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Towards the end of the year St. Matthew- s Hospital decided to try a
unique enterprise by forming a Club where pensioners inside and outside the
hospital could meet thus giving the inmates a treat and also increasing the
confidence of outside residents against the day when they themselves might
need to be patients. The Council was sufficiently impressed to vote £500
towards starting the Club and it seems already to be proving its worth.
THE ABOLITION OF NOISE FROM ROAD BREAKING APPLIANCES
It is now two years ago since at the invitation of the Chief Public
Health Inspector what has become to be known as an historical meeting took
place in Shoreditch Town Hall when every important manufacturer of pneumatic
road breakers and compressors in the British Isles and several from other
countries met in a spirit of compromise and co-operation to determine what
could be done to reduce the annoyance and irritation from pneumatic road
breakers and compressors and to see if a standard of noise could not be defined
acceptable to the users of equipment and to local authorities
In two years the results of a small working Committee formed at this
meeting have had repercussions not only in this country but in many other
parts of the world including America Canada Australia Austria and Japan
and important research work much of it financed by the manufacturers of the
equipment (the remainder being provided by the Government); is continuing
at the Building Research Station at Garston with what appears to be most
encouraging results
In the early days every effort was made to persuade contractors to
equip road breakers with muffle covers (the only equipment then available
to minimise the noise from road breakers) but after bitter opposition
from contractors complaining that whilst muffle covers reduce the noise
automatically the efficiency of the road breakers in greatly reduced At the
instigation of the Chief Public Health Inspector energetic efforts were made
to devise equipment which would fit any type of road breaker capable of
reducing annoyance and irritation to a minimum at the same time not reducing
the efficiency of the tools
Success has been achieved in this direction in what is known as a 'Noise
Converter \ and it is encouraging to find that all the principal manufacturers
in this country and in other parts of the world have taken up this as standard
equipment for their road breakers The principle of the 'Noise Converter' is
in reducing those high frequency sounds which annoy and irritate into low
frequency soundsr thus making the sum total of noise more acceptable.