With the big Interstate Three-cushion League affording[Pg 63] the sixteen contestants every incentive to practice, some great performances can be looked for.
This prediction also applies to the balkline stars playing in the Champion Billiard Players League and to those who are not. The contestants around the big circuit are getting more billiards this year than any set of players have enjoyed in the history of the game in this country.
Too Heavy for Hikes of War.
Rudolph Berger, who is a well-known operatic baritone singer, and who is six feet five inches tall and tips the beam at 240 pounds, has arrived at New York from Naples after serving three weeks in the Austrian army. He took part in long marches. The Austrians started for Lemberg, but Berger never got there. He was overweight, and after a while his feet refused to carry him. He was allowed to abandon his military career. He says he will become an American citizen.
New Fluid to Take Place of Gasoline.
John Andrus, a Portuguese, came to this country to make his fortune. He has become an inventor. Recently the government paid him thirty thousand dollars for a discovery he made in toughening armor plate. A much more important discovery, however, has been made by Andrus. He is working on a substitute for gasoline that can be manufactured, he says, for one and one-half cents a gallon.
According to some of the biggest men in the automobile business, who have observed tests of the new fuel, it will revolutionize not only the automobile business, but all manufacturing business. The substitute is declared to be superior to gasoline in more respects than cost. It is claimed that it runs automobiles faster and that when it is used the engines are cleaner and cooler.
Andrus has a good business head, and has interested influential men in his plans. No stock is for sale, but the automobile men are talking about the discovery as the most important news in their industry. They say that the new fluid consists mostly of water, a little naphthalene, and two secret ingredients. Andrus mixes these in a still to which heat is applied. The fluid looks like water and smells like camphor balls.
Says His Rifle Fires 200 Shots a Minute.
A one-man gun, invented by a Rochester man, and guaranteed by him to increase a soldier’s fighting efficiency twenty or thirty times, is for sale. Its inventor, Harry W. Sweeting, says he has begun negotiations with Germany for the sale of the invention, which he has protected by American patents. Mr. Sweeting is now in New York on his way to Washington. At the Park Avenue Hotel he admitted that he was trying to sell the gun to Germany, but hinted that there was some probability of negotiations with this government.