News and Miscellany

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Jun 27, 1912

News and Miscellany

Notes and clippings from the daily and weekly press

— The United States navy's largest wireless station is nearing completion at Fort Myer, Va., and within a month the big, 650-foot steel tower, the only one of the three which has not been completed, will be ready to receive the wires, or antennæ, which will take from and send into the air Uncle Sam's messages for a distance of more than 5,000 miles.

— The red trousers of the Austrian soldier are to be discarded, and garments of a less conspicuous color substituted. This change follows a similar one in the French army, in which this feature of the uniform — introduced, it is said, by Napoleon I for economic reasons — had long been conspicuous. Khaki is becoming the soldiers' favorite service costume the world over.

— The act of Congress appropriating $300,000 with which army transports are to be equipped with life-boats and rafts to accommodate all persons and members of the crews transported on them was signed June 14 by President Taft. All ocean steamers entering American ports in future must be equipped with life-boats sufficient to carry at one time every passenger and member of the crew, according to new regulations adopted by the steamboat inspection service.

— Professor Melladra, assistant director of the observatory on Mt. Vesuvius, has, it is reported, accomplished the daring feat of descending into the crater of the volcano and making a series of moving pictures showing the emission of vapor, and other phenomena.

— Cabole, a beautiful tree that grows on the west coast of Africa and is also found on the island of St. Thomas, is said to furnish the most costly wood in the world. It somewhat resembles teak, and takes on a very high polish. Its price is quoted as about $3,500 per cubic meter.

— Hand cooperage is now almost an extinct industry. In no department has wood-working machinery been more highly specialized. There are machines for working the staves, for making the hoops, for shaping the heads, for assembling the parts, and for finishing the barrels.

— Despatches from Ungava, the great district north of old Quebec, announces the discovery of diamond deposits which may prove extensive enough for commercial exploitation. A prospecting expedition from Ottawa and Montreal is now on its way north to make a complete survey.

— Not everybody knows that the United States has a 2,000-mile mail route operated by dog-sleds during a good part of the year. Such is the fact, however, over the trail between Cordova and Nome, in Alaska. But for these mail facilities the dwellers of the bleak northern peninsula during the long winter months would be without mail service, owing to the close of navigation.

— A fine of $100, the first to be imposed under the wireless telegraph law of 1910, was recently collected from the captain of the coastwise steamer "Sabine" for sailing without a wireless operator. The law requires all vessels that carry more than fifty passengers and crew, and go 200 miles or more without stopping, to be equipped with wireless apparatus and to have a wireless operator.

— After lying dormant for many years, four volcanoes in southwestern Alaska have sprung into life, and are terrifying the surrounding country by terrific eruptions. Kodiak and Wood Island villages are buried under a foot of ashes, sand, and hot pumice-stone as a result of the eruption of Katmai volcano, located on the mainland of Alaska. It is feared that the total population of 200 persons has perished.

— It is reported that a company is being formed for the construction of an elevated railroad from New York to Chicago, and probably on westward to San Francisco. The inventor is Dr. William D. Gentry, of Chicago. He has secured the aid of the greatest financiers of the country. The new railroad will make a speed of more than 100 miles an hour, and will carry only passengers, mail, and light freight. It will be kept level by means of tunnels and trestles. The time from New York to Chicago is estimated at eight or nine hours. The new railroad will be single-track — one rail — for the lower section, or running-bed, of the car. The car itself will rest on steel platforms, and be attached by another running gear of top tracks to a single rail overhead.

— The Mississippi River has, an exchange estimates, added 1,200 square miles to our domain in the course of its history, by its deposits in the Gulf of Mexico.

— Night letters by telegraph, the president of the Western Union Telegraph Company is reported as saying, brought in $1,000,000 to the company the first year of their introduction.

— British sailors are agitating for an increase of pay. They are said to have had but one raise in more than fifty years, and they think their turn has come for better pay and larger privileges.

— The need of automatic stops for railway trains is emphasized by the report that 171 persons lost their lives and 931 were injured last year in accidents caused by engineers running past danger-signals. Such automatic stops are said to be perfectly practicable, and to be in successful use on some electric systems.

