Devices

Radio Lamp Lighters. Ordinarily street electric lamps are turned on and off in groups, by men throwing switches in scattered control stations in various parts of the community. Those control stations are expensive to maintain. To replace the men and stations Westinghouse developed a radio device, which Boston Edison Co. began to use last week on a circuit of 70 street lights. The device utilizes the fact that an electric wire can carry several currents of different frequencies. There are the carrier current and the riding currents. In the base of each of the 70 Boston lamp posts now is a small radio receiving set. When a special generation at the central station sends waves of 720 cycles a second along the light wires, the receiver shoves a switch which connects the individual lamp with the lighting circuit; when the frequency is 480 cycles, the receiver pulls a switch that disconnects the lamp. All lamps in a particular circuit go on and off at the same instant, just as if a man operated one switch in a control station. For another group of lamps another pair of frequencies would operate the circuit; and so on. The great advantage is that a few men in a central station could handle all of a city's lighting.

Edison Radio. Thomas Alva Edison, who made the phonograph practical, for long would have nothing to do with radio because of static. His son Charles recently persuaded him to turn his wits to the radio. Result: a set to be put on the market next week. It contains two receivers, one for super-selectivity to get local stations exclusively, the other for sensitivity to pick up distant stations. Their machine also contains a phonograph.

Valveless Motor. Two Houston, Tex., mechanics, H. S. Lyons and Victor Toce, last week demonstrated a two-cycle, four-cylinder internal combustion gasoline motor that had no valves or carburetor and only 13 working parts. A "turbulator" breaks the gasoline into fine spray; two spark plugs for each cylinder explode the gasoline spray.

Smoke Clouds. Near Stuttgart, Germany, guns spit up bombs; the bombs burst in air and from them spread wide layers of smoke clouds. Flyers in planes could not see terrain or buildings below the smoke. The device seemed a good protection to the Germans against an inimical air attack.

Lighted Cigarets. A coin dropped in the slot of a new machine makes a cigaret fall with its end against an incandescent electric coil. The heat lights the cigaret, which forthwith drops out of the machine for the buyer to smoke on his matchless way. One William Cohen of Brooklyn invented the device.