THE WONDER BOOK
OF KNOWLEDGE

Copyright, 1921
By L. T. MYERS
Copyright, 1917-19

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This book is presented to those, both young and old, who wish to have a non-technical account of the history, evolution and production of some of the every-day wonders of the modern industrial age; coupled with occasional glimpses of the wonderful object-lessons afforded by nature in her constructive activities in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms; and simple, understandable answers to the myriad puzzling questions arising daily in the minds of those for whom the fascination of the “Why” and “How” is always engrossing.

Although not intended primarily as a child’s book, the interest-compelling pictures and clear, illuminating answers to the constant avalanche of questions suggested by the growing mind, unite in making far happier children in the home and brighter children at school. Parents and teachers will also recognize the opportunity to watch for subjects by which the child’s interest appears to be more than ordinarily attracted, and, in so doing, will be enabled to guide the newly-formed tendencies into the proper channels. With the greatest thinkers of the age advocating vocational training, and leading educators everywhere pointing out that the foundation of a practical education for life must be laid in the home, thoughtful parents will not overlook the fact that a book which both entertains and instructs is of supreme importance in the equipment of their children.

In the preparation of this book its function has been considered as that of gathering up some of the multitudinous bits of information of interest, both to the inquiring child and the older reader, and putting them in shape to be digested by the ordinary searcher after knowledge. The book is intended, not for a few technical specialists, but for the larger number of men, women and children who are not interested in exhaustive treatises, but who are seeking to gain some fair idea about the numberless every-day subjects that arise in ordinary conversation, or that they meet with in reading and about which they desire some definite and satisfactory information.

Most of us realize that we live in a world of wonders and we recognize progress in industries with which we come in personal contact, but the daily routine of our lives is ordinarily so restricted by circumstances that many of us fail to follow works which do not come within our own experience or see beyond the horizon of our own specific paths.

The workman who tends the vulcanizer in the rubber factory has come to take his work as a matter of course; the man who assembles a watch, or a camera, is not apt to appreciate the fact that there have been marvelous developments in his line of manufacturing; the operator of a shoe machine, or of an elevator, does not see anything startling or absorbing in the work—and so we find it almost throughout the entire list of industries.

The tendency of the seemingly almost imperceptible movement marking onward development in the work that is familiar is to dull the mind toward opportunities for[2] improvement in the accustomed task. With the exception of the man who is at times impressed with the remarkable advances made in some strikingly spectacular industry, because such knowledge comes to him suddenly, the average workman is often too much inclined to regard himself as a machine, and performs his duties more or less automatically, without attempting to exercise imagination or those powers of adaptation upon which all progress has been builded.

A single volume is of necessity too limited a space for anything approximating a complete record of the vast progress which has been made in American Industry. Consequently it has only been possible to select the more characteristic features of the twentieth century and point out the strides by which some of the prominent industries have advanced to their present proportions. If the hitherto undisputed maxim that “the more the individual knows the more he is worth to himself and his associates” still prevails, the chronicling of the developments in some fields should stimulate thought and experiment toward the adaptation of similar methods in others. It is to that end that authorities in each of the industries presented have co-operated in the compilation of this interesting and instructive volume.

The Editor.

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The history of invention has no chapter more interesting than that of sailing under the ocean’s waves. The navigation of the air approaches it in character, but does not present the vital problems of undersea travel. Both these new fields of navigation have been notably developed within recent years, largely as a result of the great European war. It is the story of sailing in the depths beneath the ocean’s surface with which we here propose to deal. The problem was settled easily enough for his purpose by Jules Verne, in his “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” But that was pure fiction without scientific value. It is with fact, not fiction, that we are here concerned.

The story takes us back three hundred years, to the reign of James I, of England, when a crude submarine boat was built, to be moved by oars, but one of no value other than as a curiosity. At a later date a man named Day built a similar boat, wagering that he would go down one hundred yards and remain there twenty-four hours. So far as is known, he still remains there, winning the wager which he has not come up to claim.