— Last month there returned to his own fair country an Italian organ-grinder, enriched by $50,000 through the simple occupation of turning a crank emitting discordant notes. That is considerably in excess of the lifetime compensation of a cathedral organ player dwelling among the masters of music.

— The trial of the steel magnates has begun in New York, and testimony is now being taken in the government's action for the dissolution of the United States Steel Corporation. Several witnesses testified regarding the alleged pool on horseshoes, and the barbed-wire pool was also under discussion. The investigation will probably be a prolonged one.

— A dime-in-the-slot photographic machine is, it is announced, about to be put on the market. The sitter places the coin in the slot, and pulls a lever; the mechanism turns on an electric light, drops a plate into position behind the lens, opens the shutter for three seconds, develops, fixes, and washes the plate, and in fifty-seven seconds delivers the picture, finished and in a neat frame. If the mechanism should fail to work, the dime is automatically returned.

— Galveston, Tex., recently celebrated the completion of its great causeway, the third and last of great protective measures adopted after the disastrous storm of ten years ago. The sea wall was the first of these. It is four and one-half miles long, and eighteen feet above the waters of the Gulf. The second protective work was the filling in of the flooded section, raising it ten feet above its former level. Now the causeway is done. It is wide enough to permit abreast a passenger-train, a freight-train, an interurban train, wagons, buggies, automobiles, and pedestrians. In time of peril it would be abundantly large to permit of the evacuation of the city in safety. It is about two miles long, stretching from the island city across Galveston Bay to the mainland. In its center is a huge roller lift bridge. With these great enterprises completed, Galveston begins a new era of prosperity. Its channel admits the largest ships, its geographical location makes it the center of a great and growing commerce, and its enterprise has made its disaster of ten years ago minister to the city's new and larger life.

— The first trial by jury ever held in China was held in Shanghai recently. The defendant was accused of murder.

— Last month in the markets of Chicago, meat advanced to the highest price that has been recorded since the civil war. The shortage of cattle is ascribed by the packers as the cause.

— The Arabs in southeastern Arabia took 4,500 Bibles from the American Bible Society last year. But the attack of Italy on Tripoli has embittered them against the Christian religion, as the Italians call themselves Christians, and they are now refusing Bibles.

— In no other country in the world, perhaps, are seaweeds utilized to the same extent as in Japan. At all seasons of the year this product of the deep is harvested. It forms not only a large item in the food of the people, but furnishes the raw material from which many articles of commerce are manufactured.

— The new Chinese postage-stamps, according to the New England Stamp Monthly, have begun to arrive in America. The name of the new republic, as indicated by these stamps, is Chung Hua Min Kuo, or Middle Flowery People's State. This name is apparently adapted from the familiar designation of China as the Flowery Kingdom.

— Missouri has a farm that annually produces more than 1,000,000 bushels of corn. One field on this farm aggregates 6,000 acres, and forty-two two-row cultivators may be seen at one time working in it, looking like an army of chariots ready to charge. The corn produced is not usually sold, but is fed to stock, of which there are 10,000 steers and 25,000 hogs.

— The signagraph is an invention that will be welcomed by the business man who has to sign large numbers of checks, bonds, or other documents. The movements of the pen held in the writer's hand are exactly duplicated by a series of other pens arranged over other sheets of paper. One New York financier is reported to have affixed his signature to 6,000 documents in thirty-eight minutes by the use of this device.

— Every child in the elementary schools of the United States would be card-catalogued, and a running history of his entire school career in the grades kept permanently on file, under a plan formulated by investigators whose report has just been issued by the United States Bureau of Education. The plan has the approval of the National Education Association, and about 300 cities already have begun to keep the cards. Eventually, it is thought, about 6,000,000 pupils will be thus tabulated.

— On May 1, on a lot in Spartanburg, S. C., which at dawn had been vacant, the Bethel Methodist church, a neat edifice with a seating capacity for 800 persons, stood that same night, having been erected, painted, papered, furnished with pews and altar, and equipped with electrical and plumbing fixtures between the rising and the setting of the sun. The feat was performed in the presence of 18,000 persons, while the band played lively airs, and moving-picture men reeled off thousands of feet of films. One hundred twenty workmen were engaged in the task of erecting the building.