Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/752

 736 Popular Science Monthly

Dry Your Fruit and Vegetables at Home with an Evaporator

��THE evaporator method of canning fruits and vegetables takes from one and one half to five hours. Peas, corn, beans, cherries and strawberries can be dried on the evaporator in from two to three hours Apples cut with parer corer, and slicer wil dry in one and half hours. The water chamber is filled about half full of water to generate steam, and heat the surface upon which the fruit and vegetables are placed.

Or you may accomplish the same result by slicing your fruit and vegetables and forcing air at room tem- perature across them with an electric fan. This process is slower than the one described above, but it is equally as successful.

A home-made evaporator can be made similar to the one shown. Five or more racks of wood with wire bottoms can be placed on top of each other and the wind forced against them.

���Steam is generated in a water chamber and heats the pan in which the fruit is placed

��A curious feature of the great volume of business which has been done in horses and mules is the fact that the extraordinary de- mand made by the war has not caused the prices of these animals to rise. Indeed, horses sold at an average of $109 per head on January 1st, 1914, and at $103 per head on January 1, 1917. This is the effect the war has had on the prices of farm animals.

There are in

the world 100,-

000,000 horses,

one fifth of

which are in the

United States,

which accounts

for the great

number of horses this

country has exported

since the war began.

Russia has 30,000,000

horses while the United

States numbers its

available horses at

22,000,000.

��Carry Your House Key in Its Own Private Mesh Bag

��A

��Business Is Booming in War Horses and Mules

DESPITE the fact that the great war is being waged largely by means of mechanical devices, horses and mules have played an important part in it. Up to the present time 920,000 horses and 330,000 mules have been sent to the theater of war from the United States. The value of the horses which have been exported is $194,000,000 and of mules $66,000,000. The number of mules being sent to the war is increasing from year to year. The sagacity of the mule makes him very valuable in war work. Most of the horses and mules shipped from this country go directly to France. Others are sent to Great Britain and Canada and a few to some of the other European countries.

��MESH bag for the door key has been invented by Mrs.Olga Berghorn, of Jer- sey City, N. J., so that the key need not get lost among the contents of the pocket book. The bag may be made of any size to conform with any shape of key. When it is desired to use the key, the bag is turned upside down, exposing the key to view. The inventor made her key-bag to correspond with her purse.

The mesh bag for the door- key. It fastens on the usual purse as if a part of it, and keeps the key separate

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