Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/553

 Popular Science Monthly

��How You Light Your Cigar When Traveling in Italy

THE Italian sub- stitute for the neat and conve- nient cigar lighter found in every American cigar store is a long rope lighted and placed outside of the to- bacco shop. It is made of cheap hemp, of rope waste, and even of rags twisted roughly into shape and held together by strings of twine. The>im- provised lighter is made by the store- keeper himself.

A tourist making his way down the main street of. a town in Italy will find strings of these ropes all along the way.

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on a heavy metal base mounted on rubber pads so as not to scar or scratch a desk. It consists of a metal framework, handle- plunger, a com-

��Jrown and Dawson

A slow-burning rope twisted from waste is the "lighter" of the Italian cigar keeper

��Stamping Two Thousand Letters an Hour with a New Machine

GONE would be the stamp-licker and the wet sponge were every office furnished with this new mechanical stamper having a capacity of two thousand let- ters per hour. This machine differs from others of its kind in that it moistens the envel- ope instead of the stamp and in this way does away with the possibility of the stamps gumming and thereby preventing the successful operation of the machine.

The machine is built up

��Handle Up stop screw Contact roller Roll of stamps

����Cwer hinge \\ 'fc9' stera,m Stamp renter

Bring tack springs

��bined water-tank and moistening wick, a stamp- counting register and a platform on which the envelopes are laid to be stamped.

The back of the framework is hinged at the bot- tom to open in order to insert rolls of five hundred or one thousand stamps. in ribbons, one stamp wide, as furnished. by the Government. The roll, slipped over a pin in the hinged cover, is .fed. for- ward by a system of levers operated by the downward push of the handle. Thus the strip of stamps is automatically fed out to a point beneath the base of the handle-plunger and auto- matically cut off at the proper perforation just when it is affixed to the moistened envelope. The system of levers is brought back to its original position at each release of the handle by means of several small springs.

A small rod attached to one of the levers of the system is made to move back and forth at each depression of the handle and to operate a register with a dial on the front of the machine, which dial indicates the number of stamps used. The stamp device may also be locked, so that no stamps can be removed. By means of the register, an accurate count of the number of stamps can be kept for any given time.

To affix a stamp the corner of the envelope is shoved under a moistened wick. The handle is pressed down and then springs back automatically.

��The corner of the envelope is mois- tened with water fed from a tank through a wick, ending just above the envelope plat- form at the right of the plunger base. Then the handle presses the stamp on

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