Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/76

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��The new life-guard boat which can not capsize. The man lying down is looking through the glass bottom to locate bodies

��A Life-Boat That Cannot Capsize or Sink

ANEW life-boat built along the lines of a big surf board, has proved so satisfactory that it has been officially adopted by the city of Long Beach, California.

The boat, sixteen feet long, forty inches wide and four- teen inches deep, is non- capsizable and self-draining, and is the invention of A. M. Nelsen of Long Beach. It has many advantages over the skiffs now used by the municipal life-guard squad of that city. It can be put through the heaviest surf without waiting for a calm. It has air tanks on both sides, at the ends, and down and has a glass bottom through bodies that may have sunk may be located. With one man paddling, and the other stretched at full length peer- ing through the glass bottom, a body can be located in twenty feet of water and brought to the surface by means of grappling hooks or by diving after it.

The boat is propelled with double-bladed paddles by two guards. It can make a speed of six miles an hour, and will support twenty people.

��Popular Science Monthly

A New Machine Husks a« Bushel of Corn a Minute in the Field

NEW type of corn husker which promises to relieve the farmer of the tedious and disagreeable work of husking corn in the damp fields has just been completed by W. H. Tschantz, of Ohio. The apparatus is driven by a gas en- gine and not only husks the corn but deposits the clean ears in a wagon bin by means of an elevator forming a part of the device and binds up the husks and silks in bundles like wheat, eliminating all litter and loss.

The apparatus consists of a small four-wheeled wagon on one end of which are mounted the gas engine and a suction blower, with the husker and binder at the other. In operation the wagon is drawn from shock to shock by horse or mule power. The un- husked corn is deposited on one side of the binder. The shock is first torn into small bundles and thrown on the feed board, which carries the bundles up to a series of hori- zontal rollers. Most of the husk is removed while passing through these rollers, and the ears are dropped on to a pair of rollers beneath the husking rolls. Here the silk is removed, after which the clean ear drops through a trough into the base of the elevator, which deposits them in a wagon or other waiting receptacle.

���The buoyant air tanks are at both sides, at the ends, and down the middle. Above: Launching the boat in a heavy surf

��the

��middle, which

��Path of silk from bottom trough to binder

���Blower Binder side' The bundles of corn are thrown on the feed board which carries them to a series of rollers which remove the husks

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