city of Wilmington was shaken to its foundations. Great chasms were rent
in the solid rock under the exploding magazines. Trees were torn up by
the roots. Iron castings, weighing tons, were hurled clean across the
Brandywine. Iron columns thick as a man's waist were twisted and bent
like copper wire. Horses outside the yards were found with legs missing;
men were found stripped clean of their clothes, and this curious fact
was developed, that a man or a horse in the region of explosion would
have shoes blown from the feet (iron shoes or leather shoes) if the legs
were on the ground at the moment of shock, but would keep shoes on if
the legs were lifted. Thus poor Green was found with both feet shod, and
so identified, although his body had no other stitch of covering, and
the explanation was that he probably saw the spark in time to spring
away, and was actually in the air when the explosion came.
In my investigations I have heard various stories showing what
uncertainty there is as to the behavior of dynamite in the presence of
fire. Workmen who handle it constantly in blasting operations say you
can put fire to a stick of dynamite without danger, and it will simply
burn away in bluish flame. On the other hand, they admit that in every
fifty or a hundred sticks there may be one where the touch of fire
_will_ bring explosion.
[Illustration: THE EXPLOSION IN THE NEW YORK CITY TUNNEL.]
It is quite certain this was the case in New York's recent tunnel
accident near One Hundred and Eightieth Street, and I have some facts of
interest here obtained from a workman who was in the main gallery at the
time. This man heard a shout of warning, and, looking down the rock
street, saw a puddle of blazing oil from one of the lamps lapping at the
side of a heavy wooden box. He knew that the box was full of dynamite,
and as he looked he saw the yellow oil flame turn to blue. That was
enough for him, and he started to run for his life. But the explosion
caught him in the first step, lifted him from the ground, and bore him
on, while his legs kept up the motions of running. He was running on the
air.
As he was thus hurled along his knee struck a large stone between the
siding and the north heading, and he fell on his face, half dazed. The
air was thick with strangling fumes, there was a frightful din about
him--yells and crashing stones. Every lamp had been blown out, and in
the utter darkness he could see the glaring eyeballs of fleeing negroes,
who cursed in awful oaths as they ran. He pressed his mouth close to the
ground, and found he could breathe better. He felt some one step over
him, and seized a leg. The leg kicked itself free and went on. He groped
about with his hands, and touched an iron rail; it was the little track
for hauling the dumping-cars. He crept along this painfully to the
siding, then down the siding to the shaft, where, in the blackness, he
found a frantic company--negroes mad with fright, Italians screaming and
praying, Irishmen keeping fairly cool, but wondering why, oh, why! the
elevator did not come, and several men stretched on the ground quite
still or groaning quietly.
Time lacks for the rest of the story; they took out men dressed in a
collar and shirt-band only--everything else blown off, and some whose
faces were mottled with fragments of stone, a kind of dynamite
tattooing, and some grievously injured. There are no limits to the fury
of dynamite, once it sets out to be cruel.
II
WE VISIT A DYNAMITE-FACTORY AND MEET A MAN WHO THINKS COURAGE IS AN
ACCIDENT
ON a certain pleasant morning in June, I set forth to visit a
dynamite-factory, and see with my own eyes, if might be, some of the men
who follow this strange and hazardous business. As the train rushed
along I thought of the power for good and evil that is in this wonderful
agent: dynamite piercing mountains; dynamite threatening armies and
blowing up great ships; a teacupful of dynamite shattering a fortress, a
teaspoonful of the essence of dynamite--that is, nitroglycerin--tearing
a man to atoms. What kind of fellows must they be who spend their lives
making dynamite!
In due course I found myself back in the hill land of northern New
Jersey, where everything is green and quiet, a lovely summer's retreat
with nothing in external signs to suggest an industry of violence. Stop;
here is a sign, though it doesn't seem much: two sleepy wagons lumbering
along the road between these cool woods and the waving fields. Farm
produce? Lumber? No. The first is loaded with a sort of yellow meal, and
trails the way with yellow sprinklings. That is sulphur. They use it at
the works. The second is piled up with crates, out of which come thick
glass necks like the heads of imprisoned turkeys. These are carboys of
nitric acid, hundreds of gallons of that terrible stuff which is so
truly liquid fire that a single drop of it on a piece of board will set
the wood in flames. This nitric acid mixed with innocent sweet glycerin
(_it_ comes along the road in barrels) makes nitroglycerin, and the
proper mixing of these two is the chief business of a dynamite-factory.
