Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/267

 Popular Science Monthhf

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��Making the Desert Bloom like a Flower-Garden

��SAMUEL LI veteran inv

��PPERT,

��Cleveland, Ohio, writes us that he has developed a pump which he thinks some day will perform no less a feat than to make the Sahara desert a flower gar- den! Pumping water, he reminds us, has been a seri- ous question ever since Biblical days when Jacob's well was drilled.

Lippert proposes to use "the free energy of the air." Not any other free energy, however, than that of the wind. Even the sporadic winds, of the Greatest Desert can operate his pump, since it is rotary and is self-checking. A vertical shaft, leading from the mill vanes down to within a score of feet of the deeply-buried stream, rotates a set of screws fitting tightly against the inside of the pump casing. A corkscrew action is produced, and the water is sucked up the first twenty feet of the distance. All the rest of the journey, the water is simply screwed up. .

��The rotary pump for tap- ping deep un- derground streams. It is driven by a windmill

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��One man working at this machine can punch over four thousand holes in heavy plate during a nine hour day

���The inventor holding a small model of his rotary pump

��Punching Holes in Steel Plates — A Machine Used by Shipbuilders

PUNCHING more than four thousand holes in heavy plates during a nine hour working day is a modern accom- plishment. It could not have been done so recently as a year or two ago. Plates for building ships must have many holes so that they can be riveted together into a finished vessel. The great expansion in steel shipbuilding industries has made the rapid handling of plates at punching machines a real necessity. The plate punch roller shown in the illustration has made this rapid handling possible, and it is in use in many of the new plate shops. The plate is laid on the table and the operator, from his seat, moves the table back- ward and forward with the aid of an operating lever at his right hand. At his left hand is another lever, which can be operated to move the plate sideways, thereby placing it in the desired position for punching. The punch is controlled by a foot lever.

Plates from one-quar- ter to one-eighth of an inch thick, and up to thirty by eight feet in size are handled. The tables are built with roller bearings.

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