A prominent financier, who was a much better business man than he was inventor, read of Moissan’s experiments in making artificial diamonds. The financier conceived the idea of converting anthracite coal directly into diamonds by subjecting it to enormous pressure of gunpowder exploded in a strong steel cylinder.
As he wished to market a large quantity of his manufactured diamonds before their artificial character should leak out, he determined to conduct his experiments very secretly; consequently, he put the man-of-all-work at his country place upon the job. This faithful and useful servant was to report the progress of the work regularly at the city office of his employer.
After trying several experiments with black gunpowder, the man reported that the scheme didn’t work—that no diamonds were produced.
The financier then told the useful that hehad evidently reached the limit of power of black gunpowder.
“Now try dynamite,” said he.
There was a break in the chain of reports, and he wrote the useful, asking him why he did not report. Still no answer.
After waiting some days, the idea suddenly struck the financier that possibly the process had proved successful and that the useful planned to betray him. He accordingly sent a peremptory telegram to him to report at once on pain of discharge.
The next day a vision, swathed and bandaged and perambulating on crutches, entered his office.
“You infernal old scoundrel!” yelled the wreck, as he entered.“Blow a man up with dynamite, and then threaten to discharge him for not reporting!”
I had a certain man in my employ down at Maxim by the name of Benjamin Billings, whom we called Ben Billingsgate. Ben held views very strongly prejudicial to dogs and matrimony. He was all that is implied by the term “all-round useful.” Though an erratic fellow, he was bright and energetic and seemed to be able to do anything under the sun when he set about it. But he lacked initiative, except in the expression of his opinions about those two abominations—dogs and matrimony.
When he was young and ardent he had married Sukyanna, a maiden who was dominated by the delusion that she had been born with a mission, to which all other considerations were secondary and should be subordinated. She was also a woman with a pug dog. Benjamin’s nerves had been frazzling out for some time, and his patience was sorely tried by the division of the lady’s affections between him and the dog—with a decided leaning toward the dog.
One day he brought home to his wife a beautiful Christmas present, which consisted of a large colored photograph of himself, mounted in an exquisite gilt frame. The expense of the thing represented a week’s hard labor, but he wanted to create an impression upon his wife. He believed in doing things by wholes and in striking hard to win. His wife was very pleased—with the frame.
On his return from work the following evening, he took a sidelong glance toward the mantel over which the picture had been hung. He did not recognize himself. There in the frame was a life-size photograph of the pug in place of his, which Sukyanna had removed.
He uttered never a word, but his whole mental mechanism was turning somersaults. The next day, at roll-call, that dog was reported among the missing.
Benjamin pretended to sympathize and to condole with his wife, but she was disconsolate. Some Gypsies had passed that way during the day, and it was suspected that they might have stolen the dog. The horsewas accordingly hitched up and a drive of ten miles was taken. When the Gypsies were overhauled and rounded up, the pug was not discovered. Then an advertisement was inserted in all the town papers. Still no pug. The canine continued a persistent absentee.
As a matter of fact, Benjamin had devoted ingenuity enough to the destruction of that dog to form the basis of a Sherlock Holmes detective story. He had prepared a sort of canister-bomb, adapted to go off by a strong thump of any sort. The dog, the bomb and a stout rawhide string, with which to tether the bomb to the dog, were confidingly placed in the hands of a small boy in the neighborhood, known to have both a sense of humor and a taste for the mischievous. The boy was, however, fond of dogs, and it eventuated that he decided to keep the dog for himself. Hence the delay in the finale of this story.
But the urchin’s sense of humor finally got the better of his affection. He found it impossible to choke off the appeal to his imagination of hitching that bomb to the dog’s tail. Consequently he took the pug out and carefully tied the canister to its tail.Following the ingenious instructions of Benjamin, as soon as he had done so he dodged into the house and shut the door before the dog realized what had happened.
When the pug discovered itself a part of an infernal machine, old-home-week associations rose up in its memory, and it made a bee-line for home and human mother.
Benjamin had made a little miscalculation about the amount of thumping that would be required to actuate the exploding mechanism of his ingenious bomb, and it did not explode immediately, as expected. The dog and bomb, consequently, hurtled through space like a comet with a head on both ends of the tail.
On the dog’s arrival, Sukyanna was going about her household duties, with a book in one hand written by Miriam Mushroom on The Transcendentalism of the Universal, and Its Relevancy to the Elevation of Womanhood; while, with the other hand, directed only by subconscious mental process born of habit, she was preparing supper for Benjamin. She prided herself on that power of concentration and absorption, so common to the artistic temperament, which can resist for a while the battering-ram assaults on consciousness of howling children, barking dogs, or a house on fire.
As a result, she did not hear or see puggy as, with whine and din and clatter, he rushed into the room where she stood. Not receiving the expected attention and consolation, puggy in his impatience circled around the human mother, entwining the shanks of her in the strong rawhide cord, until dog and bomb had effectually hobbled her skirts, when, tripping, she went down on both.
This mean trick on the part of Benjamin bruised her artistic soul and proved far too much; she instantly separated from Benjamin—in the direction of the empyrean.
She had at last achieved the realization of the Elevation of Womanhood.
