WHAT ANGORA IS DOING TO BRITAIN

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EVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM CHALLENGES the ascendency of the British Empire throughout the East, we read, and very striking is the change five years have brought. In 1918 "it seemed as tho practically the entire Middle-Eastern world would be absorbed in the British system." Britain's quiet rival, Russia, had "disappeared from the scene." There were British troops in the "Russian Zone" of Persia. Also in Trans-Caspia. Also in Trans-Caucasia. British power had supplanted Turkish power in Iraq, Palestine, and Arabia, and even in Constantinople and Anatolia it seemed that the Turks "would reconcile themselves to a British ascendency." What has changed all this? Dr. Arnold J. Toynbee thinks Angora has. "Angora is much more than the capital of the new Turkish national state," he tells us in the Contemporary Review; "it is a focus from which revolutionary nationalism has been spreading." So this is what has come of Britain's failure to control Turkey. Says Dr. Toynbee:

"Had we succeeded in establishing a moral hold over the last independent Moslem State, our ascendency would hardly have been disputed elsewhere; and the whole Islamic world, from Bengal to Constantinople, and from the African lakes to the Caucasus, might have been drawn into the wake of the British Empire, except for a few French and Italian dependencies scattered here and there as enclaves. Looking back on this position to-day, the Turks, Egyptians, Afghans, and Indians whom an English visitor meets at Angora have a way of smiling and professing ironical gratitude to Mr. Lloyd George. 'It was your late Prime Minister,' they explain, 'who saved Turkey from herself. Had he given her one touch of kindness, one friendly stroke or gentle word, she would have licked his hand and we might all have lost our independence forever. Fortunately, he preferred to kick her till she showed her teeth and summoned up her last energies to fight for her existence; and, as it turned out, we have gained far more by defiance than we could ever have gained by conciliation.""

AN AWKWARD CUSTOMER TO CONFER WITH The Terrible Turk is a mild enough individual at Lausanne, but behind him is, as one correspondent describes it, "a somewhat turbulent and victory-drunk Soviet at Angora." -Glasgow Bulletin.

TURKISH MENACE TO WORLD

DANGER

The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all the League had fled!"

-Racey in the Montreal Star.

"The

Conciliation is now impossible, thinks Dr. Toynbee. psychological moment has passed," and "it is no longer conceivable that the Oriental peoples will consent to work out their destinies within the framework of the British Empire." For

"They have been alienated by unhappy experiences-the Turks by the deportations to Malta and by the interallied régime in Constantinople, the Egyptians and Indians by events which are too painfully familiar to require mention-and they are convinced that our system stands, as far as the East is concerned, for a Western ascendency, both in political and in personal relationships. Therefore they will have none of it, for equality of status with the West lies at the back of all their demands, and is the ultimate stimulus of their action in every sphere. They are willing to trade with us, as they have always done, and they intend to master our economic methods, but not at the sacrifice of personal equality and political independence; and we shall not change their sentiments by substituting the word 'Commonwealth' for 'Empire' or by giving them progressive instalments of representative institutions."

Their ideal, Dr. Toynbee believes, will not be "the well-tried British Commonwealth," but "the newfangled Government of the Great National Assembly" at Angora, and he remarks, "One comes away from Angora wondering whether the two contrasted systems can long coexist in the Oriental world." Accordingly

"The success of Angora is, in fact, a portent which ought to make the British nation take stock of its relation to its Oriental dependencies. We originally went to the East for trade; in pursuit of trade we acquired an empire; are we now prepared to preserve our trade by liquidating our empire, supposing that we have to choose between them, or has our political ascendency become our paramount concern? And if it has, do we intend to maintain it by force over peoples whose soul revolts against it? The chief danger of our position is that we do not yet know our own minds, while men's minds in the East are traveling so fast that we have little time left for making our decisions."

