Early Calculator — Lifesaver for Schoolboys?

1900

In one of the statistical divisions of the Department of Agriculture in Washington may be seen a machine resembling a typewriter, which multiplies and divides with unerring accuracy and with great rapidity.

Give its operator a multiplicand of six figures and a multiplier as large, and he will write them out as upon a typewriter; then he turns a handle a few times, and before the onlooker knows what is going on, the product is written out before him. The machine performs examples in division with equal ease.

Does any one of our young readers fancy that he sees in this invention an emancipation of boys of the twentieth century from the vexation of the multiplication table? Alas! that is too much for him to hope. Nobody seems to have devised a machine for adding common fractions of different denominators, although many a young schoolboy has concluded that this is one of the "long-felt wants" of the day.


Intemperance in France

Those who assert that wine-growing countries are largely exempt from the evils of intemperance need not point to France in proof of their assertion. The habitual use of wine often creates the craving which seeks for such stronger stimulants as absinthe or vermouth.

Of about three thousand prisoners in the department of the Seine, in which Paris is situated, it is officially stated, more than two thousand were drunkards. The number of suicides induced by habits of intemperance is said to have more than doubled in recent years. Alcoholism is also largely responsible for the fact that thirty-four per cent of the young men conscripted for the army are sent back as unfit; and in the cities of Normandy, where hard cider is the common beverage, the proportion rejected is much larger. It rises in Caen to fifty per cent; and in Havre three-fourths of the conscripts are rejected.


Vested Interest in Getting It Right

Senator Vest recently sent a newspaper item to be read to the House. The secretary had the wrong side of the clipping, and instead of an editorial on the money question, began: "Ridiculous! We are giving away these goods at half price!" "The other side!" cried Mr. Vest.

That the much vaunted common sense of the American people has another side is forcibly illustrated by recent sales of a good-luck box. This precious humbug is a little wooden case, containing a worthless three-starred ring, worth in all about five cents. But within the past three months many thousands of persons have paid ninety-nine cents apiece for it, expecting it to bring good luck. In this and similar instances the notice might appropriately made: "Ridiculous! We are giving ourselves away for nothing!"

—Youth's Companion.