Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/535

 Popular Science Monthly

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��Midget Crane Has Giant Ability

A TINY crane, so apparently helpless that it is difficult to imagine its doing actual work about a large factory, is in use on the assembling floor of a tractor plant in Cleveland. The crane, despite its appearance, has tremendous capacity. It can seize and lift a weighty automobile or tractor engine from the floor, swing it up into the air and into the chassis without so much as a grunt or a groan of protest.

��make a hen lay an egg which should be self-preserving. He succeeded very well.

By his method the hen was fed uro- tropin, administered in capsules at the rate of less than a gram a day. Uro- tropin is deposited in the egg, where it changes into formalin, a well-known preservative.

Eggs laid within twenty-four hours after the first dosing, as well as those laid five days after, were sufficiently affected to be preserved. Dr. Riddle

���The midget crane runs around the factory under its own power, on a body which looks like an electric baggage truck. It can lift weights apparently far out of proportion to its size,

and it is controlled by one man

��The crane with its operating mechan- ism is mounted on a rigid, four-wheeled truck. It travels about and performs its required lifting all under the guidance of one man.

Making a Hen Lay Self-Preserving Eggs

THK Popular Science Monthly for January gives an account of a Chinese method of preserving eggs by coating them in hard clay. It is an in- teresting process, but more or less labori- ous.

Four years ago. Dr. Osrar Riddle, now of the Carnegie Institution, undertook in a leisure moment to see if he could not

��tested the keeping power of the eggs in comparison with those from untreated hens under particularly severe circum- stances. Kggs of both \aricties laid in the month of July were allowed to stand in a temperature varying from seventy- eight degrees al)0\-e zero to twenty-five below. By the middle of September the difference between the two kinds of eggs could be easily detected; by the middle of November all the eggs from undosed hens were spoilt while those from uro- tropin-fed hens were still edible, although thc>' had lost some of their bulk of water. The drug does not injure the hens, and is obtainable at small cost.

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