Part 2

Why is it, then, that so much glass is broken and at such long distances, while the foundations and walls of buildings suffer but little injury? Let me explain. When a quantity of high explosive detonates, a wave of atmospheric compression is sent outward in all directions by the explosion. It is, in fact, a huge sound wave, and moves exactly at the speed of sound--about eleven hundred feet per second. Of course, buildings or other structures or objects near enough to the explosion to be struck by the expanding gases themselves, or by the atmosphere immediately propelled forward by them like a projectile, may be destroyed, but the area over which this action occurs is so circumscribed that no great damage is apt to result at distances beyond a few hundred feet.

However, the great sound wave may travel to a distance of many miles. Consequently, as a result of the explosion just referred to, about a million dollars' worth of glass was broken in New York City alone. One would naturally suppose that the fragments of window glass broken in this manner would fall inside a building, but they do not. Almost always they fall outside into the street. The reason for this is that the wave of compression, striking a pane of glass, forces it inward nigh to the breaking point, and then as the wave of compression moves on, followed by a partial vacuum, the glass, springing outward to fill the void, breaks, and falls into the street.

An interesting incident of this great explosion was staged at Ellis Island. There were a goodly number of immigrants on the Island at the time, congregated from the four corners of the earth, some of whom had come to America to seek their fortunes in this land of freedom-from-everything-except-freedom, but many had come to find quiet and security from war's alarums. Few of them, indeed, had ever felt the comfort of an overcoat, but many had dreamed of some happy day when they would sport a veritable fur-lined overcoat.

When the great explosion came it sounded like the crack of doom, and most of the immigrants believed it to be the real thing and proceeded with agitated precipitation to get their souls ready for rapid transit over the Great Divide.

All eyes naturally were averted to the celestial concave, aglare with the great conflagration, when suddenly, to the confounding amaze of all, a large flock of fur-lined overcoats began tumbling down out of the heavens all over the Island. It is true they were lined merely with sheep's fur, but even such a garment is as much the pride of the Northern European peasant as is the broad, glad-colored sombrero the pride of the Mexican peon.

As the Government statute books and rules and regulations governing immigrants contain no provision for the disposal of such species of manna as heaven-sent overcoats, the immigrants were the beneficiaries.

Great as are such explosions as that at Pleasant Prairie and that in New York Harbor, they are but little things indeed compared with the explosions that sometimes accompany volcanic eruptions. Mother Earth is the greatest of all explosive manufacturers.

Water seeping down into the earth's crust and trapped in large quantities in the neighborhood of volcanoes sometimes becomes heated to high incandescence--heated until it is no longer water or steam, but mingled oxygen and hydrogen, far above the temperature of their dissociation--under a pressure so great that they occupy a space no larger than the original water; consequently the entrapped waters exert a pressure as great as the strongest dynamite.

The most notable volcanic explosion that ever occurred in historic time was when that old extinct volcano, Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, that had been sleeping for thousands of years, was literally blown into the sky by the pressure of the pent-up gases beneath it.

This great eruption occurred in 1883. More than sixty thousand persons were killed. The captain of a tramp steamer, who happened to be passing in the vicinity of Krakatoa at a distance of some miles, a short time before the explosion occurred, saw a very strange disturbance in the sea in the direction of the old mountain. Taking his glass he saw a perfect Niagara of water pouring into an enormous fissure that had opened in the earth. He was struck with consternation and rightly imagining that something very serious was likely soon to happen, he put on all steam to escape, and luckily he had reached a point which enabled him to survive the effects of the awful blast when it came.

The vast mass of water which had tumbled into the bowels of the earth was immediately trapped by the closing of the great fissure down which it had poured. The water was quickly converted by the intense heat into a veritable high explosive, with the result that the massive mountain was literally blown bodily skyward, and fell in huge fragments into the surrounding sea. The shock was so great that it was felt clear through the earth, and an immense tidal wave was set going which encircled the earth. The opposing portions of the great wave, meeting in the lower Atlantic, flowed up even to the coast of France. An atmospheric wave passed around the earth three times. It is estimated that the amount of volcanic mud that was discharged from the mountain during the eruption was more than the muddy Mississippi discharges into the Gulf of Mexico in two hundred years.

There was so much impalpably fine volcanic dust blown into the upper atmosphere that it did not entirely settle out of the air for more than two years, which period was noted for its beautiful glowing sunsets, due to the illumination of the fine dust suspended in the upper air.

As the ax is to the woodsman, so are high explosives to the engineer. With dynamite he hews down the hills, fills the valleys and tunnels the mountain-range to make a straight and even way for the locomotive. He cuts canals through the width of the land, uniting rivers and seas.

Always in the van of civilization, there is heard the churn of the rock-drill and the echoing crash and roar of the dynamite blast.