At the works of the Maxim-Nordenfelt Company in England, when some of the early experiments with smokeless powders were being made in that company’s laboratory, a strong hydraulic cylinder, which had been employed for compressing experimental explosive materials, was thrown out of commission by the ram, or plunger, sticking in the cylinder. The cylinder was taken to the shop, and the job of getting the plunger out of it was given to one of the workmen. He thereupon commenced in his own peculiar way by heating the cylinder over a forge, thinking to expand it sufficiently to allow the plunger to be removed.
He succeeded before long, with an effectuality that perfectly dumbfounded his slow sense of expedition. The contained explosive naturally ignited, and the plunger was blown out like a shot from a cannon. The cylinder itself was blown downward, demolishing the forge, passing through theplank floor, and burying itself in the ground, while the plunger whizzed upward through the roof, and disappeared in the direction of Scotland.
The worker among high explosive materials must never relax his ceaseless vigilance. Not only his own life, but also the lives of those working at his side, hang upon the thread of infinite care. This fact is emphatically illustrated by an experience of my own, while conducting some experiments with a continuous process for making nitroglycerin which I had invented.
Orders were waiting, and it would take a week of constant labor on my part to complete the apparatus. I therefore crowded the week into three days, working constantly day and night, without a moment’s sleep or rest.
I had thought out every detail of the process with the utmost care. I had tested every step, unit by unit, so I was confident not only that the process would prove successful, but also that it would be safe to operate.
On the forenoon of the third day, everything being at last in readiness, I now prepared to turn on the acids and the glycerin. I was well aware of the grim possibilities of my being killed, for if I had made a miscalculation or any wrong determination, I knew that my life might be the forfeit. I gave little thought to the likelihood of my being incautious due to the tremendous strain to which I had so long subjected myself. As it happened, I was so worn out that at the very outset I turned on the glycerin first, instead of the acids. My hand was actually upon the acids tap before I realized my error.
In that vital moment, some secret sense or instinct called back my wandering wits in the nick of time, and, shuddering, I dropped my fingers from the tap. Had I turned it on after the glycerin began to flow, I must inevitably have been blown to pieces.
I have a literary friend by the name of Marvin Dana, who, although he was for years editor of theSmart Set, once failed in a bit of à priori perspicuity. Some Italians were blasting out a bit of rock at Landing for the foundation of a new bridge, to carry the roadway over the railroad in that village. They had just finished charging a big, deep hole with dynamite, and had lighted the fuze, when Marvin started to cross the temporary bridge with his usual measured stride of ever-conscious dignity. The Italians, who had withdrawn to a safe distance, seeing him coming, and they being unable to speak English, gesticulated wildly, and pointed excitedly in the direction of the blast under the bridge.
The littérateur concluded that there must be something extraordinary going on down below there—something quite worth looking at, and, walking directly above the blast,leaned over the bridge and looked down. Just at that instant the mine exploded.
He was, happily, unhurt by any of the flying stones and débris, but the knock-down argument of the shock from the blast convinced him that such carelessness on the part of those Italians, with never a guard to wave a red flag warning pedestrians, was, indeed, truly shocking.
Just back upon the hills that rise up from the southern shores of Lake Hopatcong, there is one of the most important dynamite works in the country. James Wentworth began his labors there first as an errand boy, at the age of twelve, soon after the works started. It was his brag that he had grown up with the works, but that he had never gone up with them, although he had seen many another go up, when, on occasion, by some freak of chance, a packing-house or a nitroglycerin apparatus would be blown to the four winds of heaven, spraying wreckage of men and timber over the whole celestial concave.
Jim had no lack of courage. He had worked in every department of the business; had made nitroglycerin and nitrogelatin, and had become one of the most skillful dynamite packers. As he did piece-work, he made money rapidly.
One day, at a church strawberry festival, he was drawn into the vortex of that swirling passion, love, and married. The young wife importuned him to give up the dynamite business, as he had already laid up sufficient money to start him in another business. Yielding to her wishes, he gave notice that his resignation was to take effect at the end of two weeks.
On the third day of the period of his notice, on the advent of the noon hour, he was seized with an uncontrollable impulse to take his dinner-pail and himself out of the packing-house where he was working. He said afterward that he got to thinking, “Suppose this packing-house should blow up; what would become of Susie?”—to say nothing of his own dispersion.
He went to the top of an elevation to eat his dinner, in full view of the packing-house, continuing his pessimistic reflections.
The place began to look suspicious. For the first time in his life he felt fear. On a sudden, that packing-house became a white, dazzling ball of flame, and he was knocked down by the concussion.
He told the superintendent that the three days he had served on his notice must suffice—he had lost his nerve!
In the early days, when there was more individual and less corporate mining in the gold country of the West, a long and lean Yankee, Jim Evans, who was once a neighbor of mine in Maine, contracted the gold-fever, and went West.
Luckily, he almost immediately struck a pay streak high up the face of a cliff, where there was a wide shelf of rock that afforded a very convenient roadway for his use, as well as considerable area for the transaction of his operations.
Someone before him had started operations on the same site, but had become discouraged and quit, leaving a big steel tank, open at one end, lying upon its side, the open end pointing, like a huge cannon, over the mining settlement a thousand feet below. Jim used this tank to warehouse certain edibles, together with a keg of black gunpowder.
