[1] The British Empire Subjects: | Industrial Chemistry, Accidents |
Records that on 8 May there was an 'Explosion in Nobel's dynamite factory, Ayrshire. Ten girls killed' (318).
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[2] Science and Progress Subjects: | Societies, Engineering, Disease, Vaccination, Human Development, Electricity, Horticulture |
Gives details of the forthcoming British Association meeting in Montreal. Reveals the slow rate of work on the construction of the Panama Canal, although it is 'still hoped that the canal will be inaugurated in 1889' [in fact, the canal was not officially opened until August 1914]. Reports Louis Pasteur's 'experiments on rabies. He maintains that he has twenty dogs which he has rendered insusceptible to the disease, and which, with twenty ordinary dogs, he is prepared to have bitten by a number of dogs in a rabid state'. Notes that Eugène Dally has called attention to 'the dangers of intellectual and military prematurity' by which 'the child wants to be a big boy and the youth wants to be a man before his time'. As such, those 'whose mental development is normal—that is to say, slow—find themselves superseded by young men whose attainments have been tested at a time when their future mental value could not be ascertained'. Also records François H P de Parville's call for French 'wine-growers' to examine 'the services electricity might render them in protecting their vines from the disastrous effects caused by a sudden fall in temperature'. (320) He suggests that 'electric batteries similar to those used to fire mines' might be employed to set alight 'tarred straw and other combustibles' which would create warming clouds of smoke; the fires could even be lit automatically when 'the thermometer falls toward zero, by means of a very simple arrangement' which 'causes the electric current to pass along the wires' to the combustibles (320–21).
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[3] Obituary Subjects: | Scientific Practitioners, Chemistry, Metallurgy | People mentioned: |
Charles A Wurtz
, Robert A Smith
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