Other such boats were constructed at intervals, but the first undersea boat of any historical importance was the “American Turtle,” built by a Yankee named David Bushnell during the time that the British held New York in the Revolutionary War. He sought to blow up the British frigate “Eagle” with the aid of a torpedo[10] and nearly succeeded in doing so, seriously scaring the British shippers by the explosion of his torpedo.

The next to become active in this line of discovery was Robert Fulton, the inventor of the first practical steamboat. He, like Bushnell, was an American, but his early experiments were in France, where Napoleon patronized him. With his boat, the “Nautilus,” he made numerous descents, going down twenty-five feet in the harbor of Brest and remaining there an hour. He said that he could build a submarine that could swim under the water and destroy any war vessel afloat. But the French Admiralty refused to sustain him, one old admiral saying, “Thank God, France still fights her battles on the surface, not beneath it.”

Fulton finally went to England and there built a boat with which he attached a torpedo to a condemned brig, set aside for that purpose. The brig was blown up in the presence of an immense throng, and Fulton finally sold his invention to the British government for $75,000. Nothing further came of it.

The submarine next came into practical view during the American Civil War, when the Confederate government built several such vessels, known usually as “Davids” from their inventor. Now, for the first time, did such a craft demonstrate its powers. On the night of February 17, 1864, one of the “Davids,” the “Hunley,” blew up the steamship “Housatonic” in Charleston harbor. The wave caused by the explosion swamped the submarine and it and its crew found a watery grave.

Other submarines were built and experimented with, not only in the United States but in European countries. One of the later inventors was an Irish-American named John P. Holland, who, in 1876, built a submarine called the “Fenian Ram.” The “Ram” collapsed with the collapse of the Fenian movement. Other boats were built and tried, but the successful period of the submarine was deferred until after 1893, when the United States Congress appropriated $200,000 to encourage such an enterprise and invited inventors to submit designs. This, and a similar movement in France, formed the first official recognition of the value of vessels of this class.

The prize offered by Congress brought out three designs, one by Mr. Holland, the “Ram” inventor, one by George C. Barker, and a third by Simon Lake. The names of Holland and Lake have since been closely associated with the history of the submarine. Mr. Holland’s device secured approval and in 1894 he received a contract to build a submarine vessel. This, named the “Plunger,” was begun in 1895, but was finally abandoned and a vessel of different type, the “Holland,” was built in its place. It was accepted by the government in 1900. A number of others similar to the “Holland” were subsequently built.

The type of these vessels was what became known as the “diving.” They were controlled by a rudder placed at the stern of the vessel and acting in both a horizontal and a vertical direction, the force of the screw propeller driving the boat forward in the direction desired. In 1904 the navy of the United States possessed eight Holland boats and there were also a number of them in the British navy.

Mr. Lake’s design, offered in 1893 but not accepted, had as its novel feature a plan by which a door could be opened in the bottom of the ship and the crew leave and enter it in diving suits, the water being kept out by the force of compressed air. To maintain the vessel on an even keel he introduced four vanes, called “hydroplanes,” for regulating the depth of descent. By aid of these and the horizontal rudder it was found that the vessel would run for hours at a constant depth and on a level keel. There were other devices for diving or rising to the surface.

In 1901 Mr. Lake built a large vessel of this type which was sold to the Russian government and was in commission at Vladivostock during the Russian-Japanese[11] War. He afterwards received orders from this and other governments for a number of vessels of the even-keel type, and his principles of control have since been generally adopted as the safest and most reliable controlling agency for under-water craft.

We have not in the above brief statement described all the efforts to invent a satisfactory under-water boat. In several of the nations of Europe experiments, more or less available, had been tried, but the most practical results were achieved by the American inventors, Bushnell, Fulton, Davy, Holland and Lake. It will suffice here to say that the most successful of submarines were those constructed by Holland and Lake. An important addition was made in 1901 in a French boat, the “Morse,” built at Cherbourg. The difficulty of navigators telling where they were when under water, and of changing their course safely without coming to the surface to reconnoitre, was in a large measure overcome by the addition of a “periscope.” This, rising above the water, and provided with reflecting lenses, enabled the steersman to discover the surface conditions and see any near vessel or other object. The “Morse” was able to sink in seventy seconds and her crew could remain under water for sixteen hours without strain.