One day, on Jim’s return from grubbing inthe ground, he was amazed to find the entrance to his warehouse blocked by a huge grizzly bear that had crawled in to get at the edibles, and that fitted the big tube like a wad in a gun.
Jim was addicted to humor, and as there was a three-quarter-inch hole in the tank near the closed end right over the keg of gunpowder, the head of which had been removed, it occurred to him that he might make it somewhat interesting for the bear by lighting a piece of fuze and dropping it into the gunpowder. This he proceeded to do, and the bear proceeded to leave that tube after the manner of a cannon ball.
Hearing the report, and seeing a large volume of smoke, the townspeople, looking skyward and Jim-ward, were astonished at seeing a ton of grizzly hurtling outward from Jim’s place and descending upon them.
On Jim’s return to the village that evening, he was surrounded by numerous interrogators regarding the bear. “Oh,” he said, casually, “I found the bear in my shack, and just threw him out, that’s all.”
When the Alaskan gold excitement was at its height, a couple of adventurous spirits, prospectors from California, had expended several months of precious, good old summer-time and exhausted their resources in an endeavor to locate pay dirt by sinking a shaft into a narrow table of land which jutted out from a high mountain near its base.
After thawing and grubbing and blasting through fifty feet of earth, with no gold in sight, they came upon solid ice underlying the cover of earth through which they had penetrated.
They kept on, however, for several weeks more, in an endeavor to penetrate through the ice; but they found ice, and only ice, for another fifty feet.
Then it was that it occurred to them to salt that ice with fine gold dust and sell out to some tenderfoot sucker.
They very easily found the desired victims in two Chinamen, with evident ample means and sufficient lack of experience.
The two prospectors had about a ton of dynamite on hand. This they lowered into the shaft and concealed it in a side drift just deep enough and big enough to hold it, calculating that the first shot fired by the Chinamen would set off the dynamite and, by completely demolishing the shaft, conceal their fraud.
The first blast made by the Chinamen did explode the dynamite, which not only wrecked the shaft, but also lifted the whole jutting bit of tableland—ice, earth, everything—sending it—an avalanche—down the mountain slope several hundred feet, exposing a thick stratum of glacial detritus, under where the ice had been, so full of gold that it proved to be one of the richest finds ever made in Alaska. The one blast had made the Chinamen millionaires.
During the gold-digging days of California, before there was a restriction imposed upon the immigration of Chinese, a big American sailing vessel, while in Chinese waters, had taken aboard a large cargo of fireworks and a few tons of gunpowder of a special brand, which was safely housed in the hold, while all the sleeping quarters except those occupied by the crew, and all available deck spaces, were filled with a cargo of coolies to man California mines.
The vessel was one of those staunch, fast, sail-driven craft brought to their highest perfection in the shipyards of Maine just before the advent of the steamship.
When the ship was about a day out on its homeward voyage, the captain learned, through his faithful Chinese cook, that a big part of the Chinamen that he had picked up were half-breed Malay and Chinese pirates who had taken passage for the sole purpose of capturing the ship for piratical purposes,and that they were armed to the teeth, so that resistance offered by his crew of only twelve would be utterly hopeless.
While the captain was deliberating upon what to do, word was brought by his cook that the pirate horde were beginning to act very ugly, and had already taken possession of the fore part of the vessel, preparatory to a final assault upon the crew.
The captain ordered two lifeboats immediately to be filled with water and provisions and lowered, while he went below decks and lighted a train to the cargo of gunpowder and fireworks. Then the captain and his crew, together with the Chinese cook, manned the lifeboats and pulled away, to the amazement of the Chinese pirates, who seemed immensely pleased that they had captured the ship without a struggle.
The captain and the crew, in his two boats, lay on their oars at a safe distance quietly watching events, while the ship, which had now been turned about, was sailing away landward. When at a distance of about half a mile, that ship turned volcano. The whole above-water portion went up into the air with a belch of fire and thunder-roar likeanother Krakatoa, whose eruption shook the whole earth in 1883.
In their upward flight, Chinamen raced with rockets, while the heaven was filled with burning fireworks—and then it rained Chinamen. In fact, it was a real cloudburst of Chinamen, fire-crackers and ship’s wreckage.
For many years, all inventors and manufacturers having occasion to attend experiments with their productions at the Naval Proving Grounds at Indian Head, were aided in their work by Brown, the gunner. He was a very ingenious, genial, gigantic fellow, one of the most likable men in the world. There was nothing about the mechanism of guns and gunnery unfamiliar to him.
Once, during the early years of his service there, a fragment from an exploding gun struck him in the forehead, leaving a great dent. As soon as he recovered, he returned to his duties undeterred, although he had had many other close calls.
One day, a few years ago, he walked in on me at my summer home on Lake Hopatcong. During his visit, he asked me if I believed in presentiments. He said he had had a very strange presentiment of impending danger in his work at Indian Head. He told me thathe had confided this to the commanding officer there, who laughed at him, and said, “Oh, Brown, at last you are losing your nerve. Go and take a two weeks’ vacation, and then come back.”
Brown did go back at the end of his vacation.
