Recent American and Foreign Patents

1868 Scientific American  
BEET SUGAR IN GERMANY.-A German agricultural jour. nal gives an interesting account of the beet sugar business in that country. Fields of beets of from two to three hun· dred acres are often seen there. The beets are drilled in rows about fifteen inches apart and the whole labor of culti. vation performed by the hoe. The women and men work in gangs of twenty or more. The men get from sixteen to nine· teen cents per day and the women from thirteen to fifteen working fourteen hours. The
more » ... ies for this sugar are on a correspondingly large scale, some of them employing a thousand hands. The beets are brought from the field and elevated to the upper story of a high building, where they are cleaned, crushed, and filtered, the juice descending from story to story, undergoing a refining process by the way till it reaches the lower one in the shape of a sugar cone two and a half feet in length. It is a very nice article and worth at the factory about ten cents per pound. It takes eip-ht days from the time of crushing the beets till the sugar is dried sut· ficiently for market. One of these establishments turned out six: millions of pounds last year with the help of six hundred hll.nds. THUNDERBOLTS AS RE.. 'l'IEDIES.-An English writer argues that several physical maladies can be cured by lightning. The doctrine that" like cures like," holds good, he asserts, in the case of maladies to which the destructive element gives birth; whether the fright, or some proper action of the elec· tric fl uid works the cure, it is hard to say, but the fact is in contestible. Several cases are reported where individuals paralyzed from their youth have recovered complete use of their limbR by lightning strokes in after years. A country clergyman in Kent was paralyzed by apoplexy in 1761, and struck by lightning about a year after, when all traces of the paralysis left him. A man who had lost the use of both arms was guarding some animals in a field; lightning fell upon him, and when he came to his senses he found that he could use both arms and hands. These are but a few out of many recorded instances.
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican01251868-54b fatcat:q66zm7xaojgb3dxhytfryp2aqq