Engineering at the British Association

Abstract

SECTION G suffered badly at Glasgow, both in attendance and in the quality of the papers presented to it, from the Engineering Congress which was held in the University buildings during the preceding week; many regular members of the Section were absent, and several valuable papers which would under ordinary circumstances have come to the Section were read instead at one or other of the Congress sectional meetings. On the opening day, after the presidential address, since the engineering departments of the Glasgow International Exhibition would naturally be frequently visited by members of the Section, it was arranged to have a paper descriptive of the mechanical exhibits; this was given by Mr. D. H. Morton, and proved most useful in assisting visitors to spend to the best advantage the hours they gave up to the Exhibition. The author, rightly enough, deplored the almost complete absence of any marine engineering exhibits and the poor show of locomo. tives; but he pointed out that in another of the great industries of Glasgow, steel making, there was a remarkably complete and most instructive series of exhibits, the enormous steel plates and huge steel forgings and castings being especially interesting. On the same day two interesting papers by Mr. J. R. Wigham, on a long-continuous-burning petroleum lamp for beacons and buoys, and on a new scintillating lighthouse light, were also read. In the first paper the author claimed that by burning petroleum and using the wick horizontally, so that the flame sprang from the side and not from the edge or ends, a steady light could be secured requiring no attention for a month; the slow continuous movement of the wick over the roller was secured by an ingenious arrangement in which the gradual escape of oil from a cylinder caused a float attached to the wick end to slowly descend, thus causing the wick to travel over the roller and so present a new surface to the flame. Examples of both these appliances were on show in the University buildings.