wife was my assistant, and we arranged to touch the thing off by
electricity from the house. Again it exploded, and one of the fragments
of the apparatus, coming through the open door, struck the wooden wall
behind which my wife and I were standing and nearly passed through it.
On entering the laboratory, I discovered for the first time what was the
actual cause of the trouble, namely, the longitudinal flaw already
referred to, evidenced by the fragments of the motorite that remained
after the explosion, for motorite, like smokeless gunpowder, when
subjected to explosive pressure, is immediately extinguished upon the
release of the pressure, so that when the apparatus blew up, all of the
unconsumed motorite was extinguished, just as when the projectile leaves
the gun any unburned smokeless powder is extinguished and is blown out
in front of the gun, where the partially consumed grains may be
recovered.
The next motorite was made by rolling the material into sheets, cutting
into discs, sealing them together under pressure, and in that way
building up the bars, which precluded the possibility of there being any
flaws.
Some motorite was soon made in this manner, and another apparatus
constructed, which was tested and which worked very satisfactorily.
Following this successful result, I built a laboratory at a dynamite
plant near Lake Hopatcong for conducting the experiments on a larger
scale.
My assistant at the motorite laboratory was one of that American country
type, absolutely honest, perfectly fearless, painstaking and diligent,
of such timber as the great men of the earth are made. He was altogether
a most lovable fellow. He had all his life worked with explosives, and
was a veteran in the manufacture and use of nitroglycerin and dynamite.
But, when doing pioneer work with explosives, there is always an
unavoidable element of risk, even when the greatest care is taken.
We at first had the hydraulic press, in which we built up the sticks of
motorite, located in the laboratory room itself; but I suggested to my
assistant one day that it had better be placed outside, and a heavy
brick wall built between us and the press, as a barricade in case of a
possible accident.
"For," I said, "suppose you should by oversight neglect to put in the
leather packing between the piston and the motorite, we might have an
explosion."
He said that he could hardly forget that precaution. Nevertheless, the
press was placed outside, and the barricade built. The very first time
that we used the press thereafter he did forget the packing, with the
result that the press exploded. Although we were behind the barricade,
still the concussion brought us to our knees. Had the explosion occurred
while the press was being operated in the main laboratory, we should
both have certainly been very seriously injured, if not killed.
It was a matter of several months before the full-sized torpedo
apparatus with which we were to experiment was completed and erected,
and the necessary quantity of motorite made.
On the day before the regular test was to be conducted, I was called to
Morristown, as expert on a case in court, and I left orders with my
assistant to make up an additional small quantity of sealing compound,
used for sealing the discs of motorite together in building up the
bars. This sealing material was made of a mixture of nitroglycerin,
guncotton, camphor and acetate of amyl.
As I did not receive the telegram to go to Morristown until after I left
home that morning, my wife expected that I would be working at the
laboratory that day, but knew that I might possibly have a call to
Morristown.
On my way home that evening, I was informed by a neighbor that there had
been an explosion in my laboratory, that my assistant had been killed,
and that the place had been burned down. I hastened to the spot and
found my wife there waiting for me. All that was left of my assistant
lay in an adjacent building covered with a piece of sacking.
That was one of the saddest moments of my whole life. It is impossible
to know what little slip or misjudgment may have produced the explosion.
A little inadvertence in the handling of a bottle of nitroglycerin may
have been the cause.
The manner in which my wife was informed of the accident was about on a
par with that employed by the Irishman who took the remains of a
fellow-workman, killed by an explosion, home to his wife in a
wheelbarrow, and, knocking upon the door, asked:
"Does the widdy McGinnis live here?"
She replied: "Indade, and I'm not a widdy."
And he said: "And faith ye are, for I have his rimnants here in the
wheelbarry with me."
A butcher was the messenger-bearer to Mrs. Maxim. He said:
"Mrs. Maxim, have you heard the news about the explosion?"
And he continued: "Mr. Maxim's laboratory blew up and burned down today.
