A Monster Plow

1895

The Farmer Who Made It Overlooked Some Mechanical Principles.

Few people are aware of the fact that what is very likely the largest single share plow in the world was made in California and is at present on one of the ranches of the Kern County Land company, near Bakersfield. It is not in use, however, but is simply kept as a curiosity in a little yard all by itself.

It is over 15 years since the idea of the plow was conceived by J. Thompson, a ranch foreman. He was tired of preparing a 3,000 acre wheatfield for crops with the ordinary nine or twelve inch plows worked by two horses then in use. He made his calculations very carefully, but not being a mathematician made a great mistake.

He figured that if two horses could pull a 12 inch plow six horses could pull a 36 inch one, and that eight horses could pull a 48 inch one. It seemed natural enough to figure that way when in fact he should have "cubed" the capacity of his 12 inch plow every time he doubled the width of it. A 12 inch plow, when it is pulled the distance equal to its width, displaces one cubic foot of soil, and a 36 inch plow will displace 27 cubic feet instead of 3, as Mr. Thompson figured.

After all the calculations and drawings were made a blacksmith came out from Bakersfield, and in due time the monster plow was ready to go to work in the field. The share was made to cut a 50 inch furrow, and the top of it reached about five feet from the ground. The beam was over a foot thick, and the handles were 10 feet long, but of course did not slope at the same angle as in the ordinary plows. To enable the plow to be turned around easily it was suspended between two 8 foot wheels, on the axle of which was a seat for the driver. It made a huge, ugly contrivance that looked like a nightmare.

When the plow was taken to the field, ten horses were fastened to it. The handles were raised and the horses started, but as soon as the share was about half way into the ground they stopped. More horses were brought out and sunk it a little deeper, but not until 50 had been hitched to the plow did it move through the soil at any sort of speed. At best it moved slowly, and it took four men to hold the handles and make it stay in the furrow.

Horses were cheap in Kern county at that time, and feed cost nothing, so the plow was a little saving after the men had learned how to handle it so it did not cut more than 18 or 20 inches deep. The next season it was tried with oxen, and it took 75 of them to do the work. On the whole, the plow was not a success, and after being tinkered at for a few years was finally discarded and at last given a place in the stable yard, where it could be preserved as a curiosity. — San Francisco Call.

One Cent

1920

An ingenious professor of mathematics, according to the Omaha News, has figured out that 1 cent, invested at the beginning of the Christian era (1,919 years ago) at a rate of interest equal to the Government Liberty bonds, that is, 4¼ per cent, with interest compounded to date, would make 100,000 globes of solid gold, each the weight of the earth.

The earth weighs six and twenty-one ciphers tons. But the 1 cent with its accumulations, reduced to a minimum weight in gold at the rate of $20 in the ounce, would, he says, make 100,000 planets of the earth's weight!

The moral is: Save the pennies!

The Universal Art

1910

In a splendid series of matinees extending over two weeks, Prof. William P. Jones danced the whole of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The first two colonies were danced in slow time, to the accompaniment of two flutes and a lyre. The poses were statuesque rather than graceful, and the gestures had to them a great deal of the oratorical.

But, beginning with the story of the barbarian invasions in the third volume, Professor Jones' interpretation took on a fury that was almost bacchantic. The sack of Rome by the Vandals in the year 451 was pictured in a veritable tempest of gyrations, leaps and somersaults. The subtle and hidden meanings of the text called for all the resources of the professor's eloquent legs, arms, shoulders, lips and eyes.

A certain obscure passage in life of Attila the Hun, which had long puzzled the scholars, was for the first time made clear to the average man when Professor Jones, standing on one foot, whirled around rapidly in one direction for five minutes, and then instantly reversing himself spun around for ten minutes in the opposite direction.

