Ideas for War

During World War I someone offered the British Government a chemical which, he said, would freeze clouds solid. Guns could then be mounted on the clouds, to ward off airplane attacks.

So many ideas of this specific gravity were sent in that the authorities got to skimming them over rather hurriedly, perhaps missing a few that had some actual value. The story is still current in Britain that in 1915 a gunner submitted a device for plotting the course of attacking aircraft to increase the accuracy of antiaircraft fire. In 1918 he was finally permitted to demonstrate, and his gadget performed so effectively for altitudes up to 16,000 feet that it was adopted forthwith, helped repel the last big German air raid of the war.

In World War II the British are taking no chances of missing the useful needle among the preposterous straws of the haystack. In the Ministry of Supply an Invention Board has been set up to collect and consider, not only ideas submitted directly to Government departments, but also those sent to manufacturers, who have found their influx of suggestions quadrupled since the war started. Some British ideas:

>Decoy lighting to deceive enemy airplane pilots.

>Artillery shells which, on landing, would open and release live venomous snakes.

>Artillery shells filled with gravel which would spray muddy terrain in No Man's Land, make good footing for attacking infantry.

>Training sea gulls to spot submarines.

During War I the British did try to train seals to hunt submarines.)

>A huge beam of "black light" to black out the moon, thus deny moonlight to nocturnal air raiders.

In neutral Washington suggestions are pouring into the War and Navy Departments and to the Patent Office. The military and naval authorities are chary of discussing these whizzbangs, but the details of a patented idea naturally become public knowledge. Some U. S. war patents:

>Artillery shells which would cause the enemy to ruin its own guns. The shells, calibrated to the enemy's gun-sizes, would be filled with thermite, a well-known incendiary substance which burns at 3,000DEGC., and temptingly abandoned. When the enemy tried to fire the shells, the thermite would ignite, ruin the guns.

> A torpedo which, if it misses the target ship on the first try, turns around and tries again.

>Huge whirling screens to intercept bombs aimed at battleships or buildings, toss the bombs aside by centrifugal force.

>A rifle with a curved barrel, which a soldier could shoot from a trench without exposing himself.

> Huge electromagnets to draw submarines to the side of a battleship, where the submarine's crew would be electrocuted by an electric current sent through the hull.

Last week newshawks tried vainly to pump the Navy Department about an idea (supposedly submitted to the Navy, but with all the earmarks of a Navy jape) which would make a cat laugh. The idea: to train cats to direct submarine torpedoes. Riding on the torpedo's back, shielded from annoying waves and spray in a little turret-like compartment, the cat would fix its gaze on the target ship. In some way, perhaps by a photoelectric hookup, the angle of the cat's head would cause the torpedo to veer until the cat was looking straight ahead and the torpedo's path therefore true. Queried, Navy officials kept mum and straightfaced, said only that all such ideas sent in by outsiders are kept confidential for the sake of national security.

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