Also it is the huge high explosive shell that makes way for the march of modern armies, and high explosive mines and torpedoes are the terror of the underseas.

All forms of dynamite are high explosives, and all high explosives may fairly be called dynamite.

Smokeless gunpowder is actually but a modified form of high explosive. It is dynamite that has been chained and tamed by the chemist's cunning, so that it will burn without detonation, and thus permit the utilization of its awful energy to hurl shot and shell from war's great guns.

Thus it is that dynamite in its varied forms deserves the high place with steam and electricity as one of the great triumvirs that have been the architects of the modern world.

THE FORGOTTEN BIT OF FULMINATE

In experimenting with high explosives and in their manufacture, a little absent-mindedness, a very slight lack of exact caution, a seemingly insignificant inadvertence for a moment, may cost one a limb or his life. The incident that cost me my left hand is a case in point.

On the day preceding that accident, I had had a gold cap put on a tooth. In consequence, the tooth ached and kept me awake the greater part of the night. Next morning I rose early and went down to my factory at Maxim, New Jersey. In order to test the dryness of some fulminate compound I took a little piece of it, about the size of an English penny, broke off a small particle, placed it on a stand outside the laboratory and, lighting a match, touched it off.

Owing to my loss of sleep the night before, my mind was not so alert as usual, and I forgot to lay aside the remaining piece of fulminate compound, but, instead, held it in my left hand. A spark from the ignited piece entered my left hand between my fingers, igniting the piece there, with the result that my hand was blown off to the wrist, and the next thing I saw was the bare end of the wristbone. My face and clothes were bespattered with flesh and filled with slivers of bone.... The following day, my thumb was found on the top of a building a couple of hundred feet away, with a sinew attached to it, which had been pulled out from the elbow.

A tourniquet was immediately tightened around my wrist to prevent the flow of blood, and I and two of my assistants walked half a mile down to the railroad, where we tried to stop an upgoing train with a red flag. But it ran the flag down and went on, the engineer thinking, perhaps, from our wild gesticulations that we were highwaymen.

We then walked another half-mile to a farmhouse, where a horse and wagon were procured. Thence I was driven to Farmingdale, four and a half miles distant, where I had to wait two hours for the next train to New York.

The only physician in the town was an invalid, ill with tuberculosis. I called on him while waiting, and condoled with him, as he was much worse off than was I.

On arrival in New York, I was taken in a carriage to the elevated station at the Brooklyn Bridge. On reaching my station at Eighty-fourth Street, I walked four blocks, and then up four flights of stairs to my apartments on Eighty-second Street, where the surgeon was awaiting me. It was now evening, and the accident had occurred at half-past ten o'clock in the morning. That was a pretty hard day!

As I had no electric lights in the apartments, only gas, the surgeon declared that it would be dangerous to administer ether, and that he must, therefore, chloroform me. He added that there was no danger in using chloroform, if the patient had a strong heart. Thereupon I asked him to examine my heart, since, if there should be the least danger of my dying under the influence of the anesthetic, I wanted to make my will.

"Heart!" exclaimed the surgeon, with emphasis. "A man who has gone through what you have gone through today _hasn't_ any heart!"

The next day I dictated letters to answer my correspondence as usual. The young woman stenographer, who took my dictation, remarked, with a sardonic smile:

"You, too, have now become a shorthand writer."

The grim jest appealed to my sense of humor.

On the third day I was genuinely ill and had no wish to do business. Within ten days, however, I was out again, attending to my affairs.

HELL SWAZEY BREAKS UP THE DANCE

About the first use of nitroglycerin in the United States as a blasting agent on a large scale was in the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts, on the Boston and Albany Railroad.

So many accidents had occurred where the use of nitroglycerin had been attempted, that engineers and contractors were afraid to employ it. Nobel, however, had discovered that when nitroglycerin was absorbed in infusorial earth, it was rendered much less sensitive. This material he called dynamite.

A chemist by the name of Professor Mowbray believed that the main trouble with nitroglycerin had been that it was not sufficiently purified in its manufacture. He induced the builders of the Hoosac Tunnel to try his product. He built a laboratory on the side of Hoosac Mountain, over the village of North Adams, where he produced the stuff.

He put it up in tin cans, which held about a quart. For transportation these were carefully packed with cotton flannel between them.

The method of using the dynamite was to pour it into holes drilled in the rock, inserting an exploder cap and fuze in the usual manner. At that time it was popularly supposed that if nitroglycerin or dynamite were allowed to freeze, it became very highly sensitive and would explode on the slightest jar. Stories were prevalent that the sound of a fiddle string would explode nitroglycerin when frozen.

One day there came an urgent call from the east end of the Tunnel for more nitroglycerin. Professor Mowbray had in his employ a care-free and fear-free fellow by the name of Helton Swazey. When Swazey was sober, he was the soul of good nature, but when drunk, which was very frequently, he was as savage as a hungry cougar. This peculiarity earned Helton Swazey the nickname of Hell Swazey.