In the ballroom of the Hotel Taftoftia, during Christmas week, William K. Spriggs, Ph. D., held a number of fashionable audiences spellbound with his marvelous lucid dances in euclid and algebra up to quadratics. Perhaps the very acme of the terpsichorean art was attained in the masterly fluency of body and limbs with which Mr. Spriggs demonstrated that the sum of the angles in any triangle is equal to two right angles. — Simeon Strunsky, in Harper's Weekly.

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.

Much-Shaken Japan

1900

In 1893 the Japanese government appointed an investigating committee on earthquakes. This committee, which has now nearly completed its labors, reports, among other things, that it seems likely that one part or another of Japan will be visited by a destructive earthquake once in every two-and-a-half years.

That portion of the land bordering the Japan Sea is seldom disturbed by other than local earthquakes, while the Pacific coast of the country frequently suffers from great shocks originating under the ocean. When a region is shaken by constantly recurring small earthquakes, it appears to be rendered safe against the occurrence of destructive shocks, because the accumulation of stress in the earth's crust at that point is prevented.


Modern Bullets

Sir William MacCormac writes in the Lancet that in most cases the damage done by modern bullets, and especially the Mauser, cannot be compared with that inflicted by the projectiles of the needle-guns or the Chassepôt rifle, weapons employed in the Franco-German War. A similar result is obtained when comparison is made with the work of the bullets used in our Civil War.


Studying A Prodigy

At Indiana University a 19-year-old boy who possesses extraordinary powers of arithmetical calculation is under investigation to determine, scientifically, the nature of his mental processes.

It has been found that a tenacious memory underlies much of his singular power, the rapidity of his calculations depending upon the great quantity of number relations which he has memorized, as well as upon the short cuts that he has invented. — Youth's Companion.

Objects To Boys Sewing In School

Illinois, 1910

We received a very strong letter this week from a mother protesting against her boy being taught sewing in school when the time is needed to each branches more suitable for the scholars, at least the boys.

She says: "I think it's a shame. My son has to put two and three hours a week at sewing when they don't half know their arithmetic. John forgot to bring something to sew on this morning, so his teacher sent him home at 11:15 a.m. to get something to sew on, and as I was not at home he couldn't find anything, and when he went back to school again he forgot it. Well, his teacher got angry and shook him and sent him down to the principal. The principal sent him home, with a note and told him he couldn't come back to school again until his father came with him.

"I think it's an outrage in these civilized times to waste two and three hours a week at something they will never have any use for. I think every mother ought to sign a petition to have such nonsense stopped and to have that time devoted to the need of the times, which is business. I think it a shame taxpayers have to pay for such nonsense."

—Suburbanite Economist, Chicago, Oct. 28, 1910.


His Accent

An American-born girl was boasting of her English ancestry in public, and said: "Grandpa has lived in this country over 40 years, but he's just as English in his accent as when he went to Oxford; for instance," she added, "he still says horanges!" — Harper's Magazine.

Antiquity of Geometry

1907

The Science May Have Existed In India For Long Ages

Did we learn our rule of three and our Euclid from India? Researches have brought to light astronomical tables in India which must have been constructed by the principles of geometry. Some are of the opinion that they have been framed from observations made not less than 3,000 years before the Christian era, and if this opinion be well founded the science of geometry must have been cultivated in India to a considerable extent long before the period assigned to its origin in the west, so that many of the elementary propositions may have been brought from India to Greece.

The Indians have a treatise called the "Surya Sidhanta," which professes to be a revelation from heaven communicated to Meya, a man of great sanctity, about 4,000,000 years ago. This book contains a rational system of trigonometry which differs entirely from the first known in Greece and Arabia. In fact it is founded on a geometrical theorem which was not known to the geometricians of Europe before the time of Victa, about 200 years ago. And it employs methods of demonstration unknown to the Greeks, who used others. The former have been attributed to the Arabs, but it is possible they have received this improvement in trigonometry as well as the numerical characters from India. — Chicago Tribune.