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acute hearing possest by savages, by woodsmen and by many animals, all of whom are able to detect sounds in nature which would entirely escape the duller ears of ordinary citizens. In primitive life this ability is often a matter of life and death to men as well as to animals, since the rustle of a fallen leaf may betray the step of an enemy or the movement of a reptile. But it has remained for a German schoolmaster to prove that this keenness of hearing may be acquired by children and may be the means of unfolding new pleasures to them in their rambles through forest and countryside. The teacher in question, Herr Cornel Schmitt, gives an interesting account of his experiments along this line in a late number of Kosmos (Stuttgart). He began the work by asking the children to note down on the tablets of paper, which they carried with them on their nature-study walks, the sounds made by various birds, expressing these as closely as possible in terms of the alphabet. He then asked them to try to discover a possible approximation between the sound uttered by the bird and its popular name. This was easy in some cases and more difficult in others, but naturally formed an amusing game for the children. Among the more obvious instances are those of the cuckoo (Kuckuck) the owl (Uhu), and the turtle-dove (Turteltaube), the sound uttered by the latter being "Turr, turr." Sometimes the sound is commemorated in the zoological name instead of the popular one, as in the case of the rail bird (crex crex). From this simple beginning, Mr. Schmitt tells us, an extensive system of exercises was evolved:

"These observations led us to examine under the microscope those sound imitations embodied in our mother tongue. . . I remember, for example, a trip taken just at the time the spring snows were melting, when we wandered along the banks of a little brook running through the valley, all ears for its sounds.

"It was a novel experience. Here, the water 'gurgled' as it reached a whirlpool and was drawn into its depths. There, it found a stone in its path over which it sprang 'hissing' and 'spattering' (zischend und spritzend), yonder it ran rushing (rauschend) through a small channel and then murmured (Murmeln) over a broader bed.

"Always we found a striking similarity between the sound and the word-sound painting! We began to have . . . a gradually increasing respect for the powers of the human ear.”

As will be seen, the German words given here as having an onomatopoeic origin are closely paralleled in English, which is by no means surprizing since so many primitive words in both languages derive from the same Teutonic root. Many other instances could be given of words not only in German and in English, but in other languages, which represent the human attempt to imitate a sound heard in nature. This, of course, is a well-known fact; the novelty and value of Mr. Schmitt's work lies in his making use of these every-day sounds to train the ears of children to greater sensitiveness and precision of perception.

The schoolmaster next asked his class to make an effort to imitate the sounds heard, and the pupils gained from these exercises a still better idea of the exceedingly great delicacy of perception of which the human ear is capable. They desired to have an examination given them which would show just how sharply attuned their ears were to very faint sounds. Mr. Schmitt, therefore, devised a dozen ways of testing this. He stood behind the group, who were put on their honor not to turn their heads so as to see what he was doing, and they then

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wrote down upon a piece of paper a statement of the supposed act which caused the noise in question. These acts were as follows:

1. A five-pfennig piece rolls from the table on to the floor. 2. A metal lead-pencil cap rolls across the bench.

3. An oval rubber eraser strikes first on its edge and then on its flat surface.

4. A pocket-knife falls and remains standing with blade sticking in the floor.

5. The cork is taken with a twisting motion from a medicine bottle.

6. A moist finger is rubbed back and forth across the windowpane.

7. A glass is filled with water.

8. A few drops of water fall to the floor.

9. An empty match-box is slowly opened and shut. 10. A package of tobacco made of rustling paper is opened and shut.

11. A round pill-box holding a few peas is shaken; both oper and closed.

12. A metal match-box cover falls to the floor.

The results were truly surprizing:

"Only a few mistakes were made. One guess with respect to the twelfth experiment was as follows: 'A hollow four-cornered metal object, whose parts are not tightly joined.'