A few weeks later, while testing a new heavy gun, something went wrong. The breech block blew out, and Brown was killed.
Some time ago, a young lady who had been my private secretary for about four years got married. Thinking that one of the best ways of securing another competent stenographer and typist to take her place would be to go to an employment agency, Mrs. Maxim and I called upon the manager of one of those institutions.
Mrs. Maxim, according to the habitude of her sex, led in the conversation. She told the manager about the unusual requirements that the person engaged must have—that she must have a good general education, must be very expert as stenographer and typist, and above all, must be an exceptionally good speller. Furthermore, Mrs. Maxim placed especial emphasis upon one stipulation—that we did not want a girl under twenty or a woman over thirty-five, for the reason that a girl under twenty is very apt to lack the necessary experience and serious-mindedness for such a position, while a woman around and above forty is apt to be set in her ways, and to lack the necessary flexibility of mind and nature readily to adapt herself to anything to which she has not always been accustomed, and is, furthermore, likely to be unable to learn anything new with the facility of a younger person.
The manager was all suavity, pleasant manners and promises, and assured us that he had on his waiting list a number of young women who would exactly meet our requirements, and that he would send three of them over that very evening.
We learned from the bit of experience which followed that employment agencies and those who are sent by them to apply for positions, are apt to be governed by reasoning similar to that of the small boy, who, seeing an advertisement that twenty-five dollars’ reward would be paid for a Pekinese spaniel, thought it would do no harm to try, and so he called to claim the reward with a huge mongrel—a cross between a Newfoundland and a St. Bernard.
Well, at the appointed hour, two archaic dilapidations wafted themselves in upon us,who looked as though their nascency had a priority on the Stone Age and they had been vouchsafed to us among the antediluvian survivors of Noah’s Ark.
The first one—a slip of a girl of some sixty-seven to the nth-power summers and as many winters—betrayed her lack of typistical experience by mistaking a national cash register for a typewriter. Then she confided in us the little confidence that she really knew nothing about typewriting as yet, but that, in the sweet long ago, in the days of auld lang syne, she used to drum quite a lot on the piano, and, consequently, she imagined that typewriting, being a sort of mere finger play, would come so easy to her that she would have little difficulty in acquiring the necessary aptitude on a typewriter to qualify for the position.
The next applicant was a tall, slight, sinuous, willowy, sylph-like and ethereal creature of the hippopotamus variety, who floated into our presence like a breath of old winter, made sweet summer by the mingled odor of violets, lilacs, musk and new-mown hay. I gave her a short dictation, which she took down in longhand. I asked her why she didnot write shorthand. She said she did write shorthand, unless she was in a hurry. Contemplating her huge bulk, I insinuated that we should want someone a little lighter on her corns than she, as one of the desirable accomplishments in a private secretary was that she should be able to play tennis. She said that although she had never played tennis herself, still it ran in the family, because her grandchildren were expert tennis players.
When the third antique entered, the thing began to get monotonous, as Mark Twain remarked, when a mule had fallen through his tent three times in one evening. We were getting out of patience. I told the old lady at once that we did not want anyone under twenty or over thirty-five. She assured me that she was not under twenty. I told her that I had guessed as much, and asked, “How about the other limit!” She sharply retorted that she had never, in all her life, touched thirty-five. “Well,” said I, “if that be so, you must have been skidding some when you went by that numeral.”
Disappointed, and highly indignant, we called again the next day upon that managerof the employment agency. He was profoundly apologetic, and said that he happened to have waiting in another room a young lady who was exactly what we wanted. She was immediately asked into the private office, where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She was about twenty-five years of age, and was, as they say down in Maine, as smart as a steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete with multi-syllabic terminology, and with unusual words of difficult orthography, but she took down everything with lightning speed, read back her notes to perfection, and transcribed them rapidly on the typewriter without a mistake.
We asked for what salary she would be willing to come to us. The salary asked was pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay it. The manager and the young lady exchanged glances, and both looked a bit surprised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we might talk with the young lady alone for a few minutes.
After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came to the conclusion that she was a show girl kept by the manager merely to prove thathe had the goods when required, provided anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high salary, and the salary was made high enough to deter most applicants. We got it from the girl that she had several times been hired and had worked a few days for each of a number of employers, until she could find some rational excuse for breaking away and returning to the agency, the manager of which, we also learned, was her brother, and she was a partner in the business.
The incident reminded me of a story told by a friend of mine in New York who bought a beautiful and highly trained Scotch terrier of a Broadway dog vendor, thinking that after keeping the dog tied up for a week, feeding him and treating him with kindness, he could be depended upon to stay with his new master, but the moment the dog was freed he disappeared, and the next day he was again with his master, the dog vendor, ready to be resold. Some time later, a light was thrown upon the inner consciousness of my friend by reading an account in the newspapers of the arrest of the dog vendor for obtaining money under false pretenses and practicing fraud in the sale of dogs, or rather, of thedog. The canine was a sort of homing-pigeon dog, trained, like a carrier pigeon, to return from each new master as soon as freed. The buying and selling of that one dog constituted the main business of the scamp.
