Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/425

 Popular Science Monthly

��409

��A Waving Flag in Badge Form for Your Buttonhole

ONE of the novelties brought out by the war is a figure of Uncle Sam waving a small American flag above his top-hat. Owing to the construction of the badge, the flag actually moves, as in waving, at the slightest motion of the wearer. The badge consists of a metal figure of Uncle Sam, with the flag at the end of an up raised arm, which isn't an arm at all but a flexible spring fastened to the top of the shoulder of the figure, as the accompanying illustration shows. Each time the wearer of the flag moves, the spring jumps up and down and side- ways, giving the flag a waving motion. By means of a stick pin on the back, the badge may be readily attached to the hat, coat, dress front, or even the neck-tie, wherever it is preferred

���The flag is attached to a flexible- spring arm, as shown at the right

��means of a chain from a scaffolding on

wheels. The chain is attached to the ram

at a point which will enable the operator

to pick up the other end without

much effort.

That the ram is effective as a de- structive agent is manifest in the photograph. The side of the peasant's cottage which lies in ruins was evidently of brick or masonry before the Germans de- cided to ram it to pieces. All that now remains of it is a few tottering beams support- ing a twisted and warped roof. The two wheels in front of the apparatus and the wire handles on the bottom pieces make the appar- atus a portable one. It was probably moved from place to place as the Ger- mans retreated through a devastated and shell-torn country to the more for- midable positions in the rear.

��1

�IP

�m

�I///J

�i

�m

� �-n^A

�\C

�m$£>?

� �lS^2J^^

��Demolishing French Cottages with a Battering Ram

THE Germans have left behind them another tool of destruction during their so-called victorious retreat to the Hindenburg and Wotan lines. It is a battering ram such as Helen of Troy might have looked down upon from her father's watchtower. But the Germans did not use it for destroying walls round fortified cities, as did the warring ancients. They

used it for

smashing in the f sides of peas- ants' cottages and reducing those structures to piles of debris. In the accom- panying photo- graph a French man is illus- trating for civilization just how the ram was operated. A heavy pole of sturdy wood is suspended by

���© Underwood and Underwood

How the retreating Germans wrecked peasants' cot- tages with an old-fashioned wooden battering ram

��What Six Gallons of Good Gasoline Can Do

FEW persons have any conception of the immense amount of energy that is stored in the natural oil products in everyday usage. Take, for instance, the gasoline that is used in automobiles day by day. The motorist will be interested to know that if the same amount of energy that is used up in "autoing" a hundred miles were employed to milk cows, some ten thousand gal- lons of the milk could be obtained! Or, if the same energy were used in patri- otic gardening, fully four acres of ground could be plowed. That amount of energy could also mix up eighteen hun- dred cubic feet of the thickest cement.

�� �