They have found some of his assistant, but they haven't found any of Mr.
Maxim yet."
Mrs. Maxim immediately rushed to the scene of the accident, where she
learned the welcome news that I was in Morristown that day.
* * * * *
It was a matter of another year of hard work before I was again ready to
make a new trial of the torpedo apparatus. There were several amusing
experiences in connection with that testing.
The apparatus held a charge of one hundred and ten pounds of motorite.
Water was pumped continuously through a water jacket over the steel
cylinders containing the burning motorite and into the combustion
chamber during each run. The apparatus was provided with an exhaust
valve so constructed as to control, to a nicety, the pressure in the
combustion chamber.
Under three hundred pounds pressure to the square inch, which was what
was mainly used, the motorite burned at the rate of a foot in length per
minute, and as each foot in length weighed twenty-five pounds, it burned
at the rate of twenty-five pounds per minute. Each pound of motorite
evaporated a little more than two pounds of water, and the products of
combustion, mingling with the steam produced, escaped from the exhaust
valve through an inch-and-a-half nozzle.
The roar of the escaping gas and steam was so great that it was
impossible to hear one shout at the top of his voice. The loudest shout
was less than a whisper. The roar could be heard with great distinctness
more than two miles away. A good idea can be had of the violence with
which the steam and gases escaped, from the fact that a door, which
accidentally swung shut during one of the runs in front of the nozzle,
although seven feet distant, was blown from its hinges, broken in two,
and the fragments hurled twenty feet away. The noise was so confounding,
that it was some time before my assistants and myself could keep our
senses about us and note and record the pressures on the various gauges
during a run, although the apparatus was separated from us by a
barricade so strong and heavy that there was no possibility of our being
injured, even should there be an explosion.
One day, just as we were about to make a run, the superintendent of a
nearby explosives works called upon us, and I asked him if he would like
to see the run, and he said he would.
I then asked him to note particularly and to record the pressure on a
certain gauge. The run lasted about five minutes and, on turning to him
for his notes, he himself was surprised that he had been so confounded
by the noise that he had not thought of looking at the gauge at all.
On the day when the final test took place, the firm of torpedo-builders
that was interested with me in the apparatus sent several
representatives, including their chief engineer, vice-president and
other officers of the company, to witness the test. Everything being in
readiness, and each member of the committee being convinced that there
was no possible danger in remaining in proximity to the apparatus and
back of the barricade, while it was being tested, I gave each of the
committee explicit instructions to watch the various gauges and to note
the pressures, while the chief engineer and myself were to watch the
nozzle gauge, and to observe the character and force of the steam and
gases escaping from the nozzle.
I told the several members of the committee it was indispensable that
they should carefully watch the pressure gauges during the entire run.
As it was a condition of the test that I should get up steam within ten
seconds, the chief engineer stood ready with his stop-watch when the
electric button was pressed to ignite the motorite.
As the action was instantaneous, that is to say, as steam was got up
practically instantaneously and was escaping at the nozzle under full
head as quickly as a gun could be fired, he did not think of his
stop-watch, and it was some little time before I could get him to look
at the pressure gauge on the nozzle, so as to observe the character of
the escaping steam. His eyes had a blank, meaningless look, but it must
be confessed that he had the grit to stand there. Not so, however, with
the other members of the committee. Each of them was far more interested
in his own individual run than he was in the run of the apparatus, for
not one of them was in sight when the run was completed. They came
straggling back sheepishly, but no urging sufficed to bring them near
the apparatus during any of the succeeding runs.
THE MULE GUN
In the old days when the Indians were sometimes troublesome on the
Western frontier, an officer in the regular army, who was rather an
ingenious fellow, conceived the idea of making a mountain gun out of a
mule and the barrel of a common field-piece, using the mule for the
carriage. He therefore had the gun securely mounted on the back of the
beast.