Farther down the road I came to a railroad track where a long
freight-train was standing on a siding. Some men were busy here loading
a car with clean-looking wooden boxes that might have held starch or
soap, but _did_ hold dynamite neatly packed in long, fat sticks like
huge fire-crackers. Each box bore this inscription in red letters: HIGH
EXPLOSIVES. DANGEROUS. I looked along the train and saw that there were
several cars closed and sealed, with a sign nailed on the outside:
POWDER. HANDLE CAREFULLY.
In this case "powder" means dynamite, for the product of a
dynamite-factory is always called powder. I think the men feel more
comfortable when they use that milder name. There was "powder" enough on
this train to wreck a city, but nobody seemed to mind. The horses
switched their tails. The men laughed and loitered. They might have been
laying bricks, for any interest they showed.
I asked one of them if it is considered safe to haul car-loads of
dynamite about the country. He said that some people consider it safe,
and some do not; some railroads will carry dynamite, while others refuse
it.
"Suppose a man were to shoot a rifle-ball into one of these cars," I
asked, "do you think it would explode?"
This led to an argument. One of the group was positive it _would_
explode. Concussion, he declared, is the thing that sets off dynamite.
Another knew of experiments at the works where they had fired
rifle-balls into quantities of dynamite, and found that sometimes it
exploded and sometimes it didn't.
Then a third man spoke up with an air of authority. "You've got to have
a red spark," said he, "to set off dynamite. I've handled it long enough
to know. Here's an experiment that's been tried: They took an old
flat-car and loaded it with rocks; then they fastened a box of dynamite
to the bumper, and let the car run down a steep grade, bang! into
another car anchored at the bottom. And they found that the dynamite
never exploded unless the bumpers were faced with iron. It didn't matter
how much concussion they got with wooden bumpers, the dynamite was like
that much putty; but as soon as a red spark jumped into it out of the
iron, why, off she'd go."
Then he instanced various cases where powder-cars had gone through
railroad wrecks without exploding, although boxes of dynamite had been
smashed open and scattered about.
"How about that car of ours the other day up in central New York?" said
the first man. "Everything blown to pieces, and six lads killed."
He smiled grimly, but the other persisted: "That collision only proves
what I say. There was a red-hot locomotive plowing through a car of
dynamite, and of course she went up. But it wasn't the concussion did
it; it was the sparks."
"You say that it takes a red spark," I observed, "to set off dynamite.
Do you mean that a white spark wouldn't do it?"
"That's what I mean," said he. "It seems queer, but it's a fact. Put a
white-hot poker into a box of dynamite, and it will only burn; but let
the poker cool down until it's only red-hot and the dynamite will
explode."
[Illustration: "EVERYTHING WAS BLOWN TO PIECES."]
Pondering this remarkable statement, I continued on my way, and
presently, not seeing any big building, asked a farmer where the
Atlantic Dynamite Works were. He swept the horizon with his arm, and
said they were all about us; they covered hundreds of acres--little, low
buildings placed far apart, so that if one exploded it wouldn't set off
the rest.
"The dynamite-magazines are along the hillside yonder," he said. "If
they went up, I guess there wouldn't be much left of the town."
"What town?" said I.
"Why, Kenvil. That's where the dynamite-mixers live. It's over there.
Quickest way is across this field and over the fence."
I followed his advice, and presently passed near a number of small brick
buildings so very innocent-looking that I found myself saying, "What!
_this_ blow up, or _that_ little sputtering shanty wreck a town?" It
seemed ridiculous. I learned afterward that I had walked through the
most dangerous part of the works; it isn't size here that counts.
I paused at several open doors, and got a whiff of chemicals that made
me understand the dynamite-sickness of which I had heard. No man can
breathe the strangling fumes of nitric acid and nitrated glycerin
without discomfort, and every man here _must_ breathe them. They rise
from vats and troughs like brownish-yellow smoke; they are in the
mixing-rooms, in the packing-rooms, in the freezing-house, in the
separating-house, everywhere; and they take men in the throat, and make
their hearts pound strangely, and set their heads splitting with pain.