When our interview with the young woman was concluded, we started to leave the office in disgust, but at that moment a young woman of rather prepossessing appearance, about thirty years of age, entered the office looking for a position. She explained that her late employer having gone to Europe, she was looking for a new place.
After a critical examination, we found that she would meet our requirements very well. Then it developed that, having read in newspapers and magazines some of the accounts, highly colored by the writers of them, of how I cooked with high explosives and lighted my cigar with a stick of dynamite, and burned nitroglycerin in a lamp to light the room, she, being of a rather nervous temperament, was afraid of the prospective companionship with explosive materials.
I assured her that the accounts were misrepresentations of actual facts, and explained that we lived at a very safe distance from any explosive works, and that she would be exposed to no danger whatsoever. I finally convinced her that our home was a safe place, and although still harassed with some doubts she decided to come with us.
In the edge of the evening, after her arrival, she and I were sitting at the dining-room table engaged in conversation. I was telling her how groundless had been her fears, when there came a terrific explosion. The sky was lighted up with a brilliancy that would shame the noon-day sun, and fragments of brands from the burning fell all about the house.
I confess that I was as much surprised as she was—and that was going some. I rushed out, and found that my tool-house, located about a hundred yards from my residence, had blown up, and the wreckage was on fire. Being sure that there were no explosives in the building, I was greatly puzzled.
There were in the place at the time perhaps a hundred rounds of Mauser rifle cartridges. These were exploding, one after another, from the heat. The neighbors who had run to witness the fire, were greatlyfrightened, and did not dare to render any assistance in putting out the flames, especially while the cartridges were exploding.
I ran to a hydrant nearby, got out the fire-hose, and found, to my amazement, what one usually finds under such circumstances, that the nozzle of the hose had been taken off, and the hose disconnected from the hydrant, and that there was no wrench there. I ran and got another hose and a wrench, made the connections, and ran out the hose to extinguish the fire, when I found that only a small stream of water as big as my thumb flowed from the hose. I then ran down to my house to see if there were any faucets open which would reduce the pressure, and then to the pump-house to measure the water in the supply tank, and found that the tank was nearly full, and that thirty-five thousand gallons of water were available for extinguishing the fire. Yet I could get no pressure. The result was that nothing was saved, and the building and all its contents were a complete loss. As there was no insurance, the loss was about fifteen hundred dollars.
After it was too late to save the building,I walked down to the Hotel Durban, on my property, which I supplied with water, to calm the fears of some of the guests who were agitated, when, to my amazement, I found a two-inch fire-hose turned on full, and running in the road. I learned then that a stupid fellow who was staying at the hotel, had turned the water on at several fire hydrants to play water on the hotel, although the hotel was at such a safe distance from the tool-house that there was not a particle of danger whatsoever. It never occurred to him to close off one hydrant when he opened another; consequently, the pressure was reduced so that no water at all could be had at the scene of the fire, and not pressure enough on the hose-pipes that he had turned on to do any good even had they been needed.
After things had quieted down, I returned to the house to resume my conversation, and to repeat my assurances to the young lady secretary, but I found a polite note tacked to the table-cloth, requesting that her trunk be forwarded the next day. She had not waited for further conviction as to the safety of her new position.
On investigation, I learned that a fire had started in the tool-house from some cause unknown, and had proceeded long enough to get one side of the interior of the building well ablaze. As there were five gallons of denatured alcohol in the place, and the same quantity of gasoline, and about ten pounds of sulphuric ether, it is probable that one of these had become heated and, bursting, set free a lot of vapor which, mixing with the atmosphere, exploded. There were also in the building about thirty pounds of finely pulverized aluminum, ten pounds of magnesium powder and other ingredients for flashlight powders, with which I intended to conduct experiments. As these materials were not mixed, they were not explosive, but their combustion was what produced the wonderful light when the explosion occurred. The result was not like that from an explosion of dynamite, in which case the building would have been literally blown to fragments, but, as is usual in gas explosions, the roof of the building was lifted up, the sides thrown out, and the roof dropped in. Even the front door of the building, charred from the initial fire, was found otherwise intact.
While sitting on the porch of my house on Lake Hopatcong, dictating this story to my stenographer, and when I had arrived at this point, she suddenly called to me, “Look!” pointing her finger across the Lake to a huge column of smoke going up from the Atlas Powder Works, and mushrooming out into the sky. The direct distance is about three miles, but it seemed quite a long time before we felt the shock and heard the sound. Although the sound was loud and the shock considerable, the sound was much louder and the shock much heavier even at longer distances in several directions, owing, I imagine, to the difference in the underlying strata of earth.
As I learned later, the explosion took place at one of the packing houses, which carried another packing house with it, together with a nitroglycerin storehouse, so that about ten tons of dynamite, or its equivalent, went up in that column of smoke. I understand that seven men were killed, and about twice as many injured. It was the largest and most destructive explosion that had ever occurred at those works.
I was once invited to speak at a County Fair at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I used to live when in the publishing business. My subject was Explosive Materials and Their Use in Warfare.
The management was especially desirous that I should give my auditors some sort of spectacular demonstration, to show what explosives would do. A platform was erected in an open field, and I had an arena roped off at the rear of the platform about fifty feet wide, and running back several hundred feet. In the rear portion of this arena I buried several sticks of dynamite, and connected them with an exploder and a battery on the platform.
