1940-04-08 — Page 13

Monday,

HONGKONG TELEGRAPH

April 8, 1940.

MAGAZINE PAGE

HISTORY'S JUDGMENT ON THE SUBMARINE

"An Abominable Weapon"

TWICE during the last three

centuries tho British Ad- miralty refused to accept sub- marines as weaponų. On both ocensions the inventors were alions.

On a sunny day in 1624 stands were constructed for a big nudlence near the mouth of the Thames. One, Myn- heer Cornelius van Drebbel, from Alkmaar in Holland, had promised that he would drive a new kind of ship under the water.

King James I gave the signal for this sensational performance to begin, and a strange-looking little vessel put off from the shore, cheered by thousands af Lon doners.

The boat renched mid-stream and began suddenly to sink. When she had disappeared, the King entered a row-boat which brought him to the spot where the vezzel bad vanished,

HE could see her lying at a depth of three or four yards on the. river bottom.

By EGON LARSEN

Bauer's Submarine of 1851.

Two hours later the first cúb- marloe appeared again, and her fifteen sailors landed-obviously well and healthy after their strange adventure.

The King expressed his satisfac tion to Mynheer van Drebbel, and asked the naval experts to give him their opinion of this new man-of-

war.

But the Admiralty did not form a very high opinion of the Dutch- man's invention. They dissuaded the King from Introducing sub- marines into the British Navy.

This magic

instrument

YOU SAW the news last week that the Hongkong Government telephone exchanges were to become auto- matic. It probably didn't interest you, unless you were a civil servant.

Not in an age when you can talk from ship to shore, from one side of the globe to the other. But if Graham Bell were to return to this world he would tell us how lucky we were.

He would recall how on March 10, 1878, he said over" 100ft," of "wire," "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.". That was the first telephone speech ever made-not much more than 60 years ago. To-day there are 35,000,000 telephones in the world, 3,000,000 of them in the British Isles.

Yet the telephone constantly provides uncanny examples of its near- human ingenuity in your radio receiver, which, after all, is only a tele- phone, you can receive from all parts of the world clear pictures through the same sort of telephone as you have in your home.

News and messages are exchanged on the teleprinter, a telephonic typewriter whereby every word transmitted le simultaneously typed on a duplicate machine at the other end,...

But telephone engineers are men of Insatiable ambition. They say we have seen only the beginning of wonders. All the time they are ex- perimenting with some new and incredible way of bringing us a little nearer the other end of the world.

You are more familiar, perhaps,

Their experiments have been frult- telligible a conference us if they had ful enough in the past few years, all sat round the same table. Paris, for example, has a telephone exchange that forecasts the weather. You dial "Invalides 8800," murd a with the idea (if not the practice) of the wea- sitting in a drawing room and talk- cheery volee says, "tiere ther forecast for the Parly region ing to an unele In California.

what goes on while you and Callfor- during the next 12 hours."

("If

you

But

In the same city you dini "S.V.P." nia are conversing makes a fascino- a story of special please) to be connected ting, story-and with a bureau that answers all kinds English Interest, since all calls from North and Central America to EU- of queries and provides messengers

rope and from South Africa to In- to run errands.

Paris and Berlin have a service for dla pass through the London Inter- "absent subscribers,"

pect national Exchange, Faraday_Build- If you expect

to be away for long from your home ing, Queen Victorin-street, E.C.

or

office you can have your ne

By International agreement the transferred to a department where greater part of the speech between callers' names and messages are re- British and Continental operators is corded..

conducted in English, French, or Ger- man. Fluency is essential, for time is money. The operators ure skilled

Then there is the "conference" call, linguists.

of spe in interest to the film world, The voice of a caller in London where all the men who matter seem talking to San Francisco travels by to be in perpetual conference, land lines from Faraday Building to

thence

It came into the news last year, Rugby radio station, and when we read that Alexander Korda, either by long-wave wireless to sitting in his New York apartment, Houlton (Maine) or by short wave to (New Jersey). It then was connected with his American Netcong representative

another passes again over land lines to New New York apartment), Mr. Irving York and on to San Francisco.

(sitting in

Asher (at his home near Windsor),

and another executive at Hampstead; and the four and as long and in-

BOUND FOR HONGKONG

Cecil Wilson

Was This Your Verdict?