Not a workman escapes the dynamite-headache; new hands are wretched with
it for a fortnight, and even the well-seasoned men get a touch of it on
Monday mornings after the Sunday rest.
In walking about the works I noticed that the several buildings,
representing different steps in the manufacture of explosives, are
united by long troughs or pipes sufficiently inclined to allow the
nitroglycerin to flow by its own weight from one building to another, so
that you watch the first operations in dynamite-making at the top of a
slope, and the last ones at the bottom. Of course this transportation by
flow is possible for nitroglycerin only while it is a liquid, and not
after it has been absorbed by porous earth and given the name of
dynamite and the look of moist sawdust. As dynamite it is transported
between buildings on little railroads, with horses to haul the cars.
I noted also that most of the buildings are built against a hillside or
surrounded by heavy mounds of earth, so that if one of them blows up,
the others may be protected against the flight of debris. Without such
barricade the shattered walls and rocks would be hurled in all
directions with the energy of cannonballs, and a single explosion would
probably mean the destruction of the entire works.
At one place I saw a triangular frame of timbers and iron supporting a
five-hundred-pound swinging mortar, that hung down like a great gipsy
kettle under its tripod. In front of this mortar was a sand-heap, and
here, I learned, were made the tests of dynamite, a certain quantity of
this lot or that being exploded against the sand-heap, and the mortar's
swing back from the recoil giving a measure of its force. The more
nitroglycerin there is in a given lot of dynamite, the farther back the
mortar will swing. It should be understood that there are many different
grades of dynamite, the strength of these depending upon how much
nitroglycerin has been absorbed by a certain kind of porous earth.
In a little white house beyond the laboratory I found the superintendent
of the works, a man of few words, accustomed to give brief orders and
have them obeyed. He did not care to talk about dynamite--they never do.
He did not think there was much to say, anyhow, except that people have
silly notions about the danger. He had been working with dynamite now
for twenty-five years, and never had an accident--that is, himself. Oh,
yes; some men had been killed in his time, but not so many as in other
occupations--not nearly so many as in railroading. Of course there was
danger in dealing with any great force; the thing would run away with
you now and then; but on the whole he regarded dynamite as a very well
behaved commodity, and much slandered.
"Then you think dynamite-workers have no great need of courage?" I
suggested.
"No more than others. Why should they? They work along for years, and
nothing happens. They might as well be shoveling coal. And if anything
does happen, it's over so quick that courage isn't much use."
Having said this, he hesitated a moment, and then, as if in a spirit of
fairness, told of a certain man at the head of a nitroglycerin-mill who
on one occasion _did_ do a little thing that some people called brave.
He wouldn't give the name of this "certain man," but I fancied I could
guess it.
[Illustration: "HE WENT TO WORK THROWING WATER ON THE BURNING BOXES."]
This nitroglycerin-mill, it seems, was on the Pacific coast, whence they
used to ship the dynamite on vessels that loaded right alongside the
yards. One day a mixing-house exploded, and hurled burning timbers over
a vessel lying near that had just received a fresh cargo. Her decks were
piled with boxes of explosives--wooden boxes, which at once took fire.
When this "certain man" rushed down to the dock, the situation was as
bad as could be. There were tons of dynamite ready to explode, and a hot
fire was eating deeper into the wood with every second. And all the
workmen had run for their lives!
"Well," said the superintendent, "what this man did was to grab a bucket
and line, and jump on the deck. Yes, it was burning; everything was
burning. But he went to work lowering the bucket overside and throwing
water on the flaming boxes. After a while he put 'em out, and the
dynamite didn't explode at all; but it would have exploded in a mighty
short time if he had kept away, for the wood was about burned through in
several places. I know that's a true story, because, well--because I
_know_ it."
"Don't you call that man brave?" I asked.
The superintendent shook his head. "He was brave in that particular
instance, but he might not have been brave at another time. You never
can tell what a man will do in danger. It depends on how he feels or on
how a thing happens to strike him. A man might act like a hero one day
and like a coward another day, with exactly the same danger in both
cases. There's a lot of chance in it. If that man I'm telling you about
had been up late the night before, or had eaten a tough piece of steak
for breakfast, the chances are he would have run like the rest."
