THRILLING EXPERIMENTS ARE SYMPOSIUM FEATURE

Explosions, flashes and blinding lights kept the audience startled and gasping when Professor A. B. Lamb G'03, director of the chemical laboratory, presented the chemist's viewpoint of heat at the fourth symposuim held in the Union Living Room last night. Performing experiments that ranged from simple illustrations of the effect of oxygen and nitrogen on flame to breath-taking feats that approached necromancy, Professor Lamp kept the audience in a continual flurry of excitement.

He discussed at length the factors that influence burning, showing how, by the addition of certain third substances, such things as iron could be made to combust and burn. Many different forms of flames were illustrated on a big table raised on the platform and Professor Lamb produced one mass of flame which he calmly held in his hand and picked to pieces.

"The atomic theory and its relation to heat, since burning involves the transfer of electrons from one atom to another," said Professor Lamb, "will form the basis for the new discoveries in the chemical constitution of heat which are sure to be made in the near future."

"Waste is a characteristic by-product of modern civilization," said Professor H. N. Davis G'03, in treating the subject from the engineering aspect, "and industrially it is nowhere more evident than in the waste of heat." Professor Davis confined himself largely to the heat lost in mechanical engineering and the possible methods of saving it.

Will learn To Use Heat Now Wasted

"The insulation of the hot body is one way," he said. "The fireless cooke" has saved infinite heat in cooking. Just so will we some day save the heat wasted by our blast furnaces and power houses and with it heat and light whole districts."

Professor Davis advocated a plan by which this saving would be possible tomorrow. "If we could change our habits so as to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go to bed at 6 o'clock in the evening, we would be able to eliminate the difficulties that prevent power houses from using surplus heat as light when it is dark, and as heat when it is cold."

Names Three Big Experiments

There are three exciting adventures now in progress, according to Professor Davis, which if successful will revolutionize the transformation of heat into power, which is the basis of all mechanical. engineering. The development of a steam pressure of 1200 pounds to the square inch, or over four times the maximum pressure possible a decade ago, is imminent. The use of mercury turbines which, although dangerous to the extreme, would save infinite leakage of heat is the second of these experiments. The third is a new internal combustion engine involving a water jacket which would eliminate the necessary high temperatures of our present engines and which would use the steam for several different purposes at the same time. "Complete disaster in any or all of these experiments is possible," Professor Davis concluded, "but the material advantage to be gained from anyone of them is inestimable."

Says Animals Control Own Temperature

Professor Walter B. Cannon '96, George Higginson Professor of Physiology in the University, closed the symposium with a discussion of heat in its relation to biology. "Animals," he said, "have this advantage over machines: that they can control their body temperatures themselves."

"Fate, in this struggle for existence, dooms animals to be quick or to be dead, and the frog who allows his body temperature to sink on a cold day will find his muscles too sluggish for him to escape the experimenting biologist. It is only through exerting his metabolic functions in muscular action that he can raise his temperature."

Professor Cannon pointed out that warm-blooded animals, such as birds and mammals, have hair and feathers which help to maintain a fairly fixed bodily heat. Even this changes, however; in the space of twenty-four hours, a man's temperature can rise or fall 20 degrees. "And this fact," said Professor Cannon, is the greatest of all reasons against Professor Davis' new industrial day. If we got up at 3 o'clock in the morning, the day's industry would start off with a very bad four hours.