The PROBLEM OF HANS.-Hans Lindi was not exempled from milit-

Conjecture On Destina-ary service.

tion Of Mauretania

Honolulu, Apr. 5.

The liner Mauretania sailed today for an undisclosed destination, aftur taking on 3,000 tons of fuel oil.

Ono high source sald the vessel had clearance papers for Hongkong

Judge Davies told him: "Ever since Hitler's rise to power, and especially since the Munich crisis, you have seen the constant possibility of war between Germany and Britain, and

all the time you have enjoyed the benefits of living here."

Hans preferred democracy. So he must defend It. Do you agree?

and was apparently prepared to go to preparations were being made for elther the Antipodes or Hongkong. A the accommodation of troops- member of the crew disclosed that United Press.

Another half

century and

later,

we

find

Corporal

Wil-

holm Bauer, a

Bavarian artil-

lory

expert,

fighting with the

Prussian

against

army the

Danes in Hol- stein.

In his, leisure hours he con- structed the mo- del of a curlous ship able to sail under water.

The officers of his regiment col- lected" Lund

to enable him to build a real submarine; the balance of 200 talers being paid by the Prussian War Ministry.

The first of February, 1851, was Wilhelm Bauer's great day. On that day he presented his boat in the harbour of Kiel before thou- sands of speciatore and many off- cers of the Admiralty.

The vessel was small, it carried only three men-Bauer and two sailors and it could not rematu under more than half an hour water-the air giving out after this time.

The bont submerged and dis- appeared. The crowd writed patiently for twenty minutes, after which Ume the submarine WD3 supposed to emerge.

But nothing happened, it could not be seen, and no sign of life came from under the water....

Through a hole in the wall water had penetrated. The boat had sunk to a depth of fifty-two feet. If the wall had broken, they were lost.

But Wilhelm Bauer had his own ideas. He knew that there was just one change; to open the upper Batch.

And this hatch could be opened only when the pressure of air in- side the boat equals the pressure of the water from outside.

For hours they waited-in a boat which was supposed to emerge after twenty minutes. At last Bauer was able to open the hatch -his theory was right. A whirl of air seized the three men und threw them up with terrifle force.

Under the eyes of the bewildered spectators three men were sudden- ly shot out of the water as if they had been fired by n gun.

rescue dura

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3

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"I told him 90 per cent of my money goes for clothes and I just -

couldn't live on starvation wages any longer!”

PRINTERS' and other 'Howlers'

AUTHORS must, I think, feel

much admiration for the gentle- men who set up the type of their books and articles. Even if they do not try their patience by the atrocious handwriting which some bookmen are not ashamed to cul- tivate, they must be grateful for the small amount of work which Imposes ugon proof-correcting

them. performance

They fell back into the water and were picked up by boats. This unexpected changed the whole from tragedy, to comedy.

Everybody laughed. And their laughter killed Wilhelm Bauer's invention.

Ur

Prussia was unwilling to spend any more money

this folly. Bavaria, Bauer's native country, neither the const nor the money. Austrin declined.

had

Finally Wilhelm Bauer went to England. He sent his plans to Prince Albert. The Prince passed them on to the Admiralty. Months later Bauer received the Admir- alty's answer:

"We do not require vessels of this type. It is an abominable weapon. We prefer to fight as sailors on board ship rather than in such a box!"

Spotting The Rank

LIEUT.-COMMANDER (E) and ENGINEER LIEUTEN- ANT-COMMANDER

This rank is distinguishablo from Licytonant-Commander in the executivo branch by strips of purple cloth batween the gold stripes.

Whon

war began there word 123 Lieutenant-Com- manders (E) and one Engineer Liautonant - Commander on the active list. Of these a

word certain proportion

in charge of the machinery of destroyers, excort vessels or other small ships, while others were deputising for Comman- dors (E)

or Engineer Com- mandors in the engine-rooms of bigger vossols, such as bat- toships, battle cruisers, air- craft carriors or cruisars.

In the latter case the ofti- cer to employed is invariably known

on board

"The senior engineer." or moro briofly still, as "the senior," implying that ho is noxt senior to the officer in chargo of the machinery.

23

On the retired list at tho soma dato there wore 85 Lieutenant-Commanders (E) and 231 Engineer Lieutenant- Commanders.