The School Room

1874

The ringing notes of the school bell at 9 o'clock in the morning echo through every village and hamlet in the land. With books and lunch basket, children, little and large, hasten their response to its call. They gather in rooms of every size and of every grade of comfort, from the log cabin chinked with mud to the elegant and costly structure of brick furnished with apparatus and meeting every physical want.

However, the school-rooms may differ, the course of study is essentially the same in them all. The "three R's, reading, riting, and rithmetic," are the corner stones now, as they were in the olden time, of a good education, and teachers of every grade of culture and experience are drilling the juvenile mind in fractions, interest, and square root, in spelling and reading, in grammar and geography.

The school committee, the trustees, and the teachers are supposed by most parents to be quite competent to take entire charge of the children committed to their care, and when once school taxes are paid, books purchased, and the children entered, the parents are quite ready to throw all further responsibility upon the proper authorities.

Little do most of them trouble themselves about the teacher, whether or not he is competent mentally, morally for the task he has undertaken, for have not the school committee decided that, and who shall appeal from their decision? So the teacher is left quite to himself in his little empire, and without sympathy or co-operation on the part of parents discharges his duties and receives his pay.

In the old days when "boarding round" was the fashion it was not easy for the teacher and the parents to remain unacquainted, but now it is by no means an uncommon circumstance for them never to meet. "Have you been in the school lately?" we ask frequently. "No," is the invariable reply, "I'm intending to go, but haven't got there yet."

Now we believe that intelligent co-operation between parents and teachers is essential to the best results in education, and that every parent should, as far as possible, note the daily progress of his child in his studies, that he should assure the teacher of his cordial and earnest sympathy and support in the arduous labors of the school-room, and by his own occasional presence there, show his interest in the progress of the school.

Proctor the Astronomer

1874

Ten years ago, the name of Richard Anthony Proctor was absolutely unknown; five years later, it was familiar in scientific circles in London, but comparatively unheard of outside; and today it is familiar as household words to every educated man in England, and to many thousands in this country.

Yet, the man who in so brief a space has conquered fame, and attracted the respectful admiration of astronomers in both hemispheres, is only thirty-six years old now, and did not begin to study astronomy till he had passed his five-and-twentieth year. Barely eight summers have flown since his maiden work appeared, and in the interval he has contributed a score of volumes to the library of science, some of them profound, many of them entirely original, and all of them thoroughly elevating and purely philosophic in tone.

In addition to these works, Mr. Proctor has written constantly and voluminously in most of the leading English periodicals, and has fought successfully more than one brilliant and stoutly contested battle with some of the oldest and ablest savans in Europe. Notably was this the case in his memorable struggle with the venerable Astronomer Royal of England, Sir George Airy, who had achieved a world-wide reputation, and had published seven or eight of the nine quarto volumes of his Astronomical Observations, before his young antagonist was born.

The dispute in question arose out of the widely divergent views set forth, upon the one hand, by Airy, and, upon the other, by Proctor, as to the manner in which the approaching Transit of Venus might be utilized to the best advantage. Sir George Airy, having originally, by an unfortunate choice, adopted the approximate process in dealing with the abstruse calculations involved in the working out of this delicate problem, had been strongly advised by Mr. Proctor, so far back as 1869, to adopt by preference the exact process. Delisle's method having been selected by Airy for the Transit of Venus in 1874, his keen-eyed critic at once pointed out that Halley's method was in every way to be preferred, whereas in regard to the next Transit — that of 1882 — Delisle's would be better than Halley's.

He farther insisted, from the first, that the Astronomer Royal, in his selection of points of observation in Hindostan, had overlooked many of the most desirable. And the young astronomer was right in both instances, as is shown by the fact that the leading astronomers of England at their last meeting, in session at the Board of Visitation of Greenwich Observatory, were unanimous in urging the Government to adopt the suggestions made by Proctor four years before.

This is but one out of many similar instances which might be cited of the extraordinary courage, keenness of perception and farsightedness of this the youngest, and, in some respects, the most brilliant, of living astronomers. — Scribner's Magazine.