We have given an epitome of the development of the submarine vessel up to the opening of the twentieth century. It had now reached a successful status of achievement and during the early years of that century was to display a remarkable progress. Holland and Lake may be looked upon as the parents of the modern development of the submersible boat, their designs being at the base of the great European progress.

France took up the work actively, its most successful early vessel being the “Narval,” built in 1899. This was 118 feet long by 8 feet 3 inches beam, 106 tons surface and 168 submerged displacement. She was a double-deck vessel controlled by Lake hydroplanes, and had installed steam power for surface travel and electric power for undersea work. The French at this time kept their methods secret, and no useful type had been developed in England, the result being that a plant was[12] provided for the building of Holland boats in that country. Germany used the Lake devices, which had not been patented in that country and were made use of by the Krupps. Thus it appears that the modern submarines, as now built and used in the navies of the world, owe their success to principles of construction and devices for control originated and developed by American inventors.

The internal-combustion engine is the heart of the submarine. Steam, with its heavy engine, has been long set aside, and electricity, derived from the storage battery, yet awaits sufficient development. Gasoline succeeded them. The internal-combustion engine became essential from its light weight and the fact that it could be started and shut down instantly. This is of prime importance, as permitting quick submergence or emergence, either to escape from a high-speed destroyer or to capture a merchantman. It weighs less per horse power, takes up less room and requires less fuel per hour than any other reliable motor. It was early used in both the Holland and Lake boats and is still the chief prime motor.

The difficulty with the early boats was that they were slow in speed, making only from eight to nine knots per hour. Increased speed was demanded by governments and more powerful engines, within a fixed limit of weight, were demanded. In doing this engines were built of such flimsy construction that they soon went to pieces. The gasoline used also gave off a gas of highly explosive character and one very likely to escape from leaky tanks or joints. Several explosions took place in consequence, in one of which twenty-three men were killed. As a result all the nations demanded that a non-explosive fuel should be used, and builders turned to the Diesel engine as offering a solution to the difficulty.

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This heavy oil engine, weighing about five hundred pounds per horse-power, was not adapted to the submarine, and efforts have been made to decrease the weight. These have not as yet had a satisfactory result and experiments are still going on.

As the engine is the heart of the submarine, the periscope is its eye. This is, in its simpler forms, a stiff, detachable tube from fifteen to twenty feet long and about four inches in diameter. On its top is an object glass which takes in all objects within its range and transmits an image of them through a right-angled prism and down the tube. By means of other lenses and prisms an image of the external object is thus made visible to those within the submarine. In this process of transmission there is a certain loss of light, and to allow for that the image is magnified to about one-quarter above natural size.

To obtain in this manner a correct idea of the distance of the object seen proved difficult, but by continued experiment this difficulty has been overcome. Mr. Lake developed an instrument suited to this purpose and one which gave a simultaneous view of the entire horizon. There is one fault in the periscope not easy to obviate. It is an instrument for day use only. When dark comes on it becomes useless, and this does away with the possibility of a successful submarine attack by night.

The periscope is the one part of the submarine scout equipment that is open to vision from the surface. But while the outlook of the undersea captain, aided by his telescopic sights, has a radius of several miles, the periscope tube, of only four or five-inch diameter and painted of a neutral tint, is not easily seen. If the sea is a little choppy it is difficult to discover it with the naked eye at about 300 or 400 yards away, or in a smooth sea at over 500 yards.

The idea that a submarine may be located by an aeroplane is looked upon by Mr. Lake as a fallacy, except in water of crystal-like clearness, like that of the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, and periscopes are now being made to scour the heavens as well as the horizon, so that the presence of an enemy aeroplane can easily be seen. An attack by an aeroplane bomb, therefore, can readily be avoided, in view of the difficulty of hitting such an object from the upper air.

