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NEW TYPE OF ELECTRIC

AN

CHAIR

N innovation in electric chairs-not the kind they use at Sing Sing, but one just as expeditious, only with a different purpose-has recently been designed. The visitors at the San Diego Exposition will not have to trust to the human agency of hired porters to transport them from building to building, but will have the novel pleasure, as well as the greater freedom of movement, afforded by two-passenger electric runabout chairs. These are made after the fashion of the ordinary wicker wheel chair for sight-seers, but fitted out with electric storage batteries, which supply a small motor with power. These electric chairs will be a great convenience, as the person riding in one may turn wherever he wishes.

RUN TYPEWRITER WITH
BOTTLE

A LARGE eastern news

paper office was

working at a high

tension to get out

"copy" for a special edition.

All the typewriters in the place were clicking at top speed, when the spring of one of them sud

denly broke.

There was no
time to have it

repaired and no
other machine
was available; so
the ingenious operator
made a temporary repair
from a short length of
string, an empty ink bottle,
and a pasteboard box. One

WHEN THE RACE WAS ON

The newspaper was going to press and there was no time to fix the typewriter any other

end of the string was tied to the carriage

and the bottle was tied to the other end. The box was placed on the edge of the stand and the string was passed over this. The weight of the empty bottle was just enough to give the proper pull to bring the carriage over to begin a new line. A weight was placed inside the box to keep it steady. The typewriter was used in this

THE PORTER LOSES HIS JOB Visitors at the San Diego Exposition will ride in electric chairs.

manner for several days, during which time the impro

vised spring

pulled the carriage steadily and without

a stop. When the reporter

has come in at the

last moment to

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write his story before the last forms close any delay of even a few minutes may deprive the paper of the column which he was to have filled, and SO a typewriter repair under these circumstances is of prime importance.

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PRODUCING RICE IN JAPAN

ALL
LL the work of raising rice in

Japan is done by hand. A horse is never used in the rice fields. The husband drags the plow while the wife steers. The rice is raised on small squares and rectangles of land, covered with water, so that a rice field looks like a big mud puddle with whiskers, the latter being the rice sprouts.

When it comes time to thresh the rice, it is taken to a dry place and piled up. Then a frame. with teeth is set up; the rice is struck into the teeth of this great comb and the heads are pulled off. When these are pulled off, they are put on a floor and pounded until the hulls are removed. The stalks are used for weaving.

All day long the wife works by the side of her husband, and both working from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, can just make a living.

GUN REPLACES FOG HORN

THE first acetylene-gas gun in

the United States has recently been imported by the Lighthouse Board from Scotland, and is being tried out at the Marrowstone Point Lighthouse, in Puget Sound.

The gun stands about eight feet in height from the base to the top of the exhaust pipe.

Gas pressure lifts the diaphragm of a regulator floating in oil, to a sufficient height to operate a trigger that explodes the gas in the combustion chamber by electricity. The discharges are thirty seconds. apart and can be heard from four to ten miles away, according to air conditions.

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FOG GUN TO WARN SAILORS

It works automatically with acetylene gas, firing for three weeks without attention.

When the connection from the acetylene tanks is turned on, the gun discharges automatically. A sufficient supply of gas is in the storage tanks for three weeks' continuous firing.

These fog guns are proving very popular.

GIRL IS CHAMPION TOMATO

GROWER

MISS CLYDE SULLIVAN, of Ousley, Georgia, holds the 1913 record of the United States among the members of the Girls' Canning Clubs for yield of tomatoes on one-tenth of an acre. The tenth-acre tract is the size

of the plat each member must cultivate.

This Georgia girl gathered 5354 pounds of tomatoes from her patch and made a net profit of $132.39. A full acre at this rate would, of course, have netted $1323.90. Practically all of the tomatoes were put up in cans and neatly labeled with the standard canning club brand.

