The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dynamite Stories, by Hudson Maxim This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Dynamite Stories and some interesting facts about explosives Author: Hudson Maxim Release Date: June 30, 2014 [EBook #46039] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DYNAMITE STORIES *** Produced by Joke Van Dorst and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) DYNAMITE STORIES AND SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES BY HUDSON MAXIM Author of “Defenseless America,” “The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language,” etc. NEW YORK HEARST’S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO. Copyright, 1916, by HUDSON MAXIM All rights reserved, including that of translation into the foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Printed in the U. S. A. DEDICATION To the actors in the comedies and tragedies of real life presented in these stories, without whose efforts and sacrifices the stories could not have been so interesting and true, this volume is with grateful acknowledgments most respectfully dedicated. As the parts played by the actors were not rehearsed, the performances have required a little retouching in the interest of the reader, the author having subordinated history to story rather than story to history. Hudson Maxim. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 1 The Forgotten Bit of Fulminate 25 Hell Swazey Breaks up the Dance 29 The Poet’s Uplift 34 How Bender Lowered the Price of Dynamite 39 Foolhardy Kruger 42 Discharging Pat 45 Lines to a Lady 47 He Separated 50 The Well-Digger’s Casualties 53 The Rival Editors 55 The Passing of “Jeopardy” 58 The Involuntary Attack 59 Hoist with His Own Petard 62 [vii] The Forgotten Precaution 64 The Fatal Hat 67 A Drop too Much 68 A Close Call 70 A Pickaninny’s Treasure Trove 72 Not to Be Buncoed 73 Sir Frederick’s Bonfire 76 The Irreverent Native 79 At Folly’s Mercy 80 The Watchman’s Double Vision 82 The Zealous Fool 84 Some Lively Cotton Waste 87 Saving Time 88 The Broken Scale 90 The Singular Good Fortune of a Gentle Englishman 92 The Match at the Peep-Hole 94 The Flask of Liquor 96 Impertinence Punished 97 Curiosity’s Uplift 99 Proud even unto Death 101 The Dog That Ate Dynamite 104 Insecure Security 106 The Loaded Chinaman 108 Living Bombs 110 Ships That Passed in the Night 112 A Wild Projectile 114 The Bomb and the Train 115 The Missing Vessel 117 The Drunken Messenger 118 Nitroglycerin by Automobile 122 The Jets of Blue 127 The Wisdom of Retreat 129 The Race with Death 131 The Indomitable Poet 134 Scattered 136 A Lively Dead One 138 Incidents in the Development of Motorite 139 The Mule Gun 152 How Gussie Got Loaded 154 Dynamite’s Freak 155 Explosive Vagaries 157 The Turkey That Went to Bed 160 Bill Bennett, Detective 162 Winning the Ox 164 A Duel to the Death 166 The Bewitched Flintlock 168 [viii] [ix] When He Shirked 171 The Elevation of Womanhood 173 Didn’t Know It Was Loaded 178 The Wrong Tap 180 “Whence All but Him Had Fled” 182 Breaking His Nerve 184 The Grizzly Cannon Ball 186 The Joke Was Not on the Chinamen 188 Chinese Fireworks 190 Brown, the Gunner 193 The Happening of the Unexpected 195 When the Wash Vanished 207 The Frightened Fisherman 211 The Colonel Was Provoked 213 When the Darkies Turned Pale 215 The Dog That Was a Real Mascot 218 Weary Willie’s Discomfiture 220 Lo, the Poor Indian! 224 DYNAMITE STORIES INTRODUCTION SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES An explosive material consists of a combustible and of an oxidizing agent for burning the combustible. Hence it contains within its own substance the necessary oxygen for its combustion, so that it will burn without atmospheric air and therefore in a confined space. There are two main kinds of explosive materials—high explosives and gunpowder. There are also two main kinds of high explosives—dynamites and military high explosives. Lastly there are two main kinds of gunpowders—black, smoky gunpowder and smokeless gunpowder. Dynamite is used mostly for commercial blasting purposes, such as blasting rock in the construction of railways, and so forth. Military high explosives are mostly employed for submarine mines, warheads for torpedoes, and as bursting charges for high explosive projectiles. A high explosive is consumed almost instantly by what is called a detonative wave; hence it is said to detonate. When gunpowder explodes, it is not consumed by a detonative wave, but burns from the surface, and the more strongly it is confined, that is to say, the higher the pressure under which it is burned, the more rapid is its combustion. Although the action is rapid, it is yet much slower than is the action of detonation of high explosives. The name gunpowder is a misnomer, for gunpowder is no longer a powder, but is made in the form of hard and dense grains or sticks, according to the use for which it is intended. A gunpowder is smoky when its products of combustion are not all gaseous. Only about forty-four per cent. of the products of combustion of black gunpowder is gaseous. The rest is inert solid matter, which makes the smoke. The products of combustion of smokeless powder, however, are practically all gaseous. Consequently, weight for weight, it is