What is probably the first automobile wireless apparatus in the country belongs to O. E. Ruckgaber, Ithaca, N. Y., a senior in the College of Civil Engineering at Cornell University.
Ruckgaber is already sending wireless messages from his car for a distance of about ten miles when the atmospheric conditions are good, and he hopes to send messages for much longer distance in a short time. Ruckgaber attached the wireless to the car two weeks ago. At first he sent messages but short distances to his fraternity house, but he has improved the machine recently.
All that can be seen of the apparatus are two wires running from the top of the car and meeting at the outer point of the engine hood. The sending and receiving apparatus is placed on one of the seats.
To Make Lard Out of Corn Oil.
After determining that corn oil is an economic substitute for olive oil, Dean L. E. Sayre, of the Kansas University School of Pharmacy, is experimenting to determine whether it is a satisfactory substitute for lard. Some of the liquid oil, which is heavy and brown, has been hydrogenated. In this condition it appears white and has about the consistency of cocoa butter, and melts at the temperature of beeswax.
Dean Sayre has been experimenting with corn oil for more than a year. He found that it makes a very good substitute for olive oil in salad dressings, and believes that the hydrogenated oil can be used in place of lard. The patented frying mediums are hydrogenated cottonseed oil.
Corn oil is extracted from the soft white center of the corn, where the life spark dwells. It is a by-product of the manufacture of starch, glucose, and the better grades of corn meal.
Giant Reptile Seven Million Years Old.
Between seven and ten million years ago, in what is known as the Jurassic Age, there lived a group of giant reptiles called Dinosaurs, one family of which, the Stegosauridæ, or plated lizards, is perhaps the most fantastic and curious in all natural history. The most perfect and complete fossilized skeleton of the genus Stegosaurus, a smaller branch of this remarkable family group, is on exhibition in the new building of the United States National Museum, at Washington, just as it was found and dug out of the sandstone rock. Near at hand is a natural size and very lifelike restoration in papier-mâché so weird and monstrous in appearance as to give one the horrors.
Back in the very early days of the world, this armor-plated, lizardlike monster dwelt in the western part of the United States in what is now the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, although at that time the mountains did not exist.