848 



Popular Science Monthly 



You Can Hold a Dozen of These 

 Perfect Coconuts in One Hand 



Making Money Out of a Nuisance. 

 The Industrial Rise of Acetylene Ash 



THE coconut family is a large one, and TNDUSTRIAL chemists are constantly 

 there are many babies in it. The ba- A finding new and useful ways of disposing 

 bies are a species all by themselves, though of by-products. One of the latest trouble- 

 closely related to the giant seventy-pound some wastes to rise to the dignity of a 

 specimens called coco-de-mer . As shown in valuable commercial product Js acetylene 



the photograph they 

 are full grown, al- 

 though only as large 

 as a good-sized hick- 

 ory nut. Although 

 they taste exactly 

 like the ordinary co- 

 conut, they are too 

 small to be of any 

 value commercially 

 and they rot on the 

 ground by the ton, 

 in the tropics. The 

 same is true of the 

 giant species which 

 are too large for 

 commercial pur- 

 poses. Only the 

 medium size is sold. 



The baby coconuts are exactly like the 

 larger-sized nuts in taste and texture 



ash. This stuff, 

 which could not be 

 disposed of profit- 

 ably a short time 

 ago, is now worth 

 fifty dollars a ton. 



An employe of a 

 Los Angeles plant, 

 Frank L. Thompson, 

 discovered that it 

 could be used to 

 make plaster, white- 

 wash and a substi- 

 tute for marble dust 

 that is used in the 

 surfacing of asphalt 

 highways. 



Dissolved acety- 

 lene gas is made 

 from calcium car- 



The French "Horizon Blue" Is the Best 

 Color for Uniforms 



OUR khaki suits are good. But "horizon 

 blue," the color which the 

 French use for their uniforms, 

 is said to be better still. Against 

 certain backgrounds it is alto- 

 gether invisible from a distance. 

 The reason for this is that it is 

 the color of distance. An artist 

 painting a landscape puts his 

 objects "back" by washing 

 them over with a mixture of 

 white and blue, the horizon 

 blue. This makes it appear 

 as if there were air between the 

 objects and our eyes, so that 

 the objects themselves appear 

 indistinct. 



The uniforms of horizon 

 blue make the wearers appear, 

 if not actually a part of the 

 landscape, at least considerably 

 farther away than they are. 

 And since a man is recog- 

 nized by his shape rather than 

 by his color, the blending of 

 his clothes with the color of 

 the horizon helps his "camou- 

 flage considerably." 



bide, which is a combination of plain lime 

 and carbon. The product that remains 

 after the gas has been extracted is slaked 

 lime of a decided commercial value. 



Digging acetylene ash from a sludge pit filled with lime 

 from a Los Angeles acetylene plant and whitewashing 

 a fence with whitewash made from acetylene sludge 



