Uproarious Weevils

A mighty crashing and crackling, rumbling and rending reverberated one day last week in a lecture room of Manhattan's New York University. In from the hall burst a goggling student with a stammered message:

''The students in the next room can't hear their professor and he would please like to know what all the racket is!''

'"That," said Dr. Edward Elway Free, chemist, physicist, consultant, lecturer, "is just a few young weevils trying to eat their way out of these wheat kernels here. Perhaps we can quiet them a little."

Dr. Free was demonstrating a new amplifying device which he and N. Y. U.'s Carl Johnson had developed. The microphone frame was vertically dipped in a cup of weevily wheat which had previously been warmed to rouse the larvae to activity. The vacuum tubes were specially constructed to furnish a high constancy of current flow, eliminate all noise except the minute munchings of the weevils in their microcosms, and the whole was enclosed in a soundproof, rubber-mounted metal case. When a container of wheat free of weevils was substituted for the infested grain, the apparatus remained silent.

A cat's purr magnified on this scale, Dr. Free asserted, would be heard for 3,000 miles around. But the loudspeaker to produce such a volume of sound does not exist. Western Electric's new loud-speaker--used for the first time at last summer's America's Cup yacht races (TIME, Oct. 8 et ante}--multiplies the power of the human voice a millionfold, delivers thunderclap announcements with the force of 50-lb. hammer blows, makes itself heard for miles & miles in still air. Even so all but a few of the most intelligible speech frequencies must be filtered out, so that the words, though understandable, remain distorted.

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