"As a matter of fact this cover carried a card loosely inserted in the frame. As a general rule, not only the object itself was recognized, but the substance of which it was made as well as its form and its size, and, likewise, the nature of the material upon which it fell or over which it moved. A final test was brilliantly met. A pupil placed himself in the corner and one of his fellow pupils, at a sign from the teacher, whispered the word 'once.' There was not a single failure to answer correctly, no matter how unmusical the pupil undergoing the test!"

Still other tests were devised by Herr Schmitt for outdoor exercise. Some of these were: Can one tell the size of a treetrunk being sawed in two by an invisible sawyer in the woods? Whether the man is holding his ax-blade at right angles or obliquely? Whether the woodcutter is severing a thick block or a board? What a passing wagon is loaded with? What sort of draft-animals are hitched to it, and how many? How the road is made? etc. The pupils were also required to harken to the drops of water falling on the surface of a vessel of water, to the individual notes yielded by wine-glasses, to the height of the tone uttered by factory-sirens, auto-horns, locomotivewhistles, etc. These exercises were followed by a practical study of overtones, using piano-strings and organ-pipes, and this idea once grasped the pupils readily understood why they had found difficulty in determining the exact pitch of the sound uttered by a near-by church-bell. Other experiments with birds and insects offered entertaining proof to the class that in spite of the delicacy which the human ear can attain, there are certain sounds to which it is quite deaf, tho these can be heard plainly by creatures with a more sensitive auditory apparatus. Sometimes. however, the creatures with such sensitive ears are apparently tone-deaf to different sorts of sound; thus a tree-frog responded not only to one of his green companions but to an imitation sound meant to deceive him, whereas he paid no attention to a pistol shot. Along a somewhat similar line a great deal of interest is being aroused among men of science and especially among physicists by the recent experiments as to the propagation of sound recently made in Holland. We read in the Bibliothèque Universelle (Lausanne):

"On November 4, 1922, a large quantity of war munitions was exploded at Oldebroek. Previous to touching them off information was sent to various places with regard to the projected experiment, so that listeners at the various points were prepared to note the exact moment when the sound produced reached their ears. The sound was audible at different distances in different directions, at 350 miles toward the south, 400 miles toward the northwest and at 500 miles toward the eastsoutheast. On the other hand within the zone situated at an average distance of 90 miles, in that part of it extending between 60 miles and 120 miles, the noise of the explosion was heard only once, which confirms the observations made previously by Japanese scientists and M. de Quervain, that there exists a zone of silence.

"In England 140 reports were sent in by listeners, but nearly a third of these reported that they had heard nothing. Singularly enough the explosion was not heard in the Midland counties of England, but was heard beyond these in Cornwall. A general fact observed was that in most cases the sound waves took more time than was expected to traverse the distance concerned, the expectation, of course, being based upon the normal rate of propagation through the lower atmosphere. M. van Everdingen, the Dutch scientist in charge of the experiment, believes from a careful study of the reports sent in, which clearly demonstrate the existence of the silent zone, that the upper atmosphere cooperates in the matter of propagation."

wire telephone method which had always been used previously. The story, as gathered from officials of the company, is briefly told by The Electrical World (New York) as follows:

"When the two St. Croix transmission lines tript out at 1:55 P.M. on January 30, both telephone lines to St. Croix were put out of commission. F. J. Gerlich, superintendent of the service department, lost no time in getting to the radio set, and upon tuning in immediately heard the wireless operator at St. Croix calling Minneapolis. By means of radiotelephone communication the trouble on the transmission lines was quckly cleared up, and both lines were back in service by 2:05 P.M. 'within ten minutes). Wire telephone communication was not reestablished until half an hour later."

"Miss Clare Nicolet, who has been employed at the Missouri River Power Plant since last August, is certainly a featherweight, tipping the scales at about ninety-five pounds. Her four and a half years of mechanical training in Illinois University seem to have developed the mechanical side and to have left the native feminine qualities undisturbed in their development.

"When questioned as to her reason for choosing a mechanical engineering course, she said she had always wanted it, and after taking one year of liberal arts and sciences, she secured special permission to change to the mechanical department. She did all of the work that was required in the course, refusing the proffered assistance of her classmates.

