Monthly Archives: November 2009

What is Dry Ice

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WHEN some-one makes a lot of money from a simple, invention, one asks one’s self, “Now why didn’t I see the possibilities of that thing myself?” About fifteen years ago students saw a professor conduct an experiment before a physics class. Into a peculiar double-shelled vessel he emptied carbon-dioxide snow-white, clean, fluffy. The vessel was a Dewar flask. Its double walls contained nothing-a vacuum. That was its secret, the carbon-dioxide snow would not soon melt. Air, as every one knows, is a poor conductor of heat. Nothing is still better. The snow was said to be about 100 degrees below zero. An interesting experiment. Well -what of it?

Somebody with practical brains saw possibilities in the Dewar flask, which had already been used by scientists for several previous decades, and the “thermo bottle” was the outcome. Now the carbon dioxide that was kept frozen in the Dewar flask is making more money for some other hard-headed man who doubtless saw that experiment. It, too, has gone into business-”dry ice.”

Dry ice may be a trade name. But so is Ford-yet we don’t hesitate to mention it in editorial comment. Some commercial products burrow their way into the warp and woof of modern life. Kodak is an example. Dry ice has already become a valuable refrigerant, and the reason is that its temperature stands some 112 below zero. Pound for pound it refrigerates fifteen times as much as common frozen water, and when it disappears it goes directly from a solid into a non-poisonous, inert gas, leaving not a sign of moisture. Think of being able to lay a piece of ice on a choice bedspread or-tablecloth, allow it to vanish, and find no sign that it was ever there! That is the kind of ice we get when we freeze carbon dioxide, and the reasons given account for the fact that it is attracting considerable attention. With dry ice you can transport a car of fish in summer without the costly necessity of re-icing the car at frequent intervals. You can ship ice-cream from New York to Cuba, and that is just what is now being done in immense quantities. You can put a small piece in the bottom of a cylindrical cardboard container of ice-cream and take it with you on a picnic and it will stay solid through all of a hot day.

A couple of years ago we saw such containers in ice-cream store windows. To most of us it then seemed a stunt. The stunt has spread into industry and is still spreading. Ice manufacturers are sitting up to take notice, for, though dry ice costs ten times what wet ice costs, it refrigerates fifteen times as much. The stunt of the store window and the entertaining experiment of the professor of physics have gone to work in earnest.

Source: The Outlook, 31 August 1927

Puncture Solutions

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Believing that most tire punctures are caused by old nails, Greensburg, Kansas, offers ten cents per pound for all old nails picked up on its streets. Small boys have already earned two hundred dollars in this way. The city then sells the nails as junk.

Giant magnets seven feet long are to be hung under State highway trucks in South Dakota to pick up bits of metal that might puncture automobile tires. In a test run of twenty miles one of these magnets picked up over three hundred pounds of steel and iron scraps. The collection included a stove leg, 24 railroad spikes, an old skate, a monkey wrench, pieces of barbed wire, and a thousand or so nails and tacks.

Source: The Outlook, 20 July 1927

Lindbergh Mail Problems 1927

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COLONEL CHARLES A. LINDBERGH’S chief secretarial aide, Commander Fitzhugh Green, has made public the recently completed cataloguing of the popular flier’s mail. He states that Lindbergh has received 3,500,000 letters and 100,000 telegrams. Business offers totaled $7,000,000. One was an offer of $1,000,000 by a motion picture corporation if he would be photographed in an actual marriage ceremony with any girl he chose to wed. There were several thousand proposals of marriage and three invitations to join in an attempt to reach the moon via skyrockets. About 14,000 persons sent the aviator gifts and about 500 “close relatives” asked for money. Letters from women far outnumbered those from men. Over $10,000 in stamps were inclosed in letters for return postage.

Introduction of 40 Hour Working Week

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THAT man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow is a dictum of the Scriptures that has been pretty well abolished in America, where, in the main, he now acquires, not bread, but canned goods and package foods, by the oil on a machine. Mr. Thomas A. Edison is on record as saying that the machine does not begin to do what it should for the relief of man from toil. He hopes to have machines doing everything needful before long, giving man a chance to be one hundred per cent sociable. It may not be a dream.