They had not proceeded far with this novel battery, when a small knot of
hostile savages was espied quietly eating their midday meal within easy
range. The mounted gun was forthwith loaded heavily with grape and
canister, the mule taken by the head and pointed in the direction of the
Indians. A short piece of fuze that had been placed in the touch-hole of
the gun was ignited.
The mule, hearing the sizzing of the fuze, began to rear and snort and
kick and whirl about, while the officer and his men scudded to cover,
and flattened themselves out upon the ground. They had not long to wait
when there was a terrific crash. The gun had exploded under the
overcharge, with the utter demolition of the mule carriage.
The Indians, hearing the report, looked quickly about them, and seeing
the fragments of an exploded mule rocketing through the air, were
frightened nearly out of their wits, and fled precipitately.
HOW GUSSIE GOT LOADED
When I was a young man I taught several terms of school in Maine, where,
in the small country districts, the teacher is expected to be a walking
encyclopedia of information.
One day there came a loud knock upon the door of the schoolhouse. On
going out to see what was the cause of the imperative summons, I found
standing there the wife of one of the neighbors, white as a sheet with
agitation and alarm. She excitedly told me that her little boy, Gussie,
had just swallowed a bullet, and she asked me what she should do for
him.
"Why," said I pleasantly, "Give him a good charge of gunpowder. But be
careful not to point him toward anybody."
She went home and gave him a dose of gunpowder, without ever seeing the
joke.
DYNAMITE'S FREAK
A contractor, who does business up in New York State, told me the
following story:
A carload of nitroglycerin dynamite had been shipped to him, but was
held up in a freight-house for a day or two before delivery to him. One
night while it was there, the freight-house took fire. Hearing the
fire-alarm and looking out, he was astounded to see that it was the
freight-house burning. Believing that his carload of dynamite would be
sure to explode, he started to run to the scene in all haste, to warn
the firemen and others to keep far away from the inevitable explosion,
when, suddenly, there was a great burst of flame, which shot high into
the sky and flared out bright and wild in all directions, sending up an
enormous column of smoke. But this fierce combustion lasted only a few
minutes, and then subsided.
He knew that his dynamite had burned up, and, curiously enough, without
exploding.
He met the fire chief after the conflagration, and they spoke of the
fire. The chief remarked that there must have been some very combustible
freight on one of the cars. He said that, when the fire first started,
the firemen played a full stream of water on this car, but it did not do
any good. The car burned so fast and so fierce that they had to rush
away for their lives, or they would have been consumed by the intense
heat, and he wondered what it could be that would burn so fiercely.
When told that it was a carload of dynamite, he felt like a man who
discovers the next day that he had, during the night, walked along the
sheer edge of a high precipice.
Although dynamite in such quantities as a carload when ignited is almost
certain to explode instead of merely burning, still, sometimes, even
that quantity will take fire and burn up completely without exploding;
while, at other times, a single stick of dynamite when ignited will
detonate.
EXPLOSIVE VAGARIES
One of the old importers of picric acid in this country told me the
following story:
He sold about five tons of picric acid to a manufacturer of dynamite
doing business at a certain place up the Hudson, for employment as an
ingredient in a particular kind of high explosive.
Not being very familiar with picric acid and the character of the
exploder necessary to detonate it, the purchaser had poor success with
it, and he called upon the importer with the grievance that he had been
sold such a poor lot of picric acid that it was actually non-explosive,
and was therefore practically worthless, and he wanted the seller to
take it back immediately.
The importer could not convince him that he was mistaken, although he
insisted that it was only necessary to know how to explode it, and that,
when properly detonated, it was one of the most powerful explosives in
the world.
"No," said the purchaser, "that picric acid you have sent me is not an
explosive."
He admitted he knew that picric acid was recognized as a very powerful
explosive; but he was sure of one thing--that the picric acid that had
been sent him was not an explosive.
"Why," said he, "it is no more explosive than sand, and I want you to
take it back."
"All right," said the importer, "you may return me a sample of it, and I
will submit it to the requisite tests, and if it proves an inferior lot
I will take it back."
