The motion picture projectionist (Nov 1929-Oct 1930)

38 The Motion Picture Projectionist January, 1 930 tion makes the useful life of a steam plant less than that of a hydraulic plant, and larger amounts for obsolescence must therefore be added to the operating costs. On the other hand, there is the opportunity for greater future reduction in the cost of steam power than in the cost of water power. New Machine to Keep Patients Breathing The recent cases where relays of men have worked for days providing artificial breathing for persons so injured or diseased that they could not breathe for themselves, have led Bellevue Hospital, New York, to install a newly invented machine which will do this electrically for as long as may be necessary. The sufferer from drowning, electric shock or gas asphyxiation, who does not recover with first-aid artificial respiration, given at the scene of the accident, may be brought to the hospital (the "Schaefer prone pressure method" being continued in the ambulance) and placed in the machine. Forced Respiration The patient's body is put in a great metal cylinder, with the head coming out through an opening that is cleverly made air-tight without clamping the neck dangerously tight. Compressed air is then forced into and out of the cylinder by the electric machinery, in such a way that the chest is alternately compressed and expanded, forcing the lungs to work, at the normal rate. Machinery Tireless The electrical machinery can continue its work indefinitely and there are none of the dangerous pauses which sometimes occur when relays of workers change places in artificial respiration. The device was developed at the request of a committee representing the gas companies of New York City, whose records show that many lives are saved by longcontinued artificial respiration, while the man-power efforts that are too soon given up result in the loss of some patients who could have been saved. James Maxwell's Discovery of Light Waves "No one could converse with him for five minutes without having some perfectly new ideas set before him." The boys called him "Dafty," but his father recognized in James Clerk Maxwell the kind of ability that outstretched so greatly those of equal age. In 1831, the year when Faraday discovered the principle of magnetic electricity that led to the dynamo, James Clerk Maxwell was born. At fifteen, a paper on mathematics writ ten by him attracted the notice of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. "What's the Go o' That?" His question as a child — "What's the go o' that?" — seems to have drawn him through life. He questioned the common belief that electricity got from point to point because magnetic matter on the surface of connecting wires or other conducting surfaces, attracted it out of the ether. He demonstrated mathematically that electro-magnetic action travels through space in the form of transverse waves, like light, and at the speed of light. Hertzian Waves Heinrich Hertz gave physical proof to Maxwell's undying mathematical discovery — that these waves were created and went forth the same as light does. Known as Hertzian waves, they are the basis of wireless communication, radio. Really the same waves as light waves, but invisible, their traveling speed is identical while their vibrating speed is outside the range the eye registers. The union of radio hearing with seeing in television shows how these waves are allied. Maxwell's Color Box While professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London, neighbors whispered that Maxwell sat in the window of his home staring into a black coffin for hours day upon day. The coffin was Clerk Maxwell's color box. With this invention, he showed that any given color could be produced by combining three colors selected from different parts of the spectrum. The three base colors corresponded to three sets of nerves or sensations in the eye, each excited proportionately to the amount of its color in the blend of three. Absence of sensation in the eye to any one of the three colors, was shown to be the cause of color blindness. Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that there are invisible electric waves like light but without the power of illumination. Film Fire Statistics Seventy-one per cent of all theatre fires originate in the projection room while machines are in operation, causing hundreds of fires annually and resulting in a yearly loss of approximately $3,000,000 to theatre properties and equipment. Losses sustained from destroyed film in theatre fires, which are not included in the $3,000,000 total, would send this figure considerably higher. Theatres suffered an $18,000,000 loss during the five years from 1922 to 1926, inclusive, with the average for recent periods being lower, due, principally, to the many new devices and types of equipment now being built to eliminate fire hazards. From Fox "Now" Nightmare of a sound engineer Brain Able to Make One Fat or Thin A special nerve center in the brain to decide whether a person is to be fat or thin is the newest discovery of two German physiologists, Prof. Wilhelm Griinthall and Prof. Erich Grafe of Rostock University. This center probably controls, their experiments on animals have indicated, the rapidity with which a human body uses the energy of food. This is what physicians call the "basal metabolism" and which they now test in hospitals to aid the diagnosis of many kinds of disease. The Gland Theory Other things equal, a woman whose basal metabolism is high uses up the energy of her food as rapidly as it is absorbed. She probably will be thin. On the other hand, a person with low basal metabolism is apt not to use up surplus food and to be fat, sometimes very fat. Until recently the ductless glands, especially the thyroid gland and the adrenal gland, have been looked to as controlling these differences in basal metabolism. Extracts of these glands sometimes have been given to reduce fatness. Control by Brain Many physiologists have begun to suspect, however, that these glands are not entirely independent organs but that they, like other parts of the body, must accept control by the brain. Profs. Grunthal and Grafe, by their invention of a new way of injecting a solution of silver nitrate into one tiny spot of the brain of an experimental animal, have been able to stop the working of that small brain spot without damaging the brain anywhere else. In this way they have located a minute nerve center in the lower part of the brain, destruction of which lowers the animal's basal metabolism by two-thirds or more. Some of the animals thus treated become exceedingly fat. It is not improbable that exceedingly fat human beings may owe that condition to some accidental disease or injury of this same nerve center.