much more powerful than black powder. Black gunpowder is a mechanical mixture of charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter, the charcoal and sulphur being the combustible elements, and the saltpeter the oxidizing element or the element that supplies the oxygen. In smokeless powder the oxygen is held in chemical union with nitrogen and hydrogen, but the bond between the nitrogen and the other elements is weak, so that when ignited the other more active elements are enabled easily to unite at the expense of the nitrogen. [x] [1] [2] [3] In the combustion of all explosive materials, great heat is generated, and the force of the explosion is dependent upon the volume of gases and the high temperature to which they are raised. The smokeless powder used in the United States is made by dissolving a special kind of guncotton or nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol, just sufficient of the solvent being used to gelatinate the nitrocellulose, which is then stuffed through a forming die into rods. The rods are cut into sections of about three diameters long. The die, the invention of the writer, contains seven mandrels arranged in such wise that when the material is forced through the die the bar is multi- perforated with seven holes at equal distances apart. The grains or rods of smokeless powder are then dried for use. When burned in a cannon, all of the surfaces of the material are practically instantly ignited by a small flash charge of black rifle powder used for the purpose of setting fire to the charge of smokeless powder. The combustion in the perforations causes them to become larger and larger until the grain is all consumed. This form of grain tends better to maintain the pressure behind the projectile in its flight through the gun, and enables the use of larger charges of powder with lower pressures than could otherwise be employed. In fact, it would be impossible to use a smokeless powder made of pure nitrocellulose in big guns without the multi-perforations. In certain European countries where the multi-perforated powder has not been adopted, nitroglycerin is employed, combined with the nitrocellulose, which causes the material to burn through a greater thickness in a given time. Thus a smokeless powder may be made without the multi-perforations, but smokeless powders containing nitroglycerin erode the guns and destroy them very quickly, while guns employing pure nitrocellulose smokeless powders last much longer. When one of our big army or navy cannon is fired, the time which elapses from the instant of complete ignition of the powder charge to the instant that the projectile leaves the muzzle of the gun is about the fiftieth or the sixtieth of a second, and in that time the hard and horn-like smokeless powder material is burned through only about a sixteenth of an inch; hence the rate of combustion or rate of explosion of smokeless powder in a cannon is about four inches per second, while it has been ascertained by actual experiments that the rate of combustion or rate of explosion of dynamite and other high explosives is about four miles per second, so that the rate of consumption of smokeless powder, as compared to that of a high explosive, is as are four inches to four miles. As the time required for the projectile to be thrown from a twelve-inch cannon is only about the sixtieth of a second, sixty of these huge guns could be placed side by side and fired by electricity one after the other, while grandfather’s clock is making but one tick. Our ideas of duration are but relative. We have seen that the combustion in a cannon, though very rapid to our senses, is actually very slow indeed as compared with the much more rapid combustion of a high explosive; and great as is the speed of the detonative wave, yet the speed of the earth in its orbit is four times as great. If a celestial giant with a huge dynamite bomb the size of the earth itself were to approach the earth in its flight through space, and detonate the bomb immediately behind the earth, it would take half an hour for the bomb to explode, that is to say, it would take half an hour, or thirty minutes, for the explosive wave to pass through the eight thousand miles of its diameter. As the speed of the earth in its orbit is four times as great as that of the explosive wave, the earth would rush away, leaving the bomb about thirty thousand miles behind by the time it had completely exploded. If the interstellar ether were a high explosive mixture and were to be set off by the bomb, the earth would pass on clear around the sun, and while coming back, about six months later, would meet the explosive wave still going. It would require nearly a year for such a detonative wave to reach our sun from the earth. We have seen that if the earth were a ball of dynamite, it would require half an hour to explode. If the sun were a mass of dynamite it would require about two and a half days to explode. We frequently hear the theory advanced that planets and suns sometimes explode from pent-up forces within them, and that our earth might possibly blow up. Now, the force exerted by a high explosive is dependent entirely upon the pressure capable of being exerted by the gases liberated by the explosion. The pressure exerted by the most