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â- f r I V •â- ir f \ A.1 ^ f T 1 A jj*^ â- ^ ^ -i/- A, i. ^- ' / -» •s < > J^ "^^ .'\ ^ y" ^ A >> •*, > ^ J X '-\ f^ -s •. ^^**s. ;*. r^< 4- r -A r A - ^n <^* A >^ -< ]«• â- %< JS^ :? 1 A A t' â- "» A. A .A f ,X -jV 1^ Jl' /*^ A r 1 â- K A- The Ontario Society for Crippled Children, aided by 150 service clubs, sees that every crippled child in Ontario in need of attention gets it. Here a patient chats with his sponsor, Robert Thompson and Lindsay Scott, chairman of the crippled children's committee of the Hamilton Shriners. The Society's Easter Seals appeal for funds continues until April 9. Donations may be sent to Timmy, Toronto. When They Opened The Erie Canal Finally, the Erie Canal , . aston- ished the world, for it was an under- taking of such magnitude that the like of it had hitherto been accom- ttlished only by the greatest empires 01 the Old World and by means of She labor of slaves. It is but natural, therefore, thirt the unique spectacle of the celebra- tion of the opening of the great waterway, upom a stage ttretching from Buffalo to New York, before an audience composed of a larg* part of the population of the »tat«, should appeal to English artists in search of American views, and that their sketches should be used to decorate the pottery of Stafford- shire. It is with pride, mingled with wonder and no little amuse- tnent, that one reviews the story of the opening celebration, as it is re- oorded it\ the old china illustra- tions. The celebration began at Buffalo, the junction of the canal and Lake Erie, continued at each little hamlet and city along the banks, culminat- ing at last ill a blaze of glory aaid patriotism as the waters from tha Great Lakes were mingled with the Atlantic in New York harbor. No resplendent Doge of Venice, stand- ing upon the prow of his gayly be- decked Bucanitaur and casting the jewelled ring into the waters of the Adriatic, thereby symbolizing the marriage of Venice to the sea. was ever more proud than was Governor Clinton as. standing upon a primi- tive canal boat draped with th« Stars and Stripes, he poured a barrel of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean thereby accomplishing th« union of our West and East. The first illustration presents a â-¼tew of the harbor entrance of the «anal at Buffalo, with sail boats in the bay, low warehouses on th» dock, and a packet boat upon the canal, which sailors are tying to â- the wharf . . . With something akin to awe, one listens to the sound of that reverberating cannon shot, v/hich fired at Buffalo and repeated in succession by cannon stationed along the entire length of th« canal, proclaims in one hour and 20 minutes to the people of New York City that the little fleet it under way. Four gaily bedecked horses then proudly prance along He's Laughing Out Loud (At the Drop of a Buck) Dick Collier, who is probably the world's only professional laugher, started in business with a guffaw and worked his way down to a titter. .\nd today, at the drop of a buck, he's ready to titter, giggle, snicker, guffaw, shriek, howl, snort, chuckle, gurgle and other- wise convulse himself for all com- ers. He'll laugh any place, any timet anywhere, if the pay is right. Collier's vocal talents alone are sufficient, since he has a truly in- fectious laugh and has proved same through appearances on the radio and on records. But when you throw in his physical appear- ance (which is a big job, because he's well over 200 poundst you've realty got something. Dick Collier looks like a laugh. In fact, he looks like a walking belly-laugh, with a built-in chortle. As such, he's an up-and-coming television performer and has his laughing eyes focused avidly on the fertile fields of Hollywood. + * * He laughs for a living for two reasons. First, he's a down-to-earth, commercially-minded guy and, as he says. "Take a look at my puss. Doesn't it make you laugh? Sure, it does. So why shouldn't T casli in on it?" Secondly, he's a liappy cliaracter. He traces his happiness to the war, whei. he was badly hurt. For a time, there was some question of his coniiiiK out of it all riglit. But he did. "I found out thai just henig alive," he says, "is the most won- derful thing. So now I get a kick out of a rainy day." During the war, he'd been a one-man show for Army special services. He spent 17 months in Persia, giving shows at remote eamps. He'd play the piano, sing songs, tell jokes and looK funny. The GI's liked him. Wlieii he was discharged, he de- tided to give show business a whirl, despite the fact that he had Ipent {iv« years at Boston College, .studying psychology. H« bitllt hi)" Dick Collierâ€" He laughed the best paid laugh ever