Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/864

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��Popular Science Monthly

��You Can Hold a Dozen of These Perfect Coconuts in One Hand

��Making Money Out of a Nuisance. The Industrial Rise of Acetylene Ash

��THE coconut family is a large one, and TNDUSTRIAL chemists are constantly there are many babies in it. The ba- A finding new and useful ways of disposing bies are a species all by themselves, though of by-products. One of the latest trouble- closely related to the giant seventy-pound some wastes to rise to the dignity of a specimens called coco-de-mer. As shown in valuable commercial product Js acetylene

��the photograph they are full grown, al- though only as large as a good-sized hick- ory nut. Although they taste exactly like the ordinary co- conut, they are too small to be of any value commercially and they rot on the ground by the ton, in the tropics. The same is true of the giant species which are too large for commercial pur- poses. Only the medium size is sold.

���The baby coconuts are exactly like the larger-sized nuts in taste and texture

��ash. This stuff, which could not be disposed of profit- ably a short time ago, is now worth fifty dollars a ton.

An employe of a Los Angeles plant, Frank L. Thompson, discovered that it could be used to make plaster, white- wash and a substi- tute for marble dust that is used in the surfacing of asphalt highways.

Dissolved acety- lene gas is made from calcium car-

��The French "Horizon Blue" Is the Best Color for Uniforms

OUR khaki suits are good. But "horizon blue," the color which the French use for their uniforms, is said to be better still. Against certain backgrounds it is alto- gether invisible from a distance. The reason for this is that it is the color of distance. An artist painting a landscape puts his objects "back" by washing them over with a mixture of white and blue, the horizon blue. This makes it appear as if there were air between the objects and our eyes, so that the objects themselves appear indistinct.

The uniforms of horizon blue make the wearers appear, if not actually a part of the landscape, at least considerably farther away than they are. And since a man is recog- nized by his shape rather than by his color, the blending of his clothes with the color of the horizon helps his "camou- flage considerably."

��bide, which is a combination of plain lime and carbon. The product that remains after the gas has been extracted is slaked lime of a decided commercial value.

���Digging acetylene ash from a sludge pit filled with lime from a Los Angeles acetylene plant and whitewashing a fence with whitewash made from acetylene sludge

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