I was once editing a book of says, and one of my collabora- tors had his essay returned with apologies. The publisher said such a thing had never happened to his firm since he brought out Dean' Stanley's books. I could not read it

A man ewes it to his myself. neighbours to write legibly.

But we

we are none of us infalli- ble. Fowler, in his excellent book on Modern English usage, gives a list of "misprints to be guarded deprecate for de- inculcate for inoculate, precat

principal for principle. This is all very well; but when a reviewer call attention to what he politely calls a misprint, he knows that it is probably the author who has made " bowler in spelling or grammar.

*

*

one

Even Thomas Hardy confuses predict and predicate, and might make a long list of sole- clams by famous authors, includ- ing Byron's "there let him lay."

are

Mr. Punch week by week makes great fun of the typographical blunders of provincial and colonial newspapers. Some of them almost too good to be true. Hera are a

that I have collected my a few self -- some them misprints, of the others misreportings:

2

In praising the pulpit style of a deceased divine, the speaker sald that he spoke with the weight of a

of Barrow, and the elegance Jeremy Taylor. The report es- cribed to him the weight of a bar- ΣΟΥ, the elegance of a journey-

And tnilor.

man

A geologist described a valley as "full of CTBUC blocks." This appeared as "crotic bincks," sug- gesting one of the scenes in the "Arabian Nights" which are with- drawn from the perusal

the of young.

Other gems of mirreporting are, "Those terrible old Greek god- desses the humanities (the Eum- enides), "We have broken our breeches (bridites), we have burnt our boots (boats); honour, no less than other considerations, forbida us to retreat." "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, er taste not the aperient (Plerian) spring"

A well-known misprint described how "Sir Robert Peel and a party of flends had good sport shooting peasants on Sir Robert's estate." The engine dashed against the cow, and literally cut it into two calves."

When the Oxford prayer-books were being printed, some mis- chievous undergraduates changed "ns long as ye both shall live" in the marriage servico into "as long

as yo both shall ilko,"

By the Very Rev. W.R.INGE,

D.D.

Not long ago, In a report of и sermon by the late Bishop Burge, I was surprised read:

10

Perhaps my God, though He be

far before,

May burn and bake me by the

hand.

He no doubt said "turn" and "take."

There is a very queer example in Chaucer. He speaks of "ship- pes hoppesteres." What could he racan by dancing ships? His Latin model spoke of "naves bellatrices" -war ships; the poet read "balla- trices," ballet ships instead battle ships.

of

A few years ago a distinguished - general was opening a show of some kind at a provincial town. The local paper meant to describe han as a "battle-scarred warrior. Unfortunately it appeared DF

battle-scared warrior." The editor did his best. "We greatly regret the mistake; but no one could sup- pose that we meant to impugn the courage of this gallant officer. Of course, we meant to say "a bottle- scurred warrior." After this, it was better to let it alone.

Some young men were starting a new magazine, of which fearless outspokenness was to be a fenture. "We intend to call u spade a sonde." In the form "We intend to call a space a spape," it was less impressive.

+

Before the days of printing mis- takes were, of course, much more numerous Textual criticism of manuscripts is a dine art. When the words were not divided, it was easy to make all kinds of mistakes, like those which in English have altered some familiar words, Boys adder"

are now

ht at school that "ar to be "a nadder," "a ought now!" "on

"an orange" "a cwt," norange.

rather common source of error is the marginal note, which the next scribe Incor- porated in the text.

A

Sometimes it is obvious, as when

you

a theological discussion is start- Ingly broken by "You lie, hereile!" Sometimes it is

more doubtful. There are some odd ex- amples of these "glosses," as they are called, In the New Testament. When the Church Erew ascelle, four references to "fast- lag," which seem not to be part of the original text, got in.

more

A rather obvious gloss is the verse about the "whale's belly" in Matthew. As Christ had just re- fused to give a "sign," it is not likely that He would offer one of precisely the same kind that He had refused to give. The parallel passages made it clear

preaching was the that Jonah's

no

Two

misprints have created new words: "The Grampiana" ought to be "the Grauplans," and the word "cell" for a flint knife has mutherlly except a mistake in the text of the Vulgate of Job xix., 24. "Derring-do," for desperate cour age, Is Wardour Street English; this time Edmund Spenser seems to be the culprit, misunderstanding

Chaucer.

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