laughed. act around his laugh, a piercing shriek that had been a big hit with the hoys in service. He studied laughter, and devel- oped a routino that encompasses (he saj>) niorc than 200 different kinds ranging from the timid laugh (used "when the little woman is- sues her orders for the day") to the shaking laugh ("peculiar to pleasingly plump people"). A Broadway producer hired him tu Ml in the audience of a new nuisikiij coined> and laugh in the right places. His laughter made others laugh, and the play became a hit. Then comedians took up the idea, and Collier made a nice living laughing in radio studios, night clubs and theaters. But his code of ethics make- him refuse to langh uiile'^s <oine thiiiK is funny. On one television program. Col Her got paid $100 for laughing for five seconds. He says that's the best-paid laugh ever laughed. Thai one helped him develop wh.it he calls hig crowning achievement the last laugh the tow-path drawing the canal boat, Seneca Chief, which bear* Goveiinor Clinton and his associate* followed by the canal boats Super- ior, Commodore Perry and Buffalo. At the end of the procession is Noah's Ark, from the "unbuilt City of .\rarat," having on board a bear, two eagles, two fawns, birds and fish, besides two Indian boys iii na- tive costume â€" all taken along to gratify the curiosity of the effete New Yorkers in regard to the wild West. One smiles at the allegorical pic- ture, painted in honor of the occa- sion, which hangs in the cabin of the Seneca Chief, for in it may b« seen Hercules resting upon his fav- orite club after bis labor-of finishing the canal. Governor Clinton in a Roman toga standing by his side, gazing upon the placid water and inviting Neptune and his Naiads, who coyly hang back as if hesitat- ing to approach domains not theirs by right, to enter through the open lock. Upon the deck stand two brightly paonted kegs marked "Laka Erie" â€" the water from the lak« which is to be used in the celebra- tion in New York. â€"From "The Blue China Book," by .Ada Walker CamehL Machine Solves Chess Problems Chess players will either be de- lighted or furious â€" it all depends on how they feel about the game â€" by the invention of Mr. T. Nemes, Chief Engineer of the Hungarian Posts Research Station. It's a chess- problem-solving machine, an ingen- ious, fearsome looking contrivance of thermionic valves, photo-electric cells and cathode-ray tubes amid a mass of wires, lights, dynamos and other intricate gadgets. \\\ the player has to do is to feed his problem into the machine, which works av lightning speed through all the possible combina- tions of three legal movesâ€" one by Black and two by White. After a brief space, out comes the solution. If there is no solution the machine tells the player so! Mr. Nemes is not content with produciiiK a problem-solving ma- chine, lie '~ now at work on an- other 111 iitricate affair which will play a uame of chess and which, he says, "may surpass the schemes of thought of the great masters." What a jolly evening the chess player can have by letting the ma- chine play â€" and win â€" his games for him while he gets on with some- thing more urgent! An indolent Vicar of Bray, His roses allowed to decsy. His wife, more alert, Bought a powerful squirt And said to Ikt si>,-msf, i.et us spray." Cigarette Lighter*â€" A Milestone In History of Conquest of Darkness Most people don't realize what a wonderful thing the modern cigar- ette lighter is. It is almost a magical trick, wlien you come to think of it Vou whip out a little metal gadget, press the top, and a flame appears for your cigarette. This familiar, everyday gadget, wliich we casually use and take for granted, represents an interesting milestone in the long history of the conquest of darkness by Man. Strangely enough, the most pri- mitive methods of illumination were still in use 150 years ago, aaid the tremendous acceleration in the dis- coveries which lea to the modern forms of gas and electric lighting corresponded with the Industrial Revolution. Event the Eddystone Lighthouse was maintained by candles at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Oil lamps of various kinds ap- pear to have been useJ, roughly, from the year 2,500 B.C.; lamps of hollow stone or sea-shells have been found in many parts of the world. The Greeks and Romans knew almost as much about light- ing as was known in the eighteenth century. We know how primitive Man pro- duced fire by rubbing flints and sticks together. Kw ancient Per- sian legend describes its discovery. ".