Also, I brought several cotton bosom-shirts, several cotton undershirts, half-a-dozen handkerchiefs, a couple of towels, half-a-dozen pairs of cotton socks, and as many cheap cotton collars and cuffs. These I hadimmersed in a concentrated mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, converting them all into guncotton. Then I washed and soaked the acid out of them, and dried them.
I stretched a clothes-line from the speaker’s platform to a distance of about thirty feet to my right, and on this I hung my guncotton clothes, only a few feet away from the front of the audience.
There were, perhaps, a thousand people massed in front of me, crowding up close, that nothing should miss them. I made a brief talk on the nature and use of explosives, and burned some smokeless powder under water, and then I touched off the dynamite in the rear of the field, which made a very pretty showing.
The audience was very curious about that wash. That I should have hung my linen out to dry on that occasion they thought was very peculiar taste, to say the least; and some of them did not hesitate to say that they considered it very bad taste.
I then said to the audience that I must beg their pardon for displaying my underwear as I had done; that I appreciated the fact that it was an unsightly display, and, to accommodate them, I would immediately proceed to get it out of sight. I then touched it off with an electrical igniter, and that laundry disappeared in one great bright flash of flame.
There happened to be in my audience an ingenious fellow with some knowledge of chemistry, who was a noted wag and practical joker. Taking the hint from my nitrated laundry, he nitrated a cotton handkerchief and sent it to the Chinese laundry with the rest of his wash.
When he called for his clothes, he found John Chinaman with his right arm in a sling. However, John was all smiles, and apologized for the absence of the one handkerchief, but said nothing more about it.
A short time after the fellow had put on his clean underwear, he developed a very severe case of prickly heat, followed, a little later, by a sensation like that of needles being stuck into his body over the entire surface. Anyone who has taken a bite of a wild Indian turnip knows what that sensation is. The Chinaman had charged his customer’s garments with a preparation extracted from a Chinese variant of the Indian turnip. Ittook a couple of weeks, with the aid of a physician, for the wag to recover from the little unpleasantness which the Chinaman had inflicted upon him.
When testing big guns at Sandy Hook, the officers are often greatly annoyed by fishing boats that persist in getting within range of the guns and in remaining there, entirely regardless of the work or wishes of the officers of Uncle Sam.
It is a curious circumstance that, according to the law of the country, these ships have the right of way, and even the officers of the Government Proving Grounds have no power to compel a fishing smack to move out of range.
There was one boat of this kind that persisted in anchoring daily exactly in the range of a ten-inch gun that was under test, and day after day the tests had to be delayed.
One morning, however, there being a haze or fog floating close down upon the water at a distance of a couple of miles from the shore, and the sea looking perfectly clear to that distance, the officers in charge of thetesting of the gun concluded that the range was clear, and they fired, but the captain of the fishing boat above referred to happened to be on his job, just as usual, though concealed by the fog. He had stretched himself out in a hammock on deck and was taking a snooze, when a ten-inch projectile passed through his boat under him, and ricocheted on out to sea. He kept out of the gunner’s range after that.
Following this incident, one of the officers conceived the brilliant idea of keeping fishermen from coming into the line of fire in the following manner: When a boat was seen sailing into range he would fire several six-pound shells, exploding them in the water along the line of range, and directly in the path of the oncoming boat. This method served the purpose admirably. While the fishermen would calmly cast anchor and occupy a position directly in range of a gun being tested, they did not dare to sail directly into the line of fire of exploding six-pound shells.
An Army officer tells me the following story:
One time, while he was on duty at the Sandy Hook Proving Grounds, they were testing a gun-shield to see whether or not it would resist the penetration of a six-inch shell.
The officer whose duty it was to attend to the loading and firing of the gun did not always allow the required time to elapse after sounding the warning before discharging the gun, especially when he took it for granted that no one was in the zone of danger, in which case he was apt to consider the signal of warning a mere formality.
Such was his attitude and action on the occasion to which this story refers: He gave the signal, and immediately fired. The projectile, which was expected to penetrate the shield, went only half through, and stuck there, when, to the horror of all participants, especially of the careless officer referred to,the Colonel of Artillery emerged from behind the shield, unhurt, but madder than a demon in Dante’s Inferno.
No more guns were fired without the lapse of an ample period of warning.
At one of our Government proving grounds, some years ago, the officers were testing a new high explosive, and, as was their custom, they charged a twelve-inch shell with the material in order to estimate the power of the explosive by the fragmentation of the projectile when the charge was detonated.
They had a bomb-proof chamber prepared for this purpose. It consisted of a room about ten feet wide, twelve feet long, and eight feet high, lined with armorplate. The projectile was placed on the armored floor in the middle of the room, and covered with a few hundred pounds of fine sand. It was armed with an electrical exploder, which was set off from another bomb-proof at a safe distance. After each explosion, the fragments were sifted from the sand and counted and weighed.
A twelve-inch shell charged with Maximite and exploded at Sandy Hook during the teststhere of that explosive, was broken into ten thousand fragments. The fragments made deep dents in the hard face of the armorplate. The shell that enters into this story was exploded under similar conditions.