powerful high explosives has been estimated to be about 500,000 pounds to the square inch. Consequently, were the whole molten interior of the earth to be replaced with dynamite and detonated, the explosion that would follow would not lift the earth’s crust. The superincumbent weight of the earth’s crust is greater than would be the pressure exerted by the dynamite. If it were possible to throw a projectile from the earth to the nearest fixed star, Alpha Centauri, it would take about four years for the light of the flash to reach that star. The sound, if it could travel through ether, would reach there about four million years later. The projectile, traveling more than twice as fast as sound, would reach there in about two million years. When one of our big twelve-inch cannon is fired, the projectile, weighing a thousand pounds, has a muzzle energy, stated in mechanical terms, of about 50,000 foot tons, that is to say, its energy is equal to 50,000 tons falling from a height of one foot—energy enough to lift two 25,000-ton battleships to the height of a foot. As the projectile weighs half a ton, the energy is equal to that which would be developed by dropping the projectile from a height of more than twenty miles, making no account of the resistance of the atmosphere. Dropping upon a piece of armorplate too hard and thick for the projectile to penetrate, the heat developed would be sufficient to melt 750 pounds of cast iron. When one of these projectiles is fired from the gun directly against twelve-inch armorplate, which the projectile is [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] capable of penetrating, the hard-tempered steel plate in front of the projectile is fuzed or rendered plastic from the heat generated by the energy of the impact, and is forced like wax from the path of the projectile. There are many popular errors regarding the action of explosive materials. One of the most notable is the opinion that the action of dynamite is downward, and that if a body of high explosive be detonated on the surface of the earth the main effect is downward. The exact opposite is the truth. When a mass of explosive is detonated, it is converted practically instantly into a ball of incandescent gases and vapors under very high pressure. When confined the gases act to disrupt their container. When a large steel projectile is charged with a high explosive, like picric acid, and the explosive detonated, the walls of the projectile are not only broken but they are also torn, twisted and shredded, and so quick is the action that the inner surface of the metal is compressed and densified against the outer metal. For this reason it is easy to tell from the character of the fragments of a projectile whether or not a high explosive or an explosive of inferior power was employed, that is to say, whether or not the explosion was of high order or of low order. There is one false belief about the action of high explosives that has been about the hardest of any to kill, and the cost of killing it has been very expensive. Furthermore, it possesses more lives than the proverbial nine-lived cat. This belief is that five hundred pounds or so of dynamite exploded upon a warship or upon coast fortifications would destroy ship or fortifications, and that a few of such large bombs of dynamite dropped in a city would lay the city in ruins. Upon the advent of the aeroplane and the dirigible balloon, it was confidently believed that the aerial bomb would quickly become the most destructive implement of warfare. It was prophesied that should war come between England and Germany, London would soon be reduced to a heap of ruins by bombs dropped from the German Zeppelins. Several years before the European War broke out, I predicted that Zeppelin bombs would not and could not by any possibility work very wide destruction, and events have since vindicated my prediction. I pointed out the fact that should a hundred Zeppelins visit the city of London, once a day, for a year, returning to their base without mishap, and each Zeppelin succeed in destroying two buildings, the destruction would just about keep up with the growth of that city, for they build in London sixty thousand houses a year. We all remember the destructive powers that were predicted for the fifteen-inch Zalinski pneumatic dynamite guns that were mounted at Sandy Hook and at San Francisco at enormous Government expense. These guns were capable of throwing with compressed air about six hundred pounds of nitrogelatin to a distance of from a mile-and-a-half to two miles. It was popularly believed that one of these bombs striking upon a huge armorclad warship would utterly destroy it. Also two of these guns were mounted in a sort of cruiser called the Vesuvius. During the Spanish War the Vesuvius was taken down to Cuba, and in one action several of the huge bombs were thrown upon the earthworks and fortifications of the Spanish. They succeeded merely in mussing up the green, grassy effect. They did no material damage, for the reason that the action of the explosive was nearly all upward into the air. When the pneumatic dynamite gun was promulgated, it was popularly believed that all high explosives were exceedingly sensitive, and that it was necessary to get them out of the gun