\ great hero named Hushenk hurled a mighty stone at a snake. The sjiake escaped, but the stone struck a rock. Light shone through the dark pebble, the heart of the rock flashed out in the quarry, and fire was seen for the first time In the world." Inventive processes in the mind of early Man are difficult to trace, but it is easy to iniagiaie a cave- dweller watching a twig or fibre burning in fat dropped from a roast- ing carcass and proceeding from that observation to build a primitive lamp. The production of fire- by striking a flint in such things as the tinder-box and flintlock rifle came very much later. Various kinds of oil lamps have been used in the intervening years, but the first recorded use of illu- miination by gas dates back to 1765, when a man named Spedding, who loved near Lord Lonsdale's coal- mines at Whitehaven, piped coal gas to his oflfices, where he used it for illumination. He tried to obtain permiss-ion to build gas re- servoirs to light the streets of his village, but this was refused by the local magistrate. Early experiments in gas illumina- tion were extremely primitij?e, of course; the burners themselves were simply iron tubes with holes pierced in them, and the slightest obstruc- tioin or rust resulted in a dim, over- cooled flame. The discovery fell into hands of a financial "tycoon," as We should now call him, named Winsor. He was not particularly sciupu- tous about the claims he made for his discovery. When a newspaper man asked him whether it would be dangerous to take a lighted candle into a room full of coal gas, he replied that the gas would not ignite because "u is intermixed with the au- of the room." Asked whether it was harmful to the lungs, he replied, "Not in the least! On the contrary, it is more congenial to our lungs th.in vital air (oxygen), which proves too strong a medicine, because it only exists from one-fifth to one-fourth ill the atmosphere, whereas infiam- iriable air exists above two-thirds in the animal and vegetable king- doms, in all our drink and victuals. It forms a part of ourselves.'' Despite tliese shady beginnings, the Pall Mall was illuminated by gas five years later, and. by 1811, several large cotton mills were Ht by this method. \ year earlier, Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrated the electric arc between two carbons to the Royal Institution in London. Electric lighting developed at a slower pace than gas. N'ew kinds of improved gas-burners were introduced, and in 1885â€" after an interval of over a hundred years â€" Carl \'an Wels- bach invented the incandescent gas mantle. It was he. too, who diacovcreti that cerium and iron fused together resulted m a hard substance which emitted a brilliant spark on being struck with a wheel. He thus pro duced the first "flint" But it is iniportanr to remember that this subtttance bears no relaion to ilM genuine flints, the geological depo- sits used in the tinder-boK an4 flint-lock rifle. It waa not until the First WorW War that the flint was incorpor- ated in a primitive form of cigar- ette lighter consistinii of braided tow ench'sed in a small metal cylinder (sometimes a cartridge- case). This was surmounted by a fine-toothed wheel and flint Friction beiweeui the two pro- duced a spark, and this ignited th« tow, v.hich when lilown upon, created a red glow sufficient to light a cigarette. From this developed the modem cigarette ligliter, though some years passed before the cigarette lighters were perfectly satisfactory and couW be accepted as a respectable mechp-'cal gadget. Ea.sy Money An American had an invitation to a private shout. Addressing the old i gamekeei)er. he said: "I'm one of . the crack shots in the .States. To- morrow you will be loading for me, and for every bird I miss I'll give you a shilling." The following evening the game- keeper met a friend and told hifli the story. "If I'd had another blank cart- ridge," he said, "I'd have made just a pound." Midget Mximniy Up For Exams â€" Ivan P. Goodman, holds the 14-inch figure which he believes to be the mummy of a minis- tare prehistoric man. The "mummy" was found by a group of workers in 1934 in a formation of solid granite in.side a sealed cave. Goodman bought the figure from a man who believed ifc brought bad luck. Scientists are studying the piece to deter- ly was the body of a man. .^S}i**-J--|»rO'-- :â-  â-  «.vv.'*<v.o 600,000 Idled Steel Production Cut 200,000 on Short Week To 70% Notionally 40,000 Autos Lost â- *-'-S<^»M' m% Heating ond Power Emergencies in 7States Railroad Traffic Cut Passenger to 35% Freight to 60% Schools Closed To 250)000 Pupils Cost Of The Coal Strikeâ€" Here is what the month-long general .strike by 372,000 L iiiied Mine Workers and the resulting coal shortage cost in industrial lay-offs and other hardships. The Newschart gives highlights of a nationwide i»tifvev .m cliVvi- .if the strike. BOUFORD By MELLORS