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The submarine is the guerrilla of the sea. Its tactics are like those of the Indian who fights under cover or lies in ambush for his enemy. It is the weaker party and can hope for success only through strategy. The old adage that “all is fair in love and war” applies to this new weapon of destruction as to every warlike instrument. It is its invisibility that makes the submarine the terror of the seas. This has been well proved during the European war. The North Sea and the English Channel have been invaded by German submarines which have made great havoc among merchant ships. And it is well to draw attention to the fact that submarines are safe from each other. In no case has a battle taken place between two of these armed sharks except in the one instance reported of an Austrian sinking an Italian submarine. But in this case the Italian boat was on the surface and was at the time practically a surface ship.

During the war the Germans were especially active in the use of the submarine, and did much in making them an effective terror of the seas. With no mercantile marine of their own to guard, they had a free field for attack in the abundant shipping of their foes. The loss of ships was so numerous and became such a common occurrence that little attention was finally paid to them except when great loss of life took place, as in the signal instance of the “Lusitania.”

The great mission of the submarine during the European war was as a commerce destroyer. Many ships were sunk and many lives, with cargoes of great value, were lost, and it was not until the summer of 1916 that the submarine appeared in a new rôle, that of a commerce carrier. On July 9th of that year the people of Baltimore were astounded by the appearance in their port of a submarine vessel of unusual size and novel errand. Instead of being a destroyer of merchandise, this new craft was an unarmed carrier of merchandise. It had crossed the Atlantic on a voyage of 4,000 miles in extent, laden with dyestuffs to supply the needs of American weavers.

This new type of vessel, the “Deutschland,” was an undersea craft of 315 feet length and a gross tonnage of 701 tons, its cargo capacity being more than 1,000 tons. It had crossed the ocean in defiance of the wide cordon of enemy warships which swarmed over part of its route, and reached port in safety after a memorable voyage, to the surprise and interest of the world. Leaving the port of Bremenhaven on June 18th, and halting at Heligoland for four days to train its crew, it made its way across the Atlantic in sixteen days. During this voyage it lay for two hours on the ocean bottom in the English Channel and was submerged in all not over ninety hours, the remainder of the voyage being made on the surface.

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Its crew, composed of twenty-six men and three officers, found their novel voyage rather agreeable than otherwise. Supplied with plenty of good food, a well-selected library, a graphophone with an abundance of music records, and other means of convenience and enjoyment, their voyage was more of a holiday then a hardship, and they reached their transatlantic port none the worse for their hazardous trip. It was not the longest that had been made. Other submarines had voyaged from German ports to the eastern limit of the Mediterranean, but it was the most notable and attracted the widest attention.

The return voyage promised to be more perilous then the outgoing one. A fleet of British and French ships gathered around the outlet of Chesapeake Bay, alert to capture the daring mariners and their ship, if possible. Ready to leave Baltimore on July 20th, with a return cargo of gold, nickel and rubber, the captain of the “Deutschland” shrewdly awaited a favorable opportunity and on August 1st began his voyage, plunging under sea as he left the American coast-line and easily evading the line of floating foemen. The return to its home port a success, a second round-trip voyage was made and completed on December 11th, in the course of which a convoying tug-boat was rammed and sunk with the loss of several lives, shortly after leaving New London, Conn. The “Deutschland” was sent out by private parties, for purely commercial purposes, not as a military enterprise.

Such is the story of a pioneer enterprise, that of the use of submarine vessels as commerce carriers. It is one not likely to be supplemented in times of peace, since surface boats would be cheaper and more available. But in future wars—if such there are to be—it may point to a future of advantageous trade.

Commerce is not the only peaceful mission of the submarine. In 1895 was organized an association known as the Lake Submarine Company, its purpose being to use the Lake type of submarine boat for the recovery of lost treasures from the sea bottom and for other possibilities of undersea work. This company is still in[16] existence, its various purposes being to recover sunken ships and their cargoes, to build breakwaters and other submerged constructions, to aid in submarine tunnel building, to dredge for gold, to fish for pearls and sponges, and for similar operations.

The first vessel adapted to these purposes was the “Argonaut,” built by Simon Lake in 1894. The important feature of this boat was a diver’s compartment, enabling divers to leave the vessel when submerged, for the purpose of operating on wrecks or performing other undersea duties. This vessel and its successors have bottom doors for the use of divers, as previously stated. They are now used for numerous purposes for which they are much better adapted then the old system of surface diving, the sea bottom being under direct observation and within immediate reach.

