THE ELECTRIC SHIP

"Marine electrical engineering" is the new branch of engineering science required by the advent of electric propulsion for ships. Our cover shows the control room of the electric ship Virginia, in service between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, via the Panama Canal.

This ship and the California, a sister ship, is owned by the Panama Pacific Line of the International Mercantile Marine Company. Both are electrically propelled and otherwise electrified throughout, and are the largest American-built steamships in the world. They are also the world’s largest electrically driven commercial vessels.

They have power plants consisting of two 6,750-horsepower turbines, each driving an electric generator, and the propulsion motors are each rated 6,750 shaft horsepower.

ANCIENT MAN IN AMERICA

New evidence that human beings may have lived on this continent near the close of the Great Ice Age has been found in a cave full of ancient bone deposits in the lower slope of Bishop’s Cap Peak in southwestern New Mexico, according to William Alanson Bryan of the Los Angeles Museum.

The discovery consists of the fragments of two human skulls and other human skeletal remains, mixed with the bones of many extinct mammals and birds in the sandy deposit that floors the cave. The human bones were so deeply buried and so intimately associated with the bones of extinct species of horse, camel, sloth, and cave bear that a later intrusive interment seems highly unlikely.

STONE AGE MEN HAD FILES

The file is by no means a modern tool, according to Dr. Otto Dick, German engineer of Esslingen-Wuerttemberg. Stone Age men had files closely resembling in shape the present-day triangular files, which they made out of flint by hacking rough places on the surface. These instruments served them in shaping articles of horn, bone, and other materials.