"In the class with Miss Nicolet was one other young lady, who, after a year, was unable to go on with the work. Miss Nicolet is, we believe, the first woman thus far west to take a mechanical course in our universities.

"Altho Urbana is her home town and the university atmosphere a part of her very being, it was not an altogether easy thing to surmount the difficulties of obtaining a college education. In addition to the strenuous course, she did other work to help defray expenses. One summer she worked as draftsman; during school she was in charge of the architectural library, and part of the time worked in the mechanical library.

"Miss Nicolet is perfectly at home among the big turbines and uses waste as deftly as a powder puff. When she applied for work, she asked for a position as actual mechanic, and gave assurance that he was not afraid to do anything that was to be done around the power house-even preferring that to the work on the efficiency squad, which she is now doing.

"Her plans for the future have set a high mark for her attainment-efficiency engineering. She admits that it is a high goal and that considerable lies between her and its attainment, but that is the ideal she is keeping in mind. She also says that engineering is in a way lacking in the human element, and for this reason she is hoping to supply that lack through some kind of social work with girls and young women. On the other hand, she feels that engineering is a constructive work and by its means you can reach many people. Aside from that, however, is the fact that her father has always followed mechanical lines, and perhaps she inherited a sort of congeniality with oils, powerful machinery, and figures."

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STEAM AT TERRIFIC PRESSURE

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N THE NEVER-ENDING PURSUIT of fuel economy, boiler pressures in steam-power plants are being increased by leaps and bounds. While 550 pounds per square inch is the highest steam-pressure in strictly commercial use in the United States, two large boilers for 1,200 pounds' pressure are now being erected at Chicago and at Weymouth, Massachusetts. Sweden is trying out a 1,500-pound boiler, and now an article in Power (New York) gives the details of a new British plant of 1,500 horse-power in which steam will be generated at the hitherto unheard of pressure of 3,200 pounds per square inch! experiment with steam generation at this extremely high pressure is not made entirely on considerations of efficiency. In fact, the pressure will be reduced by throttling to 1,500 pounds before the steam is delivered to the high-pressure turbine. The explanation given is that, while the turbine will exhibit its best economy at 1,500 pounds, it is actually easier and safer to generate the steam initially at more than double that pressure, because at 3,200 pounds' pressure water has a "critical point,” and will slip quietly into steam without bubbling or boiling. In further elucidation of this point, the writer states:

"The chief difficulty at these pressures [800 pounds and up] has been in the generation of the steam rather than in its use in steam turbines. Special precautions must be taken to guard against 'priming,' or the passing over of water in gulps, on account of the violent boiling under high pressure. It is principally due to the seriousness of this factor that pressures above 800 pounds have been attempted in only a few cases. The likelihood of priming increases with rising pressure as long as steam is generated by methods that require the addition of latent heat of evaporation with consequent ebullition.

"The development of steam generators above this pressure has been retarded, tho to a less extent, by metallurgical difficulties. The extensive experiments carried out during the war, however, enabled a tremendous advance to be made in the production of steel and steel alloys of high tensile strength.

"The field has, therefore, been prepared for the introduction of a super-pressure plant using steam generated under 'critical' conditions, that is, with a pressure of 3,200 pounds per square inch and a temperature of 706 degrees Fahrenheit. The tremendous jump from 1,500 pounds to 3,200 is due entirely to the fact that, at any pressure below 3,200 pounds, latent heat must be added with consequent troubles from boiling and priming. At the critical point there is no latent heat and no boiling, and this has enabled the designers to construct a generator with heating elements of very small section and without steam drums or chambers.