That day, during the purchaser's absence, some workmen were moving a
barrel of the picric acid in order to let a plumber mend a small leak in
a lead pipe, which supplied the place with water. Over and about this
lead pipe had been spilled a considerable quantity of picric acid, which
had formed picrate of lead with the lead pipe.
The friction from the barrel set off this picrate of lead, which in turn
detonated the picric acid; and the whole five tons went off with such
violence as amply to demonstrate its explosive qualities.
The following day the purchaser returned to the importer with the
complaint that that picric acid sold him was the most sensitive, most
violent and treacherous explosive material in the world.
The importer laughed, and reminded him of their previous conversation.
But, as the dynamite factory had been demolished and several men killed,
the purchaser did not respond very readily to the humor of the
situation.
THE TURKEY THAT WENT TO BED
Possibly it may not be diverging too much from dynamite stories to tell
of an experience of mine with a steam-cooker, which I invented away back
in the eighties.
In this cooker I was able to roast and bake by superheated steam.
Sometimes it worked very well. At other times the safety valve gave me a
great deal of trouble, being altogether too uncertain in its action.
One day I was sitting alone in the kitchen, steam-roasting a turkey,
when dispossessed Bridget, who was waiting in an adjoining room, opened
the kitchen door, and took a sly peep at me. I was endeavoring to
convince her that the thing was perfectly safe, when, of a sudden, that
cooker blew up. The kitchen windows were blown out, the door ripped off
its hinges, and the stove demolished.
Fortunately, none of the fragments found either Bridget or me. The oven
portion of the cooker, containing the turkey, went upstairs somewhere,
through the ceiling. Later developments showed that the turkey had gone
to bed in the room over the kitchen.
That cooker was my first patent.
BILL BENNETT, DETECTIVE
We had a neighbor, when I was a young man down in Maine, by the name of
Bill Bennett, a hard-working farmer, who was very proud of his pile of
dry hard wood, which he had prepared for the winter's cold.
Late in the autumn, however, the wood began to disappear faster than he
thought it ought. He was sure that someone was stealing it, and inasmuch
as his nearest neighbors had no store of wood whatsoever, and, too, were
notoriously shiftless, he concluded that they must be the pilferers.
A little bit of detective work that he practiced to ascertain the truth
of his conclusions was certainly ingenious and worked well.
Bennett took a dozen sticks of wood, and bored a large hole in the end
of each of them, which he filled with rifle powder, putting about a
pound into each stick. He then plugged the holes skillfully to conceal
the evidences of his work, sawing off a short bit of the plugged end of
each stick, so that the plug would not show, and distributed these
sticks upon the part of the pile that was shrinking. He was careful to
select the wood for his own burning from another portion of the heap.
The following evening he was looking from his window toward the house of
the neighbors, wondering how long it would be before his ingenuity bore
fruit, when suddenly there was a flash, a crash and a roar, followed by
screams of "Murder!" and "Fire!"
The mystery had been solved.
WINNING THE OX
This Bill Bennett was a good deal of a marksman, and one day while
attending a county fair, where he had imbibed a considerable measure of
bottled-up unsteadiness, he came reeling along to a group of men who
were engaged in shooting at a target. The range was long, and the price
paid by each contestant for a chance to display his skill, or lack of
it, was a dollar a shot, but the prize was a fat ox, which was destined
to go to the first who made a bull's-eye. As yet none had succeeded in
making the lucky shot.
Bill staggered into position, and threw down a ten-dollar bill for ten
shots. The attendants steadied him sufficiently to confine his wild
target practice to that part of the sky and horizon where the target was
located.
Bill had wasted nine shots without coming within speaking distance of
the target, which to his drunken sight appeared to be double. Rolling
like a ship in a storm, Bill brought the gun to his shoulder for the
last round, declaring, "By gum, I'm agoing to hit one of them targets
this time."