It was a very cold winter day when the call came, and Professor Mowbray, learning that Hell Swazey was going over the mountain that very evening to attend a dance, asked him if he would not take over the nitroglycerin with him. A hot-water bag was placed with the nitroglycerin and all was wrapped in a heavy blanket to protect it from Jack Frost. The shipment was placed in the back of Swazey's sleigh.

Hell Swazey's best girl, whom he took with him, did not know the nature of the cargo.

The nine-mile ride over the mountain was very cold. Swazey kept himself warm by imbibitions from a flask of liquid caloric, and to keep the young woman warm he took the blanket and the hot-water bag from the nitroglycerin for her comfort, leaving the explosive to the mercy of the below-zero weather.

When Swazey arrived at the dance-hall to join in the frolic, he was in so ugly and meddlesome a mood that he was promptly put out of the hall, followed by his woman companion. Swazey was mad all through. He went to the sleigh, and taking an armful of the cans of nitroglycerin, returned to the hall, and opening the door proceeded to hurl them with all his force at the merry-makers.

One can struck upon the stove and glanced across the room. Cans smashed against wall, ceiling and floor.

As the frightened occupants fled through the windows, they did as Mark Twain did when he saw the ghost--they did not stop to raise the windows, but they took the windows with them. In the language of Mark, they did not need the windows, but it was handier to take them than it was to leave them, and so they took them.

When Hell Swazey turned up for duty the next morning, Professor Mowbray had already heard of the escapade, but he was filled with marveling why the nitroglycerin had not exploded, particularly as it must have been frozen very hard.

When Swazey entered the presence of the Professor, he expected immediately to be discharged. He was meek and crestfallen enough, and began to excuse himself and to apologize for his behavior.

To his amazement, Professor Mowbray appeared to be very much interested and pleased, tapping his forehead with his finger, smiling and nodding, and muttering to himself, "Good; good; splendid!" He interrogated Swazey carefully, to be assured that the nitroglycerin was frozen hard, that it had been thrown hard, that it had struck hard, and that it had not exploded.

That very night there was mailed at the North Adams Post Office an application for a patent for freezing nitroglycerin to make it safe to handle.

THE POET'S UPLIFT

Explosive factories are veritable schools of efficiency. All work is done under the eye of the most vigilant caution, and the penalty for negligence is so expensive in the destruction of life and property that science, which is knowledge, and proceeds from sure premises to safe conclusions, is the sole guide. It does not do to follow a guess. The dynamite factory is no place for that class of persons who believe themselves to be favorites of Providence or of Almighty God, for dynamite plays no favorites.

There is probably no other class of persons so little guided by science as are the poets. They pride themselves on the fact that they ignore science. They claim that poetry is a sort of transcendental stuff, star-dusted from the gods' abode upon only a few persons fortunate enough to be born with a divine afflatus, which puts them into a fine frenzy--a condition of body and mind partaking somewhat of the ecstaticism of the Whirling Dervish, the spiritual clairvoyant and the soothsayer--a holy hysteria--a delirium-tremendous effervescence of over-soul--in which condition they are able actually to commandeer the co-operation of the Deity.

To heighten the humbug, the poets claim, to quote, that "_poetry knows no law_," that "_it is above and beyond all law_"; and consequently that it is "_the antithesis of science_," veritably "_the despair of science_," "_defying all attempts at analysis and understanding_," and that, being an inspired product, "_poetry is the greatest achievement of the human mind_."

The poets would have us believe that all of the great inventors and discoverers, scientists and philosophers, have been far inferior to the poets. The poets would have us believe that all the triumphs of chemistry and mechanics have been small compared with the triumphs of poetry. The poets would have us believe that the invention of the phonograph, of the telephone, of wireless telegraphy, the discovery of radium and the X-ray, the discovery of gravitation, are not equal to such triumphs of the poets as "Aurora Leigh," "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight," and "The May Queen."

The poets would have us believe that the discovery of the spectroscope, which tells the composition of the stars so far away that the light by which we see them now left its source before the building of Babylon and the founding of the Egyptian Pyramids, is a less wonderful product of the human mind than is Shelley's "Skylark."

It is perfectly safe for the poets to live and move and have their being in error, but it does not do even for a poet, when working with explosive materials, to eliminate scientific procedure, for in that case he is likely to get an uplift that will sprinkle the feet of the angels with his filamented fragments.

This very thing actually once happened in the Pennsylvania oil region when the poet laureate of his community was blessed by the discovery of petroleum on his otherwise worthless farm. One well sunk by the oil company gushed a large quantity of both oil and natural gas. The royalty received by the poet was immense. One day he conceived the idea of climbing to the top of the oil-derrick and writing a poem to vent his pent-up fervor.