"The experimental plant now nearing completion, and soon to be erected in the works of the English Electric Company at Rugby, England, is equivalent to a 1,500 horse-power commercial plant. Steam will be generated at 3,200 pounds per square inch, then throttled to 1,500 pounds and, after being superheated to 768 degrees Fahrenheit, will be passed through a high-pressure turbine exhausting at 200 pounds. The exhaust of the highpressure turbine is to be reheated to 662 degrees and then expanded in a standard normal-pressure turbine to a condenser maintaining a 97 per cent. vacuum.'

The tubes of the steam generator and superheater have an internal diameter of only 0.8 inch, and are arranged in continuous coils heated by an oil-fired furnace. On account of the great density of the high-pressure steam a 14-inch pipe is sufficiently large to conduct the entire steam supply of the 1,500horse-power plant to the high-pressure turbine. This, in turn, has but a single wheel of very small diameter which will rotate at from 20,000 to 25,000 revolutions per minute. It should be noted that the exhaust pressure (200 pounds) of this highpressure turbine is as high as the initial pressure employed in many modern plants. As to the results expected from tests to be made within a few months, the article says:

"The builders of the plant predict not only that it will consume about 28 per cent. less fuel than a normal-pressure, high-grade

plant of the same capacity, but that it will also be cheaper to build and maintain. As a matter of fact, the actual test genera tor, complete with feed pump and fan, has cost less than a normal water-tube boiler for a plant of the same capacity, even the every part has been special. Further sets should, of course, cost even less."

DO BUYERS TURN TO THE RIGHT?

AVE OUR TRAFFIC REGULATIONS, which re quire us to turn to the right, become so ingrained in our habits that we unconsciously do so on many other occasions also? Harry Botsford, who writes on the subject in Electrical Merchandising (New York), believes that they have, and that it is possible to utilize this fact commercially Mr. Botsford thinks that the right side of a store, as you face it, is worth much more than the left, and he adduces facts to prove it. If he is correct in deriving our alleged right-turning habits from our traffic regulations, then in Britain it should be the left side of the store that is the better. Further experiment in England and other left-handed-traffic countries would seen to be in order. Writes Mr. Botsford:

"I had always believed that both sides of a store were equally valuable from the standpoint of sales value-all things being equal. But there is a big difference, I find. This holds true. of course, only when a store has one entrance. So if your store has one entrance, you are going to be interested in this little article and it may even mean considerable profit to you.

"An electrical merchandise dealer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, brought the matter to my attention. I consider him as one of the very best retailers I have ever known.

"The right-hand side of my store is easily worth four times the other side,' he told me a month ago. "This is a fact and not a mere theory. I've been in business for over ten years and I'm considered a fair business man, yet several months ago I dis covered that something has been happening in this store every day, and I have never noticed it. And what I discovered has a direct bearing on sales, too!

"As you know, I am strong for service to customers. Originally, I had one telephone pay-station in the rear of the store. I managed to convince the telephone company it would be good business to install two telephones there. Each telephone was placed on a small table, fitted with a chair, at opposite sides of the store. Each was equally convenient and there was no reason in the world why one should be used more than the other. Yet at the end of the first month, the telephone on the right had taken in just four times the number of nickels the other had. I gave the matter scant consideration. The next month the same thing happened. That gave me the theory on which I subsequently worked.

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"I decided on several experiments to prove whether or not people naturally had a habit of turning to the right when they enter a store. I had had for two weeks a very good-looking display of hair-driers and curling-irons in my front-center showThe sales on these items were very low for that periodonly three had been sold, to be exact. I moved the display over to the right-hand side of the store. The very first day it was there we sold more than we had sold before in two weeks. "That almost convinced me; but I made other experiments. A display of electric flashlights and renewal batteries which had been selling very well on the right side of the store were moved to an equally well-lighted show-case on the left side of the store, and the sales dropt just an even 95 per cent. I have tried plan after plan of shifting and the net of my results is that I sell about four times the goods on the right as I do on the left. Right now I am concentrating on new and novelty goods on the right and I have shifted my stock so that most of my staple units are on the left. Believe me, it is boosting my turnover in a most pleasing way.'

