Science: Inventions

Last week the U. S. Patent Office, making its annual report, signaled distress. It would have to have more employes, larger quarters, greater appropriations. The nation’s inventive genius, or more accurately the national penchant for protecting inventive genius, had increased until there was a patent application filed for every thousandth inhabitant—110,000 in a year. The Office found itself with 58,000 applications still on the docket, despite its having cleared up 35,000 hangovers from the last three years. For the first time in history, the Office had felt obliged to rid itself of its vast accumulation of working models. Some 50,000 designs patented prior to 1880 were turned over to museums; sime 2,500 were returned to heirs; several thousand were sold at public auction.

Some inventions reported last week:

“Radiano”. Inventors Fred W. Roehm and Frank W. Adsit of Minneapolis announced the perfection of a device to “revolutionize” the piano business, hard hit lately by radio and phonograph competition. The device was the “radiano”, attachable to the sounding board of any piano, and with modifications to violins, banjos, mandolins, to replace the microphone of a radio receiving set. Connected through the “radiano” with a radio’s amplifier circuit, the piano or stringed instrument’s sounding board would act, it was claimed, as a loud speaker, reproducing broadcasted piano tones with a clarity unattained hitherto; reproducing also the human voice, without metallic sound or microphone roar. The inventors boasted of overtures from leading piano manufactures, pointing out that manufacturers of player pianos face the imminent expiration of their basic patents.

Tank. The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see. Director of Tropical Research William Beebe, of the New York Zoological Society, wants to go under the mountain—the mile-high mountain of the deep sea—to see what can be seen by the light of luminous fishes. Last week he announced that a leading steel corporation was making him a specially designed deep-sea diving tank, doubtless on the order of Inventor Hartman’s “diving bell” which has penetrated thousands of feet deeper than any live man ever went in the ocean and came back to tell about it (TIME, Aug. 24, 1925). The tank is fitted with oxygen pumps and other breathing apparatus and a glass window capable of withstanding many tons of pressure to the square inch. For illumination he planned to depend entirely, at first, upon the abysmal brilliance of deep sea creatures.

Lobster Silk. The U. S. Department of Commerce received a report that one Dr. G. Kunike had been saving lobster and crab shells, bringing the chitin or bony structure thereof into colloidal solution, passing it through a filter press and drawing it out into artificial silk threads of greater tensile strength than the cellulose imitation. Optimists saw a new industry arising, out of fish-house garbage cans.

“Persuader.” Into police headquarters in Manhattan last week marched one John J. Hise of Hightown, Va., oppossum hunter extraordinary. From his pocket he drew a revolver and flourished it at the Commissioner. That gentleman and the fearless detectives gathered about him never flinched. They could see that Hunter Hise was not desperate and that his “persuader”* was no common weapon. Upon its barrel was affixed a flashlight, of which Hunter Hise soon demonstrated that the beam was adjusted to centre upon the exact spot where a bullet fired from the barrel would strike. Hunter Hise had invented it last year as a surer means for hitting ‘possums at night than the antiquated combination of a gun and a light held in the hand or fastened on the head. He offered it to the Manhattan police force as a dead-shot device for shooting crooks in dark places. As surely as the flashlight, with a strong battery, found its mark, the trigger could be pulled with deadly effect.

*Negro, and therefore Southern, colloquialism for a lethal weapon.