Coincident with this utterance on the part of the eminent inventor, the American Federation of Labor has announced its purpose to bring about a five-day week in organized industry. That is to say, a working period of forty hours per man out of the one hundred and sixty- eight that comprise the week. That would mean less than two full days of time, with one hundred and twenty-eight hours left for recreation, the uplift, and slumber.

The basis of this demand is that machinery has so advanced output as to make it economically possible for man to acquire a further period of respite. Mr. Henry Ford added emphasis to the point by announcing a five-day week in his works. This move was made while the delegates were gathered at Detroit, and helped frame the new policy. Mr. Ford’s factories, it should be stated, are non-union. The difference between Ford and the Federation is that he proposes to pay for five days’ work. The Federation wants pay for six, though exerting itself but five. Here is where the crux lies.

Probably there are lines of industry that would lose but little if the five-day week went into full effect. These are those where the forty-four-hour week is in effect. The forty-four-hour week was the outcome of the Saturday half-holiday
inaugurated in New York about forty years ago. This was a summertime concession that has come to cover most establishments, in cities at least, all the year round.

Employers have generally found the four hours of Saturday wasted. The men do little more than start and stop their machines. For a time this was overcome by making up for the half-day lost by extra time worked during the week. This disappeared with the arrival of the forty-four-hour scale.

William Green, the head of the American Federation of Labor, is a sensible man. He says the men can speed up enough during the five full days to earn pay for the sixth, so that the advantage can be enjoyed without curtailment of income. This is undoubtedly correct if men can be brought to do it. There is the rub.

That there is ample room for increased exertion without hardship is beyond dispute. So great a part of production is due to machinery that workmen in many instances are mere watchers, or, at the most, feeders, of these devices. In the printing trade even feeders are dispensed with by the use of automatic devices. In paper making the pulpwood grinders are fed from hoppers, which can be automatically operated. The conveyor has stepped in to relieve the shovel and pitchfork quite generally. Mr. Edison is undoubtedly correct in his assumption that mechanical devices can be contrived that will do even more. Those who frequent factories can observe that not more than forty per cent of the worker’s time is productively employed. It is easy to idle at tasks unless the chain system used by Henry Ford is in operation. This sundry visitors at his plant representing the Federation have termed slavery. They describe the method as one of endless monotony,
from which men flee after a couple of years. Probably there is some truth in this. The thinkless thrusting of bolts into holes all day long cannot be a very refreshing occupation.

The discussion so far is, however, confined only to the attitude of organized labor and mass-production factories. These two have become a sort of privileged class enjoying benefits denied others, and that could not be universally beneficial unless all classes of workers and producers were included in the scheme. Organized labor and organized industry profit by the unrelieved toil of the farmer and the unorganized workers generally. These include the vast bulk of our people and, in particular, the farmers. All wealth coming from the soil or the sea, farmers, miners, and fishermen have to provide the base upon which all others stand.

These three classes care for all the others, either in the low price at which they furnish food and raw materials or in the high prices they pay for finished articles and prepared sustenance. All have to buy back the bulk of what they sell in its improved form, providing always the material to be embellished, made useful, and enhanced in value. So, while it sounds easy to cut down hours and increase pay, the question rises as to how much more the heavily laden backs can carry. Mr. Ford denounces the farmer as archaic. He would do away with him as such, employ machinery, produce more food, such as milk, synthetically, and do away with what he seems to regard as the cumbersome processes of nature. This calls for an industrial revolution too great to be brought about in time to synchronize with Mr. Green’s movement. The merits of the suggestion do not need to be discussed.

The whole problem is’ ne of proportion. Yet it is not entirely one for the United States. We are competing in world markets with German trade- unionists who are willingly working twelve hours a day six days in the week. France and Italy are also busy in the same field, working far harder and more faithfully than we in America. These factors cannot be ignored. The competitive principle is ruthless and takes small heed of obstacles or artificialities.

We are now working under the highest tariff ever known, with shorter hours than the rest of the world, higher wages, and higher rates of transportation. Earning power is being capitalized to the nth degree. Our load is cumulating, yet it is proposed to lighten it by doing less, because, despite his belief, Mr. Green gives no assurances. He does not know whether men will do as much in forty hours as they do in forty-four. That they could is already admitted.