III
HOW JOSHUA PLUMSTEAD STUCK TO HIS NITROGLYCERIN-VAT IN AN EXPLOSION AND
SAVED THE WORKS
I DROVE over from the works to Kenvil under the escort of a red-nosed
man who discoursed on local matters, particularly on the prospects of
his youngest son, who was eighteen years old and earned three dollars a
day.
"What does he do?" I asked.
"He's a packer," said the red-nosed man.
"What does he pack?"
"Dynamite. Guess there ain't no other stuff he c'd pack an' get them
wages. Jest the same, I wish he'd quit, specially sence the big blow-up
t' other day."
"Why, what blew up?" I inquired.
"Freezing-house did with an all-fired big lot of nitroglycerin. Nobody
knows what set her off. Reg'lar miracle there wa'n't a lot killed. Man
in charge, feller named Ball, he went out to look at a water-pipe.
Hadn't been out the door a minute when off she went. Say, you'd oughter
seen the boys run! They tell me some of 'em jumped clean through the
winders, sashes an' all. If ye want to know more about it, there's my
boy now; he was right near the house when it happened."
We drew up at the Kenvil hotel, where a young man was sitting. Here was
the modern dynamite-worker, and not at all as I had pictured him. He
looked like a summer boarder who liked to take things easy and wear good
clothes. Wondering much, I sat down and talked to this young man, a
skilful dynamite-packer, it appears, who happened at the time to be
taking a day off.
"They put me at machine-packing a few days ago," he said, "and it's made
my wrist lame. Going to rest until Monday."
After some preliminaries I asked him about the process of packing
dynamite, and he explained how the freshly mixed explosive is delivered
at the various packing-houses in little tubs, a hundred pounds to a tub,
and how they dig into it with shovels, and mold it into shape on the
benches like so much butter, and ram it into funnels, and finally, with
the busy tamping of rubber-shod sticks, squeeze it down into the paper
shells that form the cartridges. One would say they play with
concentrated death as children play with sawdust dolls, but he declared
it safe enough.
"How large are the cartridges?" I asked.
"Oh, different sizes. The smallest are about eight inches long, and the
largest thirty. And they vary from one inch thick up to two and a half.
I know a man who carried a thirty-inch cartridge all the way to
Morristown in an ordinary passenger-car. He had it wrapped in a
newspaper, under his arm like a big loaf of bread. But say, he took
chances, all right."
At this another man informed us that people often carry nitroglycerin
about with them, and take no risk, by simply pouring it into a big
bottle of alcohol. Then it can do no harm; and when they want to use the
explosive, they have only to evaporate the alcohol.
The talk turned to precautions taken against accidents. In all
powder-mills the workmen are required to change their clothes before
entering the buildings, and to put on rubber-soled shoes. There must be
no bit of metal about a man's person, no iron nail or buckle, nothing
that could strike fire; and of course the workman who would bring a
match on the premises would be counted worse than an assassin.
"Just the same, though, matches get into the works once in a while,"
remarked the young packer. "I found a piece of a match one day in a tub
of dynamite; it had the head on, too. Say, it's bad enough to find
buttons and pebbles, but when I saw that match-head--well, it made me
weak in the knees."
This brought back the old question, When does dynamite explode, and when
does it not explode? I mentioned the red-spark theory.
"I think that's correct," agreed the packer. "I've watched 'em burn old
dynamite-boxes, and if there are iron nails in the boxes they explode as
soon as the nails get red-hot; if there are no nails, they don't
explode."
"You mean empty boxes?" I asked.
"Certainly; but there's nitroglycerin in the wood, lots of it. It oozes
out of the dynamite, especially on a hot day, and soaks into everything.
Why, I suppose there's enough nitroglycerin in the overalls I wear to
blow a man into--well, I wouldn't want to lay 'em on an anvil and give
'em a whack with a sledge."
There was a certain novelty to me in the thought of a pair of old
overalls exploding; but I was soon to hear of stranger things. By this
time other workmen had drawn up chairs, and were ready now with modest
contributions from their own experience.