When the officers were ready to explode the shell, they sounded the usual alarm to give warning to laboring men on the premises to seek cover. Now, it so happened that about a dozen negroes who were engaged in some pick-and-shovel work had been in the habit of using this very bomb-proof as a shelter when a big gun was fired; consequently, when the warning was sounded, they immediately rushed for cover within that bomb-proof.
The officer in command was about to close the switch to explode the projectile, and his hand was already upon it, but, being an exceedingly cautious man, he thought he would take another look to be sure that all was safe, and, to his amazement, he saw a negro who had been screening himself behind a pile of rubbish making a dash for the bomb-proof containing the projectile, when it was revealed that the dozen darkies had all huddled into it for safety.
When those darkies found out how close a call they had had, they turned just as pale as negroes can turn. Had the projectile been exploded while they were in the bomb-proof, they would not only have all been killed by the blast, but would also have literally been blown to ribbons.
In the long line of trenches that constitutes the French and British front, facing the equally long German front, the soldiers relieve time’s tedium by numerous artifices. Many kinds of pets—dogs, cats, owls, doves, parrots—are harbored for the sake of their company, or as mascots—bringers of good luck.
A French soldier had a dog that was a great favorite in the trenches, for the reason that he was a famous ratter, and as the trenches were infested with rats, he was a most welcome guest.
One day, when the Germans were bombarding the French position before Verdun preparatory to a charge, a huge howitzer shell, penetrating deep into the earth in front of one of the French trenches, and exploding, buried half a hundred men—among them the owner of the dog.
The dog also was quite buried by the explosion, but he quickly dug himself out, andthen he began an eager search for his master. Smelling out his location, he dug furiously with all his might to unearth him. Fortunately, his master’s head was near the surface of the ground, but his arms and legs were bound tight so that he could not move, and he was nearly suffocated when the dog succeeded in digging out his head and face so that he could breathe.
Happily, relief came soon, and when the rescuing party arrived, they found the dog still working with all his strength to uncover his master.
Pick and spade soon brought the dog’s quarry to the surface, who was quite unharmed except for a few bruises, while the dog, it was seen, was bleeding at ears, eyes and mouth from the effect of the explosive blast.
Some good old English folk whose prosperous son had made a large amount of money in the railroad business in America, were persuaded by their boy to give up their fine, old-fashioned English country home for such home life as America could afford.
The dutiful son had anticipated the wants and pleasures of his parents, and on a fine country estate he had built practically a replica of the old English homestead. There was the big fireplace and the big, wide chimney, to be swept by the smutty chimney-sweep. The chimney was provided with pegs to climb up and down.
Some time after the good parents were quartered in their new home, Weary William the wanderer, a real hobo, walking past the place late one night, could see enough of it in the moonlight to recognize its genuine English aspect; for Weary Willie had, in his boyhood days, been one of those smut-facedchimney-sweeps in old England, and when he walked up and peeped through the window and saw a few embers in the familiar fireplace, he concluded to go down that chimney and take a nap in the cosy comfort that the room provided, and perchance find something to eat and drink without waking anyone.
Entering the room by way of the chimney, he did find, all set as though for himself, edibles and wine—left-overs from someone’s late supper.
After feasting, he took a snooze on the sofa, intending to take his leave the way he came at an early hour before the family was up, but he had drunken more of the good wine than he ought, and he slept soundly. He was awakened by voices, which told him that it was high time and past for him to make his exit, and he scooted up the chimney in great haste, but not a whit too quickly, for by the time he had raised himself up out of sight, several persons entered the room. He did not dare continue his ascent or move for fear of making a noise. He waited there, breathless, for a more favorable opportunity to climb out.
It so happened that an ingenious Yankee neighbor of the English gentlefolk had suggested a more expeditious way of cleaning the chimney than by sweeping it out in the old British fashion. He said that all that was necessary was to throw several pounds of black gunpowder into the fire, which, flashing, would blow the soot out of the chimney. Of course, the genius had never tried the experiment himself, but as such geniuses are usually cocksure, he was so confident of success that he did not feel the need to make any preliminary experiments. Therefore, just as the tramp had mounted above the line of vision into the chimney, the genius, entering the room, threw the gunpowder into the fire, which instantly exploded with a great flash and smoke, blowing cinders and embers all over the room and filling it with dense, black, sulphurous smoke, burning the face and hands of the genius considerably, and frightening the elderly people out of their wits. But what frightened them all still more, was the appearance of the thoroughly singed and scared tramp, who fell from his perch in the chimney, down into the fireplace, and rolled out into the room,sneezing, coughing and saying things, all at once.
The terrified tramp was easily secured, and when the master’s gold watch—a gift from royalty and a family heirloom—was found upon his person, the genius was not only forgiven for his miscalculated experiment, but also thanked for his good offices.
Dave King, editor of theMorris County Press, Morristown, New Jersey, was reared a lariat man in the Wild and Woolly, in the days before civilization, rum and guns had subdued the Cheyennes, the Comanches and the Sioux to extinction or to the more uncongenial fate of enforced good behavior.