It can be safely said, however, that we are still some way off from the dolce jar niente, the “sweet do-nothingness” of the Italians. Americans do not like to loaf. However tempting the extra day may appear, it will be found in practice that the average man, if it comes, will turn it to some sort of account. The twelve-hour day was industrial slavery. The ten-hour merely mitigation. The eight-hour was sensible and salutary. But it is possible to come to the vanishing-point.

To repeat, the question before the country is how far it can care for the two privileged classes at present involved without an economic overload too great to carry. Will it not give workers more time in which to compete with the farmer and the fisherman, to the disadvantage of both, while these are still compelled to support the privileged ones in the style to which they are accustomed? “We must maintain our standard of living,” asserts organized labor. Yes. But how are the unorganized going to maintain theirs?

Source: The Outlook – Nove 3, 1926

The Outlook for Oil

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THE Federal Oil Conservation Board has reported to Secretary Work that the supply of oil in the pumping and flowing well areas of the United States is about 4,500,000,000 barrels-a six years’ supply in theory, though it cannot be extracted within that period. Up to June last the 68,000 wells bored since 1866 have produced over 9,000,000,000 barrels-an incredible quantity -but much of it was pumped during a period when the demand was far below the gigantic requirements of today.

The almost 20,000,000 automobiles calling for gasoline, the huge consumption in other internal-combustion engines, and the growing requirements of oil for fuel makes the problem acute in its relations to industry and prosperity.

Today the United States is producing and consuming seventy per cent of the world’s supply of mineral fluids, with a total investment set at $9,500,000,000. The Conservation Board, which includes Secretaries Hoover, Wilbur, Work, and Davis, asserts that with the current production coming from about four per cent of the producing wells, most of them only a year or so old, and from fields discovered in the past five years, the future maintenance of current supplies implies constant discovery of new fields and new wells. The Board holds that the situation renders it imperative for the welfare of the Nation that every effort be exerted to obtain the maximum amount of oil from known fields and to promote conservation vigorously along various lines.

Oil – Exhausting the Inexhaustible

FUTURE supplies, the Federal Oil Conservation Board avers, must depend on reserves, new fields, improved methods of recovery, better utilization of control, consumption, economics, supplies from distillation of shale and coal, and even from foreign oil fields. The Board urges better control of production and better mechanical devices for use of oil products, and also declare it important that American oil companies should acquire and exploit foreign fields.

“While the production of oil upon our own territory is obviously of first importance,” the report says, “yet in failure of adequate supplies the imports of oil are of vast moment. The present imports from Latin-American fields amount to about 62,000,000 barrels annually of crude oil, against which we export about 94,000,000 barrels of products.

“The fields of Mexico and South America are of large yield and much promising geologic oil structure is as yet undrilled. That our companies should vigorously acquire and explore such fields is of first importance, not only as a source of future supply, but supply under control of our own citizens.

“Our experience with the exploitation of our consumers by foreign-controlled sources of rubber, nitrate, potash, and other raw materials should be sufficient warning as to what we may expect if we shall become dependent upon foreign nations for our oil supplies. Moreover, an increased number of oil sources tends to stabilize price and minimize the effect of fluctuating production.”

Security for the future, the Board holds, depends upon the following items:
1. The reserves already mentioned.
2. The possible discovery of new sands in the known areas by deeper drilling.
3. The possible discovery of new fields.
4. Improved methods which will recover a larger proportion of the oil out of the sands.
5. Better utilization of crude oils by diversion from less essential to more essential uses, such as conversion of fuel oil into gasoline.
6. Better control of the flush flow from newly discovered fields.
7. Economies in consumption by improved mechanical devices.
8. Supplies from distillation of oil shale and coal.
9. Foreign oil fields.

Americans are so in the habit of regarding all things in nature as inexhaustible that this report will jar their serenity, coming as it does from the highest possible authority. We must sooner or later realize that our neglect of the reproductive and our capitalizing of the destructive can have but one ending-Nation-wide calamity. Our wastage of coal has been a crime, the exploitation of oil is an orgy.

Source: The Outlook – Sept 15, 1926