very gently if they were to be thrown from ordnance. The writer was the first to dispel this folly, through the invention of Maximite, a high explosive which will stand not only the shock of being fired from heavy guns at high velocities, but which will also, without exploding, stand the far greater shock of penetrating the heaviest armorplate—armorplate as heavy as the projectile will stand to pass through without breaking up. While I was working upon Maximite and trying to get the Government to adopt it, Congress appropriated the money for building an eighteen-inch gun for testing a shell invented by Louis Gathmann, which was intended to destroy battleships by exploding the shell on the outside of their heavy armorplate, it being believed that if five hundred pounds of guncotton were to be fired against the side of an armored ship and exploded, the whole side of the ship would be blown in and the vessel destroyed. The gun employed by Gathmann was essentially the same type of gun as that previously designed by me, and explained in a lecture by me before the Royal United Service Institution of Great Britain in 1897, and illustrated in a book of mine published the same year by Eyre & Spottiswoode, British Government printers, except that the bore of my gun, which was of the same weight as that of the Gathmann gun, was greater. With my gun, however, I proposed to throw armor-piercing projectiles, or projectiles capable of penetrating an object struck and exploding inside of it. I did not believe that a quantity of high explosive that could be thrown in a shell and exploded on the outside of a heavily armored ship would destroy it, but believed it necessary that the explosive should penetrate and explode inside the ship, and within earthworks and fortifications in order to destroy them. Maximite was adopted by the United States Army in 1901. It was during that same year that the experiments were conducted with the Gathmann shell at Sandy Hook. I attended those experiments. Two Kruppized armorplates, each eleven-and-a-half inches thick, sixteen feet long, and seven-and-a-half feet wide, and each weighing 47,000 pounds, were set up, one as a target for the Gathmann shell and the other as a target for the regular United States twelve-inch Army Rifle. Each of the plates was backed by supports to represent the same [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] strength as though mounted on a battleship. The Gathmann shell weighed about eighteen hundred pounds, and carried about five hundred pounds of guncotton, while the Government twelve-inch shell weighed a thousand pounds and carried only twenty-three pounds of Maximite. The Gathmann shell had a soft nose, which collapsed on the plate at the instant before the explosion of the shell, so that the guncotton might explode fairly against the side of the plate. At the first shot of the Gathmann gun, the projectile struck the plate squarely and exploded, but the only effect upon the plate was to leave a great yellow smudge on its face. The plate was neither cracked nor pushed back. Several more shots of the Gathmann gun were fired, and although, under the heavy pummeling, the plate was pushed back and broken through, up and down, it was not otherwise injured. Then the Government twelve-inch gun was fired at the other plate. The first shell contained nineteen pounds of high explosive, and it passed through the plate, leaving a clean round hole, and exploded behind the plate without breaking it. The next shell contained twenty-three pounds of Maximite, and the fuze was timed to go off a little quicker. This shell exploded in the plate when about two-thirds through, with the result that a hole was blown in the plate as big as a barrel, and the plate shattered into fragments. One would think that these tests would suffice forever to seal the doom of the Gathmann type of shell. Nevertheless, it matters not what Army and Navy officers may learn by experience, or know without experience, Congress does not know and does not understand, and depends far more upon think-so than upon experience. The result is that Government officers are often compelled, as in the case of the Zalinski dynamite gun and the Gathmann shell, to waste large sums of money while they know very well beforehand exactly what the results will be, and that the tests will prove the devices to be abject failures. Even after the failure of the Gathmann shell, another shell of almost identical conception and purpose was made and tested under a Congressional appropriation, to be relegated to the scrap-heap of failures. It is very fortunate that things happen to be as they are in the cosmos and that the action of a high explosive when exploding against a massive body is to rebound from that body on the line of least resistance. It is for this reason that more damage is not done by great explosions. One of the biggest explosions in the history of gunpowder manufacture occurred at Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, on the 9th of March, 1911, when it was estimated that a thousand tons of black blasting powder blew up. Glass was broken over a very wide area. Some glass was broken in Chicago, about fifty miles distant. But neither the walls nor the foundations of buildings were greatly disturbed even but a few miles from the explosion. In the village of Pleasant Prairie, at a distance of but two miles, although the buildings were very much damaged the inhabitants continued to occupy them. Early in the morning of July 30, 1916, a very large quantity, certainly several hundred tons, of high explosive materials blew up in New York Harbor, not far from Ellis Island. A large quantity of shrapnel ammunition and other ammunition went up in the blast, their fragments raining all over the surrounding water. There was but very little loss of life, and the actual material damage to buildings in Jersey City, Manhattan and Brooklyn was astonishingly small, except the loss from broken glass. 