Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/229

 Popular Science MontJihi

��213

���Mount a snow plow in front of a locomotive and simply melt away all the snow drifts you encounter. An inventor has provided the extra apparatus that is necessary

��Just Melt a Snow Bank Away. But It's Not a Simple Process

JrST now when railway men all over the country are struggling with overpow- ering snow storms, we know they will be interested in a Middle- Westerner's in- vention whereby all their troubles may literally be melted away. His idea is to mount a snow plow in front of the loco- motive^a snow plow provided with in- numerable steam jets by which all snow encountered may be rapidly reduced to water. It is easy to do this, merely a matter of having coal enough in the tender.

The inventer provides pipes by which the water accumulated, may be delivered at will, to the tender, or distributed freely along the right of way to freeze and hold down drifts. Perhaps the blowing ac- tion of the steam jets may assist a plow in loos- ening up its obstacles. But when the disposal of snow by melting ac- tion alone, and with steam as the source of

neat, is con- ^ pleasure automobile made

Sldered, the wounded men can easily be

���question of practicability arises.

It takes eighty calories of heat to re- duce one gram — a small teaspoonful — of ice at 32° F. to water at identically the same temperature (32° F.), or as much heat as it afterwards takes to raise the teaspoonful of (now) water from 32° F. to about 175° F. In other words, ice takes an immense amount of heat just to melt it. Of course, snow isn't literally ice, but as an almost limitless absorber of heat it id a close rival.

Good strong rotary plows sre proving very useful as disposers of sno v.

Your Automobile Can Be Made Into an Ambulance

NY five-passenger car can be made into an ambulance that will carry two men, by attaching a gas-pipe framework, invented by Captain G a n s, of Philadelphia, Pa., an officer in the Med- ical Corps.

The stretch- ers are slung from the racks. The light variety weigh not into an ambulance. Two "^ore than

carried on the stretchers fifty pounds.

��K

�� �