received an
award of so pounds for his ingenuity long
before anybody dreamed of whole popu-
lations with such masks strapped over
their shoulders.
Roberts invention consisted of
leather hood completely enveloping the
head and made alright at the neck by
straps and wadding. The hood had two
airholes protected by glass or mica, and
breathing tube, the orifice of which
was filled with moistened sponge and
covered with coarse wooden cloth. The
former was to absorb gasses and the lat
ter to catch solid particles and smoke.
The inventor gave two demonstrations
of his apparatus. For one of these spe-
cial alright cubicle was constructed
filled with smoke and fumes from moist
shavings, wet hay and several pounds of
sulphur Roberts remained in this COM
nartOnnnf for An rojYl,toc xyl,ilo 10
perature rose to $50 F. He was none the
worse for the experience and claimed
that his only discomfort was due to the
heat.
Another tree disease, this time af-
fecting the sycamores, is spreading
rapidly down the Atlantic seaboard.
1t has reached the proportions of a
killing epidemic in Philadelphia and
Baltimore. Lately it has been found as
far South as Washington and as far
North as Newark Isolated infections
also have been found in Williamsburg,
Va; Charleston, w. Va, and Vicksburg,
Miss. The disease forms elongated cank-
ers on the trunks or branches. Dark
streaks spread through the wood from
these cankers and soon the tree dies One
way in which the disease is being spread,
according to DR.. j. M. Walter, forest
pathologist OF the Department of Agri-
culture, is through the use of infected
pruning tools. Over one-third of the
cuts which he made in healthy trees with
purposely contaminated saws produced
cankers.
Three star-cloud moons, each COM
posed OF billions of stars, accompany the
great Milky Way galaxy, in which the
sun and its planets are like dust speck
in its billion year revolution, according
to observations just reported to the Ma
tional Academy of Sciences here by DR..
Harlow Shapley, professor of astronomy
at Harvard University.
They would appear like galactic
moons, DR. Shapley says, in photographs
taken with powerful telescopes from
some possible abode of intelligent life in
| the Andromeda nebula, first of the outer
star systems to be recognized and distant
about a million light years from the
farthest borders of the Milky Way
galaxy.
They would be pictured by astrono-
mers in the Andromeda nebula, he says,
as small, spheroidal galaxies, or giant
| globular clusters of stars. DR.. Shapley's
report chiefly concerns newly found and
very curious clusters of stars, the So
called Sculptor and Fornax systems,
which fill an hitherto unrecognized
place in the evolutionary sequence of
| gigantic stellar aggregations. They are
members, together with the Milky Way
and Andromeda galaXies, the clouds
of Magellan, and few other aggrega-
tions of billions of stars, of the local
| galactic system. All lie within the
distance which can be traversed by light,
moving at the rate of 10000 miles a
second, in couple of million years. The
new systems are of about the size of the
average galaxy but have low total in
trinsic brightness and are devoid of the
supergiant stars which are found in the
other systems.
BY means of a study of the Cepheid
variables which have been found in both
these systems the Harvard astronomers
have been able to arrive at some COM
parative figures as to their distances.
On a small Photographic plate they
appear close together, even as if one
were superimposed upon the other.
Actually, the new studies show, one is
about twice as far away as the other.
In the same report DR.. Shapley records
the discovery of three hitherto un-
recognized supernovae in outer galaxies.
These are stars which suddenly flare up
until their brightness exceeds that of all
the aggregate of all the billions of stars
in the system. This represents the
greatest output of energy ever con-
ceived and the cause of titanic star
explosion still is matter of much
speculation.
In any one star system, such as the
Milky Way galaxy, they are extremely
rare. Only one possible explosion of
this sort has taken place in the visible
heavens during human history.
Throughout the millions of external
galaxies, however, several such blasts
can be observed each year and an
approach made to statistical study of
| the phenomenon