Before a large audience, in the Yokohama Public Hall on the evening of the 6th inst., Professor John Milne, under the auspices of the Asiatic Suciety of Japan, described the new instrument fur measuring the motion of railway trains. Mr. N. J. Hannen, H.B.M.'s Judge, presided.
The Chairman in opening the proceedings, said he supposed it was the office of the Chairman to introduce the lecturer. But he was not only quite sure that the lecturer required no introduction from hit he thought the lecturer might rather ints duce him, as he had been a considerable time away from Japan and there were some who probably did not know his face any more than he knew theirs. They would all be delighted, he felt sure, to hear Mr. Milne describe an instrument which promised to be one of the greatest successes of the age and to make a new era in the scientific measurement of the motions of bodies, in which scientific men were at present interesting themselves.—(Applause.
Professor Milne, at the outset, said he felt that before beginning his lecture, he ought to make one or two remarks in order that the audience might understand the nature of the subject. When he was asked come to Yokohama—or rather when he volunteered to come, because he liked to get to Yokohama, a visit to the port alway marked a red letter day with him—he understood he was to come here and make a few remarks which would occupy sbout ten minutes, for he really could describe the machine in that space of time. But he found that instead of being the tail end of a lecture he had to be the lecturer himself, and so he found himself sition of the man who wanted to go on the stage and play the rule of Hamlet. in the 'This man went to a theatre and made his request. He was told he could not at first play Hanilet; he must begin at the bottom and gradually work 'They were going to represent a play i which an elephant appeared, and they ssid he the hind' legs of the pachyderm, He at first objected but eventually cov to accept this part. Unfortunatel ever, the hind part of the elephant never appeared, and he was compelled to remain behind the scenes and listen to the applause of the spectators while the elephant waved its trunk. But at length there came a night when for some reason or another the fore quarters failed, and the front part the elephant collapsed. This was his opportunity, and he at once rushed on the stage and waved the tail.—(Laughter.) This was the position in which the lecturer found himself on this occasion. The title of his lecture—with which he dis claimed any conuection—was The men: surement of the motion of railway trains." Now, to those scientific gentlemen who were present, and ho saw several, this title would indicate something rather dry,—centres of percussion and axes of oscillation, and moments of inertia, and things like those while to ordinary persons the motion of trains generally meant their progress from one place to another. They might measure the motion by distance or they might measure it by the fare and say that it was 60 cents or so much between Tokio and Yokohama. But he did not think many people who travelled in trains considered how far they really moved while on a journey. The distance that they actually velled was much greater than the di tance between their places of departure and arrival. The distance travelled between Yokohama and Tokio was not 173 miles: it might be 100 hat all depended on the kind of carriage one took; and if one rode on a locomotive it would be very great indeed. With these few remarks he would commence what he had to say about these instruments. What he wished to do was to vive the company rather the history of an invention than a description of the invention itself. He would tell them how these instruments came to be invented; of the troubles Mr. McDonald and himself had to encounter how they were invented; kow it happened that he was going to Europe, and the instruments and himself were nearly lost, though the instruments, being in an_upper berth, hind the best. of it. They went to America and thence to Europe where they fell into the hands of promoters, and directors of railways, and general managers, and at length he got weary and worn out and finished and returned to Japan. The invention of the instrument was en accident. One day at Shinibashi he met Mr. McDonald, who, talking about his locomotives, said some of them jolted more than others; some were very unpleasant to ride upon. He had tried to measure the motion of them—there was no doubt about the jolting; it could be felt. Mr. McDonald had made experiments, as many people had done before him; he had taken among cther things a bottle of water and observed the oscillation of the water in it, but this was productive of no useful results. They experimented than with instruments, but were met by the problem how to secure a steady body, Unless one had ridden on a locomotive one could hardly realise what that meant. The first time that he rode on a locomotive was, he thought, between Shimbashi and Yokohama and he had such an experience that he was sick afterwards for just one week. But this line was constructed as well as any he had travelled on; it was as good as the Pennsylvania Central or the London and North-western. If they took the southern parts of California where the lines were put down rapidly and the engines were hung on the springs differently the motion was terrific: one was not mere knocked but banged from side to side, All sorts of things were blown in one's face and altogether it was a perfect tornado as compared with lines in this country, The question was how to measure anything about in this way. Let them me this room a carriage twisting it, all sorts of ways at the same time, not with the nice easy motion of an earthquake—he did not want to talk of earthquakes to-night—(laughter)—and then let them try to measure the motion from the inside, "The great thing was to get hold of a steady point—seiemographs were too delicate for such violent work—and eventually they made the combination which he now show: ed. To register the motion of a railway ca three movements were required: on rk the transverse or side to side motion, the fore and aft. or longitudinal motion, and one tion, Mr. Milne then expl the inatrument a point practically steady was secured. to record the vertical movement by a poised on a spring, For the transverse movement two brass cylinders were provided, one suspended from the top and the other poised from below, the movement of one neutralizing that of the other and thus securing also a practically steady point; and for the fore and aft motion the arrangement was the same, except that the lever was so contrived that it would register on the slip of paper as the others. By means of those three movements they could plot the actual motion that had taken place. The record was made by poncile dropped through pointers at the ends of the levers, on a web of paper which was unwound by clockwork at the rate of about an inch per minute from one roller, and wound on another after receiving the record. The machine now shown was only working model; there were other types, some with only the vertical motion which even alone gave a very useful diagram, After the machine was made, it happened that he went to Europe and he took it with him, He had some very valuable diagrams that he desired to have photographed. They had been written with bras on metallic paper, a process which he thought at first would be superior to weiting with pencils, which required sharpening often, but afterwards he found that the wire point became glazed and incapable of regarding on the metallic paper. The diagrams represented a journey that Mr. Me Donald had made from Tokio to Yokohai and on to the south of Fuji, and they wed every curve, every grade, every bridge, and the various points of the line with the length of the stoppages—were in
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.