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Show THE WEAKNESS OF BEING J DEPENDENT ON OTHERS. r England went on for years uncon-j. uncon-j. scious of the fact that the Germans . were undermining the glass industry of the island, and tie English were . not aware that they were in a de-L de-L pendent position until the war em-. em-. phasized a shortage in many lines. i An English glass expert, In revlew- ing the situation, explains the loss of . the industry. "Jena, whloh all the world knows as the fount of optical glass, did not rest on that achievement, it went on to lay down the exact ways of making mak-ing glass of given hardness, glass of certain tenacity, glass of a certain resistivity to crushing, or of a certain elasticity. Jena did not attempt miracles; mir-acles; there is nothing miraculous about its procedure, as may be seen from a survey of the manufacture of glass for steam gauges. This kind of glass must sometimes resist pressures of four hundred pounds to the square inch- It must also refuse to fly when subjected to sudden extremes of heat or cold; and consequently it has to be made of two kinds of glass; an Inner layer and an outer layer; of different yet compensating expansibilities under un-der heat. The finest glass of this kind is made by the Scottish firm of Moncrieff, and their gauges go all over the world, to every railway, in Australia as woll as Roumania, and Chile, America and Japan. But Jena has calculated out the formulae for the definite expansibilities, and though It cannot oust the sturdy Scot, it will try. There is a glass famine in English Eng-lish laboratories. Chemists and bacteriologists bac-teriologists and pathologists do not know where to turn for beakers and iflasks and test tubes: doctors are clamoring for drainage tubes and douche pipes. A moBt gallant effort has been made to provide this kind of glass, which has to be of such a com-position com-position that it will be tough and : will support sudden hign and low tern- peratures. But is cannot be turned , out a tenth part quickly enough yet , That 1b because every manufacturer who has the ability and the adapta- , blllty to produce it fs being snowed j under with orders for things of even , 5101W iuiijiumce aL tne moment oil elghters for aeroplanes, glass ampoules am-poules for holding standardised doses of serum for the troops, Davy lamp glasses, or glass tubes for many uses in the navy or elsewhere. "All or most of these things were made more' cheaply abroad than in England before the war. tfhey can" be taken up only with difficulty now' by the flrdtrrate firms; and these firms have another obstacle to meet They have not the skilled workers' All the "hand glass blowing,' as it Is rather mysteriously called, which is the glass blowing done by workmen over a blowpipe, was done before the war by Germans and Austrlams It Is a German and Austrian industry Consequently Englishmen are now learning the lob from ths few gkilled exceptions In the English trade. In Scotland girls are being taught to blow test tubes. In England and in London the best firms are neglecting their own specialities of manufacture in order to turn out work that the government wants." All this Is a lesson for the people of the United States. This country also has discovered that German manufacturers man-ufacturers had been gradually ousting American concerns from local markets, mark-ets, so that at the opening of the war the United States was helpless In more than one line of manufactures Even today, twenty months after the first gun was fired, there are many industries suffering handicaps because the German supply of materials entering en-tering into the fabrications from the factories has been shut off. This should teach the American people the necessity of striving to be independent of the outside world. |