And he did. As they went sailing by, he let blaze at them, and behold,
it was a bull's-eye! Bill had won the ox on a one-to-a-million chance.
A DUEL TO THE DEATH
In the old pioneer days of Maine, when it was still a province of
Massachusetts, a young French officer had an altercation with the chief
of the Oldtown Indians, and according to the custom of the times,
challenged the Red Man to fight a duel with him.
The old Indian, according to the courtesies of the game, was allowed the
choice of weapons, and he chose two kegs of gunpowder. Each was to sit
upon a keg, with the bung out. Then two pistols were to be discharged in
succession. On the firing of the first pistol, two iron pokers, heated
to a white heat, were to be laid upon a table beside the duelists, which
was to be immediately followed by the discharge of the second pistol. At
this signal they were each to seize a poker and thrust it into the
bung-hole of the keg on which his adversary was sitting, the old Indian
calculating that he would be quicker than the Frenchman.
But the Frenchman had a little calculation of his own, and he figured
out something that the Indian had doubtless not thought of. This was
that the explosion of either keg would be certain to explode the other.
But he made a bluff of it, thinking that the old Indian too might be
bluffing, and so everything was arranged. Each mounted his respective
keg and the first pistol was fired. The savage was a graven image, but
the Frenchman did not wait for the second signal, and unlike Lot's wife,
he never looked back.
THE BEWITCHED FLINTLOCK
My father used to tell a good story about a one-time chief of the
Oldtown Indians, and, as it had to do in a way with explosions--indeed,
a series of them--I add it to my collection.
There was a farmer living in an adjacent town, who frequently received
visits from the old chief. On such occasions, the Red Man always carried
his shotgun with him. The weapon, according to the times, was a
flintlock, single-barreled muzzle-loader.
One day in the autumn, the farmer was feeding his turkeys by stringing a
long line of corn upon the ground, on either side of which the turkeys
were standing, head to head, in two opposing ranks for the feeding. The
Indian was present, and the farmer asked his guest what he would give
for a shot at that double line of turkeys' heads. The Indian answered
that he would give five dollars, if he could have every turkey that he
killed or wounded. The farmer, who had previously drawn the shot from
the Indian's gun, leaving only the powder charge, accepted the offer.
The Indian leveled his gun and fired; but not a turkey fell. The old Red
Man looked puzzled. The farmer laughed at his marksmanship, but the old
savage merely grunted, and went home.
The chief appeared again next day, and the farmer asked him how he would
like to take another shot, having again drawn off a charge of shot from
the Indian's gun. He would gladly give another five dollars for a try.
This time the discharge of the gun brought down a goodly number of
turkeys. The Indian had taken the precaution of loading his gun with a
double charge of shot. On the next visit received from the Indian, the
farmer unloaded the gun down to the powder charge, then put in a wad of
punk, and another powder charge with another wad of punk, and so on,
until he had loaded the weapon nearly to the muzzle. He then replaced
the gun in its position in the corner, dropped a fire-coal into the
muzzle, and invited the Indian to supper.
After the lapse of a few minutes, the Indian's gun went off, bang! Much
surprised, the Indian looked around, and remarked that it was a strange
occurrence, that he had never before known his gun to go off by itself.
While he was still cogitating over the strange occurrence, bang! went
the old gun again.
The Indian hurried through his supper, very greatly perturbed, but he
had not quite finished when the old gun spoke yet once again. The chief
rose from the table hurriedly, seized his ancient weapon, and started
off for home with as nearly a display of agitation as is permissible to
the dignity of the Red Man. Before he had gone far, however, the old gun
uttered another bang! He then broke into a rapid run, and just as he
arrived at his wigwam, the gun banged again. Now thoroughly frightened,
he hurled it from him over a fence. Still, for more than two hours the
Indian's weapon continued its mysterious barking.
When the farmer explained the trick to the old chief, he felt that he
had been somewhat compensated for the loss of his turkeys.
WHEN HE SHIRKED
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.