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Show L3 WHO'S NEWS THIS WEEK By LEMUEL F. PARTON N' EV YORK. John F. Stevens was self-educated as an engineer. engi-neer. Therefore, he was an eclectic and readily made use of a retired murderer to ac-Famed ac-Famed Engineer complish a des-Used des-Used Murderer Patoly impor-Z. impor-Z. . r , tant end, re- To Attain tnd s.irdle!iS of Uie lack of engineering precedent. He is now Bu, one of the greatest of American engineers, the first engineer engi-neer in charge of planning and building the Panama canal, recently awarded the Hoover medal by the American Society of Civil Engineers at its eighty-sixth annual meeting in New York. The murderer who came in handy was a Montana Blackfoot Indian. In-dian. Jim Hill's new railroad, westbound west-bound from St. Paul, was rather impulsively started. It ran slap-bang slap-bang into the impenetrable wall of the Rocky mountains. There was an Indian legend that there was a pass over the divide, along the course of the Marias river. Mr. Stevens, a young engineer for the railroad, talked to the Blackfeet about it. There was such a pass. They knew all about it. But not all of Jim Hill's wampum could bribe them even to point in that direction. direc-tion. This Marias pass was the dwelling place of evil spirits, of sorcerers, of dreadful demons, and all who went that way lost either their lives or their reason. Mr. Stevens mnshed over the mountains with the thermometer thermome-ter at 50 degrees below icro and found no pass. But, by chance, he found a wanderer In the wilderness, wil-derness, a Blackfoot driven out by his tribe because he had killed a man. The Indian had been having a difficult time. A few devils and monsters, more or less, meant little to him. They made a deal. The story of their days-on-end scramble to the roof of the continent through five feet of snow and bitter ooldf with Mr. Stevens sleepless as he kept an eye on his homicidal guide, Is one of the classics of the conquest of the wilderness. They found the pass, and their return was another desperate adventure. But soon the scream of locomotives was crying down the demons, who, presumably, moved on. When the Panama canal was projected, pro-jected, John F. Stevens fought through, against weighty opposition, the lock principle against the sea-level sea-level plan. The engineer In charge, from 1905 until he was succeeded by General Goethals, he flattened all the demons of disease and disorder dis-order which had licked De Lesseps. General Goethals rated his work as among the greatest of engineering achievements. He was minister plenipotentiary to the Soviets in 1917, remaining six years and reorganizing re-organizing and rebuilding their railroads. rail-roads. rR. VANNEVAR BUSH, testify-L' testify-L' ing on the patent system before the national economy committee at Washington, is the inventor cf . . a "mechanical Scientist s Brain brain," or Machine Downs "thinking ma-Human ma-Human Thinker chi2" as big as a sawmill that solves problems "too difficult for the human brain." It works nicely, nice-ly, and Franklin Institute awarded him a medal for It. One can think offhand of a lot of vexing problems that might be tossed into its hopper these days. Set up in congress, dealing the answers an-swers on war and peace, national defense, relief and a balanced budget, budg-et, it ought to save a lot of money. Dr. Bush, former vice president presi-dent of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became president presi-dent of the Carnegie institution on January 1 of this year. He is one of the most distinguished mathematical physicists In America. A tall, genial, bespectacled bespec-tacled scientist, with a slightly stooped and somewhat stringy figure, with untamed hair, he leads reporters quite out of their depth. His metallic cerebration was just one of many of his Interesting In-teresting devices and discoveries, discover-ies, including, particularly, research re-search In the transmission of electric power, to which he has made notable contributions. The son of a distinguished Boston clergyman, he romped through Tints. Harvard and M. I. T., picking up three degrees in three and one-half one-half years, thereafter teaching at On February 19, i936, addressing the New York Patent Lawyers' as socation, he was severely critical of the American patent system for ns 'appalling fixity and lack of adaptability." At the current com-mn,ee com-mn,ee hearing, he commends it but bo.h meager news reports are out of their context, and Dr. Bush doubtless doubt-less could defend himseU against charge of inconsistency Consolidated New. Future. "Mi Service, |