Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/682

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lips when the device is in place. A string attached to the ring can be tied around the neck. This will enable the wearer to recover the shield in the dark in case he has a blowout. It will also keep him from swallowing or inhaling the apparatus should he overcome its resistance by a determined effort to break into nasal rhapsodies.

In the second class, the anti-snore devices are intended to keep a person from sleeping on his back, in which position the nasal soloist makes the welkin and adjacent hardware ring. Apparently the inventors who work along this line never slept on lumpy mattresses. If they had, they probably would have directed their thoughts toward some method of fastening the snorer, face up, on any one of the inanimate deformities of the bed.

"It may be confidently stated that the wearer of this device would not snore for the simple reason that snores accompany sleep and for him sleep is altogether out of the question"

In one of the illustrations at the bottom of this page is a simple application of this principle. A pad, either round or elliptical, is strapped to the small of the back by means of a belt. The idea is to keep the sleeper off an even keel and thus prevent his useless sounding of the fog siren. The pad, it is said by the inventor, will keep him listed either to port or to starboard.

The ball-and-strap device opposite is almost a duplicate of the one described. The inventor, however, believes more punishment can be inflicted by strapping the back-breaking object directly between the shoulders. He advocates the use of a rubber pneumatic ball to be fastened to the belt in such a manner that it will be neither punctured nor displaced. He fails to explain how a person with the belt strapped around his chest tightly enough to hold the ball in place could inhale enough air to raise a snore. In that, however, may lie one of the subtle and fundamental excellencies of his invention. "The idea of this device is to keep the sleeper off an even keel. The pad, says the inventor, will keep him always listed either to port or to starboard"

The genius responsible for the device illustrated at the bottom of page 667 goes his fellow scientists one better. He doesn't believe in half-way measures and is not afraid to say so. His scheme is to make life on the flat of the back so miserable that a snorer assuming such a position will wake up at least long enough to wish he had never been born. Incidentally, he combines a shoulder brace with the snore dispeller. The connection between snoring and shoulder braces is not immediately apparent, but it becomes so when one reflects that if a shoulder brace won't keep a person awake, nothing will.

The refinement of torture, however, so far as this public benefactor could apply it to snoring, is embodied in the attachment to be fastened to the shoulder brace at the back. The attachment is a metal casting having several projections. Though spikes

"Here some mercy is shown ball is pneumatic. But the ventor emphasizes the importance of protecting it from puncture"