In all of Dave’s hair-ruffling experiences—corralling stampeding long-horns, lassoing and riding a bull-buffalo bare-back, hunting, with Rex Beach, the great Kadiak bear in Alaska, whose enormous bulk and Ivan-the-Terrible disposition would by comparison make the grizzly of the Rocky Mountains a gentle companion—his most intimately interesting, close-to-nature adventure was when he was ten years old, and dwelt upon the upper waters of the Arkansas.
Dave’s father, a husky pioneer, accompanied by his ten-year-old son, his brother, “Uncle Joe,” an assortment of dogs, gunsand ammunition, embracing a dozen kegs of gunpowder, had gone there to stake a squatter’s claim, hunt buffalo and grow up with the country.
Timber was scarce, so, after the manner of the troglodyte, they burrowed out a room in the side of a hill, which constituted at once cook-room, dining-room and parlor, and also museum of rare weapons, dog-kennel and powder-magazine. The cook-stove was placed in the middle of the room, and the flue was run up through the ground for ventilation and the escape of products of combustion.
One day, Dave’s father and Uncle Joe went on a buffalo hunt, much to the disconsolation of Dave, who wanted to go along. Toward the end of the afternoon following the departure of the hunters, Dave built a roaring fire in the stove to keep himself company, and incidentally to prepare supper for himself and the hunters, who were expected to return before sundown.
His eyes regarded longingly a double-barreled shotgun hung on the wall. He had many times been warned by his father to exercise caution in handling the guns during his absence, but Dave had the dare-devilspirit of his parent, with the added impulses of the small boy, and he took down the shotgun and fondled it lovingly, examining its firing mechanism. Then he proceeded to return it to its hanging, not noticing that he had left one of the hammers cocked. He did not know that the gun was loaded, and he would not have been deterred had he known. In putting up the weapon he accidentally touched the trigger of the cocked hammer and the charge in that barrel exploded, sending shot and burning wads under the sleeping-bunks, just missing one of the kegs of gunpowder.
Dave proceeded with his cooking, but soon he smelled smoke, and looking under the bunks discovered, to his horror, that a fire had started. Under the bunks he went, pawed at the fire with his hands, and smothered it with his hat, until he thought that he had extinguished the last spark. Then he started for a water-hole an eighth of a mile distant, to get a pail of water, accompanied by his favorite dog.
When he got out into the open, he saw a dozen horsemen just coming into view over a rising ground between him and the sinkingsun. He thought at first that his father was bringing company home to dinner, and he waited and watched. But he soon saw by the feathered and blanketed make-up and demeanor of the horsemen that they were savages on the warpath.
Dave was not long getting himself and his dog out of sight in a badger-hole which he had, during many days of hard labor, enlarged for a playhouse.
The Indians were a party of Cheyennes who had been forcibly located in the Indian Territory by the Government. On this occasion, half a thousand of those fierce warriors decided to go on the warpath and return to their former hunting grounds in Wyoming. On their way they burned houses and slew and scalped everybody that fell in their path. Among many other outrages they, for a little diversion, killed and scalped a young woman school-teacher and forty pupils. United States troops then rounded them up and corralled them in Fort Robinson, Nebraska. One night they made a break to escape and the soldiers, now out of patience, killed the whole bunch.
But to return to Dave: When the Indianssaw the smoke coming out of the top of the ground, their curiosity was excited, and discovering that it was a dwelling they rode round it, red-man fashion, in a constantly narrowing circle, firing guns and war-whooping.
The dog began to bark and struggle to free himself to get after those Indians, but Dave thrust his hand into the animal’s mouth, and grasping his lower jaw managed to keep him from barking. It took all of Dave’s strength to hold that dog, but he knew that it meant life or death, for if the dog should escape he would betray their hiding-place.
The Indians, finding no sign of life in the dugout except the barking dogs that Dave had shut in, came closer and closer. Half a dozen of them got up on the top of the dugout, and the others bunched themselves in close to the entrance, preparatory to rushing the place.
But Dave had not succeeded in extinguishing the last spark of the fire that he had started under the bunks, so, coincidentally with the Indians arranging themselves about the cavern, the twelve kegs of gunpowder went into action.
Dave could not imagine what had happened. He thought that possibly the Indians had captured the gunpowder and exploded it purposely, but he did not dare to emerge from his hiding.
There was an interval of silence. There were no more war-whoops, and he concluded that the Indians had departed. They had, but not exactly in the manner that Dave imagined.
The parent and Uncle Joe, returning on the edge of evening, were dumbfounded at finding only a great hole in the ground where the dwelling had been. Dave’s father wrung his hands and bemoaned the loss of his boy, while Uncle Joe consoled him with the usual I-told-you-so that he ought not to have kept the gunpowder in the place.
They began a diligent search for any souvenirs of Dave that might have happened to return to Mother Earth. After they had gathered up about a wagon-load of the disintegrated Indians, Uncle Joe suggested that they must be on the wrong scent.
At this puzzling juncture, Dave, hearing the voices of his father and Uncle Joe, cautiously emerged from his hiding. When hecame in sight, Uncle Joe said, “There’s Dave now! There’s your boy!” His father looked blankly at him for a moment. Though the vision looked like Dave he could not trust it. He said, “No, it can’t be my boy! It can’t be my boy!”
But it was; and Dave is still with us.