"Why do people turn to the right naturally? It's more or less a national habit, I believe, due to our usual traffic regula tions which shout an imperative Turn to the right!' It's a habit we have fallen into unconsciously. It may be that the fact that most people are right-handed has something to do with it.

"In any event, it's a national habit-common to all. The important thing is to put that habit to work on speeding up turnover!"

PUMPING A RIVER OUT OF A MINE

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WHEN FLOOD-WATERS of the Big Muddy River suddenly roared through a break in the roof of a coalmine at Murphysboro, southern Illinois, a few months ago, engineers said the mine was doomed. The workings were flooded with a billion gallons of water. A lake, covering about an acre, rested above the underground chambers at the point where the break occurred. A writer in Popular Science Monthly (New York) tells what happened then. He says:

"It looked as if 300,000 tons of high-grade Murphysboro coal and $50,000 worth of mine machinery and trackage were lost. "But nobody had reckoned on the ingenuity of W. J. Jenkins, general manager, and C. L. Moorman, chief engineer, of the Consolidated Coal Co., of St. Louis, owners of the mine. While engineers smiled at their nerve, they set out to hoist and pump the river out of their mine! With ingeniously devised hoistboxes, each holding 700 gallons, and with electric centrifugal pumps, they dipt and pumped that billion gallons out, at the rate of about 5,000,000 gallons every 24 hours.

"Previously, with layers of brush, timber, mattresses and earth, they had plugged the deep hole in the mine roof formed by inrushing waters. With timbers, earth and hay, they also solidly blocked the underground passages leading from the hole in the roof, making the mine practically water-tight, even while the small lake remained at the surface above.

"The ingenious apparatus used in dipping the river out consisted of two 700-gallon water-boxes, each equipped with a bottom flap valve, and a hinged end-gate that opened inwardly by a double-crank mechanism. These boxes were hung in the hoist shaft and lowered alternately into the flooded workings. The filling and discharge of the boxes were automatic.

"For two months the boxes were in operation 24 hours a day, making an average of three hoists a minute and discharging about 3,000,000 gallons a day. In addition, an electric centrifugal pump mounted on a platform in the airshaft ejected about 2,000,000 gallons a day in a steady stream."

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CAMELS, COWS AND TOBACCO

N MOROCCO, when the natives are training wild camels, they make them docile by inducing them to smoke tobacco -a cigar, loosely rolled, and placed in the end of a threecornered piece of wood through which a hole has been drilled, says The Irish Tobacco Trade Journal: "As soon as the camel begins to draw he becomes docile and quickly grasps the art of inhaling the smoke and emitting it through his nostrils." But, it adds rather regretfully: "One defect of the training is that Mr. Camel is apt ever after to insist on smoking at work." This elicits the following comment from Good Health (Battle Creek, Mich.):

"Tobacco makes camels docile, it debases and emasculates them. It does the same to men.

"Tobacco destroys the natural spirit of the camel and makes him an obedient slave to a cruel master. It does the same to men; it enslaves them to a drug and makes them the easy dupes of the tobacco mongers who delude them into the notion that tobacco is a friend and a solace, whereas it is, in fact, an enemy and a curse.

"The California Department of Agriculture sent out a statement to the effect that a drove of cattle, stopping for the night near San Ardo, got into a near-by tobacco field, apparently enjoying the weed, which they proceeded to 'chew' and swallow. Four of the cows died before morning, and within a few days twenty-one had died from chewing the weed.

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About the same time this was published, appeared a notice of a child picking up and swallowing a piece of cigar, causing his death.

"Of course the cows died, as well as the baby. Tobacco is well-known to be one of the most deadly of all plants. There is nothing surprizing about this. The wonder is that the twentyfive or thirty million smokers in the United States are so blind that they can not see that a drug that will tame camels and kill cows and babies is not the sort of thing likely to make men virile, manly and efficient."