He had engaged the services of a photographer to catch his beatitudinations. The sun was just descending the horizon, and the poet and the top of the derrick were still aglow in the radiance of sunset, while derrick and poet were enveloped in an explosive mixture of gas and air a hundred feet in diameter. The photographer had said, "Beady, look pleasant, please." This was the moment of inspiration. The poet loosed his divine afflatus and set his fine frenzy to doing things. The following science-confounding doggerel is what he effused:--

_Poetry is a divine art And I am a poet to the heart, And am writing these lovely lines Right where the setting sun shines, Just at the close of a beautiful day, Under the milk-like Milky Way, But which cannot be seen just yet though Because of the sunset's brighter glow. Yet I know it is there, and poesy may Raise me nearer the Milky Way._

... And it did, for at this point the poet struck a match to light a cigarette, and the explosive mixture of natural gas and air about him fired first.

When last seen the poet was headed for the Milky Way.

HOW BENDER LOWERED THE PRICE OF DYNAMITE

Once, when entering my storage magazine at Maxim, New Jersey, in which were several carloads of dynamite, along with 37,000 pounds of nitrogelatin, made to fill an order from the Brazilian Government, I saw John Bender, one of my laboring men, calmly but emphatically opening a case of dynamite with cold chisel and hammer. With some epithetitious phraseology, I dismissed him.

It was not long after this incident, when the Boniface of the inn at Farmingdale, a nearby village, called upon me to buy some dynamite. He told me that he had employed John Bender to blow the stumps out of a meadow lot. I related to him my experience with that reckless person, and tried to impress him with the fact that Bender was temperamentally so constituted as to court death, not only for himself but for others about him, when handling dynamite.

But Boniface was unconvinced. He wanted Bender to do the work and he wanted the dynamite to do it with. Bender, he said, had assured him that he was a great expert in the handling of dynamite--that he could so place a charge under a stump that he could always tell beforehand the direction the stump would take, and about how far it would go under the impulse of the blast. Therefore, it was only a question of the price of the dynamite.

"Well," said I, "the dynamite you want is sixteen cents a pound, but I'll bet you the dynamite against the price of it that John Bender kills himself with it, so that if he does not succeed in blowing himself up and killing himself with the dynamite, you can have it for nothing. On the other hand, if he does blow himself up, you must pay for the dynamite."

A few days later, there was some hitch in Bender's exceptional luck. A particularly refractory old stump had resisted a couple of Bender's dynamic attacks. The failure to dislodge the stump Bender took as a personal affront, because it reflected upon his skill as a stump-blaster.

"Next time," said he, "something is going to happen."

He placed about twenty pounds of dynamite under the deep-rooted veteran, touched it off, and several things happened in very quick succession. The huge stump let go its hold on earth, and proceeded to hunt Bender. It was a level race, but the stump won. Striking Bender on the north quarter, it stove in four ribs, dislocated a few joints, and damaged him in several other respects and particulars.

Boniface came to settle for the dynamite.

"Sixteen cents a pound," I said. "Bender hasn't a chance in a hundred. Wait till the doctors are through with him."

"What do you say to a compromise," suggested Boniface, "of eight cents a pound? For really," quoth he, "I do not believe that Bender is more than half dead."

And the account was settled on that basis.

FOOLHARDY KRUGER

One of the most dare-devil men I ever had in my employ was a young fellow by the name of Joe Kruger. He was a very hard worker, and that won pardon for his many indiscretions.

I sent him one day to a neighboring explosives works to get a special kind of guncotton made there, and told him to have it sent by freight in a wet state. Instead, however, he filled about fifty pounds into a big burlap bag, in a perfectly dry state, and took it on the train with him and into the smoking-car, placing it on the seat beside him. He struck a match, lighted a cigar, and smoked throughout the entire journey. Had the least spark of match or cigar fallen upon the bag, the guncotton would have gone off with a tremendous flash and, although it would not have detonated, it would have burned him terribly, as well as any persons sitting near, and would have blown out all of the windows in the car.

At another time, in order to test the insensitiveness of a certain high explosive, a quantity of it was charged into a four-inch iron pipe, and the pipe hung against a tree as a target to ascertain whether or not the bullet would penetrate the high explosive without exploding it.

Kruger and I fired several shots with a Springfield rifle from cover at long range without hitting the cylinder of explosive. I was then called away and told Kruger to continue firing until he hit the mark. As soon as I left him, he advanced with the gun to within a few rods of the tree. His first shot penetrated the cylinder, exploding it with terrific violence, blowing the tree, which was about eight inches in diameter, clean off, while the fragments of metal flew about his head like hailstones. But none happened to hit him.

* * * * *

The following is the sort of adventure that is likely to happen to anyone under similar circumstances and has doubtless happened before and since.