Electricians

Over 100 scientific gentlemen, representing 13 countries of Europe including the Soviets, assembled abroad and sailed to the U. S. on a slow boat. When they landed last week, one of their number, a lean, active gentleman of 81, in a Derby hat of antique cut, remarked: "Politicians are one thing; electricians another. . . .Talk about your League of Nations! We are one, and have been one for 20 years."

He referred to the International Electro-Technical Commission of which he and his fellow travelers are members. They had come to Manhattan for a ten-day sitting, the first they ever held in the U. S. The lean gentleman was Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, who takes pardonable pride, not only in his Boer War decorations and his fast game of squash, but in having founded the commission.

British, French, Germans, Austrians, Belgians, Canadians, Czechs, Chileans, Dutchmen, Italians, Norwegians, Poles, Russians, Swedes, Swiss, Japanese--the Commissioners assembled--after some annoyances from Customs officials, who fancied that packing cases full of scientific documents might be dutiable--in the Engineering Societies' Building with their U. S. colleagues. Secretary Hoover of the U. S. Department of Commerce called up by telephone from Washington to say, through an amplifier, how sorry he was not to be able to welcome them in person. Guido Semenza of Italy, the Commission's president, replied. There were formal words of greeting from the heads of the various delegations--including Dr. Howard T. Barnes* of Canada; Sir Richard Tetley Glazebrook of England; Professor P. Strecker of Germany; G. J. Darrieus of France; Professor M. Chatelain of Russia, the Soviets' chief reconstruction engineer.

At lunch the next day, Dr. C. A. Mailloux, honorary president of the commission, refused to speak until the gallant Colonel Crompton, his old friend and associate, roared out: "Your father orders you to speak!" Dr. Michael I. Pupin of Columbia University addressed the visitors, with great names upon his tongue for them to honor, the names of electricity's pioneers--Volt, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday, Hertz, Kelvin, Helmholtz, Gauss, Coulomb. . . .

Business. International issues debated in committee meetings:

Discarding "horse power" as the unit of capacity-measurement for hydraulic turbines--prime movers of the electric industry--and rating turbines in terms of kilowatts instead.

Universal radio terminology; standard aluminum specifications; uniform size of bulb stems and light sockets; the failure of British bolts to interact with U. S. bolts, and vice versa, necessitating a hardware entente.

*Of ice-thermit fame, the chemical (aluminium powder and oxide of iron) with which he last .month relieved Oil City and Franklin, Pa., of an ice-gorge in the Allegheny River; with which he will experiment at "burning up icebergs" this summer in Greenland (TIME, March 1).