Henry shambled up, jerked his suspenders straight, hunted his hat. Men were crowding round him—he saw mouths moving excitedly, hands waving. They beat him on the back, they shook his hand. But Henry pulled away.
"Lemme alone," he yelled at the curious who milled about him. "You lemme alone. I've gotta feed my cats!"
GRAINS SEND ROOTS MANY FEET INTO EARTH
Investigators for the Carnegie Institution of Washington have reported some interesting discoveries about the depth to which food plants send their roots. Trees and other perennials send tap-roots to a great distance into the earth, but that cereals, which start new from the seed each season, do the same, has not been generally understood. Professor John E. Weaver reports that in Nebraska wheat and oats were found to send roots down to a depth of from six to eight feet, while corn roots were found eight feet deep. New agricultural methods may result from these investigations.
HELICOPTERS MAY MAKE AIRPLANES OBSOLETE
The next big forward step in aviation will be the helicopter. Run to your Greek dictionary and look it up. "Helicon" means spiral or screw and "pteron" means wing. Get it? Orville Wright invented the word and predicted years ago that someone would invent the machine. An airplane—though it wouldn't be a "plane" at all and we'd have to call it a "flying machine" or something like that—which was able to rise into the air by means of "screw-wings" or devices like electric fans placed horizontally, could ascend from a space no bigger than the spread of its wings, and descend, if the machinery worked properly, in a similar space. Instead of a big landing field away out in the country, such machines could start out from a city roof or a suburban back yard. Both the British and the French governments, which pay much more attention to aviation than does ours, have offered prizes for helicopters capable of doing certain "stunts." The British specifications call for a machine that will rise 2,000 feet, carrying a pilot and fuel for an hour's flight; hover stationary in the air for half an hour, and fly horizontally at 60 miles an hour. Louis Brennan, the monorail inventor, claims to have built a machine covering these requirements. Pescara, an Argentine inventor, made a helicopter that would rise six feet carrying a passenger, and sold it to the French government.