"Tell ye a queer thing," said one man. "In that explosion the other
day,--I mean the freezing-house,--a car loaded with powder [dynamite]
had just passed, not a minute before the explosion. Lucky for the three
men with the car, wasn't it? But what gets me is how the blast, when it
came, blew the harness off the horse. Yes, sir; that's what it
did--clean off; and away he went galloping after the men as hard as he
could leg it. Nobody touched a buckle or a strap. It was dynamite
unhitched that animal."
"Dynamite did another trick that day," put in a tall man. "It caught a
bird on the wing. Dunno whether 'twas a robin or a swaller, but 'twas a
bird, all right. Caught it in a sheet of tin blowed off the roof, an'
jest twisted that little bird all up as it sailed along, and when it
struck the ground, there was the bird fast in a cage made in the air out
of a tin roof. Alive? Yes, sir, alive; and that shows how fast dynamite
does business."
So the talk ran on, with many little details of explosions. The expert
explained that the air waves of a great concussion move along with
crests and troughs like water waves, and the shattering effect comes
only at the crests, so that all the windows might be broken in a house,
say, half a mile from an explosion, and no windows be broken in a house
two hundred yards nearer. The first house would have been smitten by a
destructive wave crest, the second passed over by a harmless wave
trough. And, by the way, when windows are broken by these blasts of
concussion, it appears that they are usually broken _outward_, not
inward, and that the fragments are found on the ground outside the
house, not on the floors inside. The reason of this is that the
concussion waves leave behind them a partial vacuum, and windows are
broken by the air _inside_ houses rushing out.
"How about thunder-storms?" I asked.
"There is always danger," said the expert, "and all hands hurry out of
the works as soon as the lightning begins to play. If a bolt struck a
lot of dynamite it would set it off."
Then he explained that the policy of dynamite manufacturers is to handle
explosives in small quantities, say a ton at a time, each lot being
finished and hauled away in wagons before another lot is started. This
is possible because of the short time occupied in making dynamite. He
assured me, for instance, that if there were only raw materials at the
works on a certain morning when the seven-o'clock whistle blew, it would
be perfectly possible to have a ton of dynamite-cartridges finished,
packed in boxes, and loaded on freight-cars by nine o'clock.
After this some one told of a thrilling happening in the mixing-house,
by the great vat, wherein nitroglycerin is mixed with porous earth,
called dope, and becomes dynamite. Over this vat four men work
continually, two with rakes, two with hoes, kneading half a ton or more
of explosive dough to the proper consistency.
One day a powder-car loaded with heavy stone got loose on its track a
quarter of a mile up the slope, and started down the steep grade. The
tracks ran straight into the mixing-house. The switch was open, and the
first thing these men knew, there was an angry clang at the switch, and
then a swift, heavy car was plunging toward the open door, with every
chance that it would set off twelve hundred pounds of dynamite there.
Workmen outside shouted, and then stared in horror. Not a man in the
mixing-house moved. All four kept their places around the vat, held
tight to their rakes and hoes, while the car, just missing the dynamite,
hurled its mass of two tons through the back wall of the building, and
spent its force against a tree-trunk. There was no explosion, and
nothing happened, which was something of a miracle; but what impressed
me was that these four men stood still, not from courage, but because
they were frozen with fear!
[Illustration: "A SWIFT, HEAVY CAR WAS PLUNGING TOWARD THE OPEN DOOR."]
While there is danger in every step of dynamite manufacture, it appears
that the center of peril is in the nitrating-house, where the fresh
glycerin is mixed with nitric acid, or, more correctly, is nitrated by
it. This operation takes place in a great covered vat about which are
many pipes and stop-cocks. A man stands here like an engineer at the
throttle, watching his thermometer and letting in fresh glycerin. These
are his two duties, and upon the right performance of them depends the
safety of the works. Every hour he must let in some seven hundred pounds
of glycerin upon the deadly acid, and every hour he must draw off some
fifteen hundred pounds of nitroglycerin and let it go splashing away in
a yellowish stream down the long, uncovered trough that leads to the
separating-house yonder. From this separating-house runs another trough
to the freezing-house, and a third to the distant mixing-house. These
three troughs inclose an oblong space, at the corners of which stand the
nitrating-house, the separating-house, and the freezing-house. In each
one of these, at any hour of the day, is a wagon-load of pure
nitroglycerin, while in the three troughs are little rivers of
nitroglycerin always flowing.