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. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] 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. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] 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. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] 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, [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] 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. [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] The following is the sort of adventure that is likely to happen to anyone under similar circumstances and has doubtless happened before and since. Kruger had a dog which was well trained to fetch anything that his master threw for him. One day Kruger took some sticks of dynamite and went to a neighboring stream with the intention of dynamiting some fish. He attached fuze and exploder to a stick of the explosive, and threw it toward the stream, but, missing his aim, the dynamite landed on a rock. The faithful dog, thinking that the stick had been thrown for him to bring, ran and returned with it to his master in great glee, with the fuze sizzing nearer and nearer to the explosive. Kruger ran in horror, the dog after him, deeming it great sport. The dog being the better runner, danced about his master. Finding it impossible to escape by running, Kruger climbed a tree with all the alacrity he could muster, and had just reached a vantage of safety when the dynamite exploded, and the dog—well, the dog was holding the stick in his mouth when it went off. DISCHARGING PAT A works foreman of mine who had been employed as assistant superintendent in another dynamite factory told me the following story: He one day intercepted an Irish laborer who was taking a barrel, which had been used for settling nitroglycerin, down to the soda dry-house, with the intention of filling it with hot nitrate of soda from the drying-pans. The foreman scolded Pat roundly, and told him that, should he do such a reckless thing again, he would be instantly discharged. The foreman then went to the superintendent’s office and reported the matter. In the meantime, Patrick, utterly ignoring the injunction, simply waited for the foreman to disappear, then proceeded to the dry-house with the barrel and began to fill it with the hot nitrate of soda. Over in the superintendent’s office the foreman had just completed his narration of Pat’s carelessness, when there was a thunderous report and a crash of glass, and Pat’s booted foot landed on the office floor between them. The superintendent dryly remarked, “Evidently, Pat is already discharged!” LINES TO A LADY Some years ago, when I was conducting experiments with detonators for my safety delay-action fuze, which was adopted by the United States Navy in 1908 as the service detonating fuze for high-explosive projectiles, I received instructions that a parcel of fulminate detonators, made at the torpedo station, had been received and were being held for me at Fort Lafayette, and I was told to go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, whence I would be taken in a tug to the Fort for them. After having procured the package, I concluded that it would be much more expeditious for me to take a trolley car home than to return by the tug. On entering the car and seating myself, I placed the package beside me on the seat, keeping my eye constantly upon it. It was, by the way, perfectly safe to carry if subject to merely ordinary handling, but it would not do to jump on it or to kick it about much, for, in that case, there might be some energetic results. No sooner had I comfortably seated myself in the car than a huge, determined, militant-looking woman entered, brushing a few small men aside. Seeing all the seats occupied except the space where the package was, she turned and hurled herself backward and downward. Her movements were so quick that I had barely time to throw my left arm firmly under her, and, although I am unusually strong, I had all I could do to support her enormous bulk. When she felt my arm beneath her, protecting the package, she was all the more indignant and determined to crush the package in order to teach me a lesson, and she glared upon me fiercely. I finally succeeded, by throwing my shoulder against her, in toppling her sufficiently to remove the package with my right hand, and then I let her down upon the seat. I seldom wax poetical, and never permit myself to write verses to ladies when I am not sure that they will be gratefully received. But, in this c...