a year after the war began, for no nation can fight unless it has sufficient food for its people and powder for its guns. [Illustration: TURBINE GENERATORS, NIAGARA FALLS POWER HOUSE Eleven turbine generators in the Niagara Falls Power House, each set developing 5,000 horse-power.] The preservation of food is also dependent on ammonia, which produces the refrigerating effect in the numerous cold storage houses and artificial ice plants in this country. In the cold storage plants alone the cold produced by means of ammonia is equal to 750,000 tons of ice consumed per day, while 25,000,000 tons of artificial ice are produced and sold as such per annum. Cyanamid ammonia gas is especially valuable for this purpose on account of its high degree of purity. Then, too, the ammonia gas can be fixed in any acid desired, for instance, in phosphoric acid, making ammonium phosphate, a fertilizer of unusual merit, or ammonium sulphate, another fertilizer, or ammonium nitrate, an explosive. So, for peace or war, the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen has become a tremendous factor in the life of nations. If the United States should be forced into war with a foreign power it would be a simple matter for an enemy fleet to cut off our large importations of nitrate of soda from Chile. These amount to about 700,000 tons per annum in normal times and at present about 900,000 tons per annum. In other words, we would be short just this quantity of nitrogen in addition to the quantity that would be required by the government for the manufacture of military explosives. It has been suggested that our coke-oven industry could be expanded to furnish a large part of this requirement, but even with the largest expansion considered practical by the coke-oven people within the next several years, the coke ovens would not be able to supply even one-third of our requirements, thus leaving a large balance which could be furnished only by the establishment of a large nitrogen industry in this country. * * * * * The expression “The King can do no wrong” has been widely used since it first caught people’s fancy at the time of the explanation, made in England, that the Ministers, and not the King, were responsible for mistakes of government. What is a Drawbridge Like Today? We have all read of the castles in olden days into which the owner could retire and raise a drawbridge across a ditch, thus putting a barrier in the way of his enemies. That old style drawbridge, with, of course, many improvements, has been adopted in these modern times to use in permitting navigable rivers and channels to be crossed by railroads and other kinds of transportation, without preventing the passage of vessels up and down the rivers.