The results were carefully checked by county and demonstration agents and the record is fully verified. A number of Georgia girls approached her record but a larger number fell far below, the smallest net profit being ten dollars on the tenth acre.

The enrollment of canning club girls in Georgia is thirty-five hundred and it is claimed that the work has only begun and many more could be enrolled if they could be looked after by those interested in the movement.

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The city has just

completed, at a cost of one million dollars, the first unit in harbor development, which consists of one pier eight hundred feet long. The total cost of contemplated improvement will be nine million dollars. With this expenditure the city will secure title to fourteen hundred acres of reclaimed tide lands with the value far in excess of the cost of improvement. Being the first port of call on the Pacific in the United States, the eyes of the world are now focused upon this magnificent body of water.

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the

N

The RACE of
SILK SPECIALS

By Monroe Wolley

EARLY every day in the year giant express steamers are racing across the Pacific under a full head of steam, the engines throbbing mightily in an effort to gain more headway, to get a commodity to us at a certain hour, nay, at a certain minute. First-class passengers no longer command the fastest steamers; the traveling public no longer is able to go and come in advance of freight, that is, of a certain kind of freight.

What may be the name of the class of freight that exacts all this hurry and fuss? What is it that sends engine-room firemen weak and weary to the forecastle of the ship at the end of every watch after stoking roaring fires like demons in hell? What is it that causes railroad

officials to plan for days ahead of the arrival of a steamer, that fast freight trains may be waiting to dash across the continent on a passenger train schedule as soon as the precious packing cases are rolled from the hold?

Oddly enough, it is nothing more than silks for milady! Hitherto food supplies have usurped all the speed there was left after traveling humanity had exacted its toll. Now it has become more important to speed up ships and trains to deliver silk than it is to hurry fruit boats and refrigerator cars carrying fastripening fruit. Silk is not perishable, but silk prices are.

If silk quotations are high, the producers in Japan are naturally anxious to sell. It is to their interest to land the silk in New York City before the bottom

THE RACE OF THE SILK SPECIALS

falls out of the market. The sellers make it their business to see that the overocean carriers get the cargoes into New York on schedule, often on a certain day, and sometimes at a certain hour. It is an exciting game, as much so for the carrier as it is for the seller. If the race is lost, the grower is out at pocket, and the transporting agent likewise loses. There is a penalty for every day that the shipment is overdue.

Because of these conditions, silk has been able to do in almost no time what ordinary trade conditions have failed to do for transpacific shipping in a decade. Silk ships, some of them, are now crossing the Pacific in from nine to ten days. Twenty days over the northern route used to be fair time; even today the average steamer from 'Frisco out takes from twenty to twenty-five days to reach the world's silk center.

A Canadian Pacific silk express came near making the voyage from Yokohama. to Seattle in eight days but, in the end, she disappointed her owners and the maritime world by coming in late.

369

Carrying concerns that operate their own over-ocean steamers and railroads are the leading participants in the silk races. They have facilities for bringing the ships alongside docks on which fast freights are waiting with steam up.

In July last, the Japanese steamer Awa Maru brought a silk cargo valued at $1,141,000 into Seattle. The ship sailed from Yokohama on July fifteenth and, although it ordinarily takes the vessel from fifteen to sixteen days to make port, by unmerciful crowding she was able to get the cargo on the rails by July twentyeighth. The Awa Maru's burst of speed was occasioned by the fact that the Empress of Russia, perhaps the fastest silk ship on the Pacific, owned and operated by the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a formidable rival of the Japanese line, left Japan shortly after the Awa Maru left, for Vancouver, British Columbia, carrying a cargo valued at $1,500,000. The idea

was to get the Awa's cargo into the New York depots before the Empress could get her shipment on the rails. As the Empress has made the trip from Yoko

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THE GIANT OF THE PACIFIC The Minnesota has carried the greatest cargo ever carried by any ship on any sea. according to the Pacific Coast

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