News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 3, 1913

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— The total military expenditures of the United States government during the present fiscal year, which ends June 30, will go upward of $180,000,000, the greatest in the history of the government.

— The fastest shorthand writing ever done, so it is said, was accomplished by Mr. Nathan Behrin, a New York court reporter, at a recent contest held by the National Shorthand Reporters’ Association.

— Hundreds of locomotives on the Pennsylvania Railroad are now equipped for service as fire-engines, and during the last four years these engines have assisted in extinguishing 153 fires. In one instance nine of the engines were at a fire within seven minutes.

— The University of Southern California has instituted a chair of automobile science, being the first university in the country to recognize the importance of the motor-car as a subject of technical study and investigation from the engineering standpoint.

— Dr. Roy C. Andrews, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, has lately returned from an expedition to Japan and Korea. In the latter country he traversed unexplored territory, one of the features of which was a great forest of larches and birches, through which the party traveled for three weeks.

— The new Equitable Building in New York City is to be the largest office-building in the world, but this will be on account of the large ground area which it is to occupy, for the structure will be but thirty-six stories in height—only relatively a sky-scraper in a city that contains forty-three-, forty-eight-, and fifty-five-story buildings.

— A novelty in paper goods that is rapidly coming into general use is the tissue-paper towel, which is designed to take the place of linen towels in public lavatories, railway stations, factories, etc. This is a truly sanitary device, for it furnishes every one with an individual towel, and, as each towel is thrown away after use, any possible communication of disease is prevented.

— In the recent death of Stephen Dudley Field, one of the world’s conspicuous inventive geniuses has been taken from the field of inventive improvements. Among the inventions patented by Mr. Field are the quadruple telegraph, electric elevator, amplifier for doubling the speed of ocean cables, stock ticker, hotel annunciator, police patrol telegraph; and he is also sometimes called the “father of the trolley-car.”

— The United States is very thoroughly “in business” in the Canal Zone. It not only watches over the interests of those employed on the “big ditch,” with a care that is most paternal, looking after the health and sanitation of the community to the last detail, but provides hotels and dwellings for them, and runs for their benefit the largest department store in the world, where employees can purchase anything they want, from meat and provisions to furniture and clothing, at rates that make all non-employees envious. Under Colonel Goethals the whole marvelous plant is a practical illustration in actual operation of what government ownership and control can do for a community where graft has been eliminated. As a great business organization, the authorities of the Zone have now taken a step in line with so many great corporations, looking toward the banishing of the drink evil, and the consequent loss of efficiency in their employees, and it is announced that after July 1 of the current year there will be no more licenses issued for the sale of liquor in the Zone.