This sea bottom, in localities near land, is abundantly sown with wrecks, old and new, and in many cases bearing permanently valuable cargoes, such as gold and coal. The Lake system greatly simplifies the work of search for sunken ships, the vessels being able in a few hours’ time to search over regions which would have taken months in the old method. Many wrecks have been found by these bottom-prowling scouts and valuable material recovered. Thus vessels laden with coal have been traced that had been many years under the water and deeply covered with sand and silt, and their cargoes brought to the surface.

The gold-dredging spoken of refers to the working of gold-bearing sands found at the mouth of certain rivers in Alaska and South America. Places on the Alaskan coast, laid bare at high tide, are said to have yielded as much as $12,000 per cubic yard. With the Lake system it is possible to gather material from such localities to a depth of 150 or more feet, the material being drawn up by suction pumps into the vessel and its gold recovered.

Another important application is that of fishing for pearl shells, sponges and coral. This is blind work when done by divers from the surface, the returns being largely matters of chance. By aid of submerged boats, with their powerful electric lights, the work becomes one of certainty rather than of chance. The recovery of the oyster, clam and other edible shell-fish is also a feature of the work which the Lake Company has in view. The present method of dredging is of the “hit or miss” character, while the submarine method is capable of thorough work. Vessels have been designed for this purpose with a capacity of gathering oysters from good ground at the rate of 5,000 bushels per hour. In regard to submarine engineering, of its many varieties, the Lake system is likely to be a highly useful aid and assistance.

These particulars are given to show that the submarine vessel is not wholly an instrument of “frightfulness,” as indicated by its use in war, but is capable of being made useful for many purposes in peace. Some of these have here been very briefly stated. With continued practice its utility will grow, and by its aid the sea bottom up to a certain depth may become as open to varied operations as is the land surface.

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America has captured the forces of Nature, harnessed the floods and made the desert bloom, builded gigantic bridges and arrogant skyscrapers and bored roadways through solid rock and beneath water, but the most spectacular of all spectacular accomplishments is the Panama Canal.

Some four centuries ago, Balboa, the intrepid, the persevering, led his little band of adventurers across the Isthmus of Darien, as it was then called, and, leaving their protection, gave rein to his impatience by going on ahead and climbing alone, slowly and painfully, the continental divide, from which vantage point he discovered the world’s largest ocean.

We are told that, later, gathering his followers, he walked out into the surf and with his sword in his right hand and the banner of Castile in his left gave the vast expanse of water its present name and claimed all the land washed by its waves the lawful property of the proud country to which he owed allegiance.

The narrowness of the Isthmus naturally suggested the cutting of a waterway through it. It interposed between Atlantic and Pacific a barrier in places less than fifty miles wide. To sail from Colon to Panama—forty-five miles as the bird flies—required a voyage around Cape Horn—some ten thousand miles. Yet it was nearly four centuries before any actual effort was made to construct such a canal.

In 1876 an organization was perfected in France for making surveys and collecting data on which to base the construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and in 1878, a concession for prosecuting the work was secured from the Colombian Government. In May, 1879, an international congress was convened, under the auspices of Ferdinand de Lesseps, to consider the question of the best location and plan of the canal.

The Panama Canal Company was organized, with Ferdinand de Lesseps as its president, and the stock of this company was successfully floated in December, 1880. The two years following were devoted largely to surveys, examinations and preliminary work. In 1889 the company went into bankruptcy and operations were suspended until the new Panama Canal Company was organized in 1894.

The United States, not unmindful of the advantages of an Isthmian Canal, had from time to time, made surveys of the various routes. With a view to government ownership and control, Congress directed an investigation, with the result that the Commission reported, on November 16, 1901, in favor of Panama and recommended the lock type of canal, appraising the value of the rights, franchises, concessions, lands, unfinished work, plans and other property, including the railroad of the new Panama Canal Company, at $40,000,000. An act of Congress, approved June 28, 1902, authorized the President of the United States to acquire this property at this figure, and also to secure from the Republic of Colombia perpetual control of a strip of land not less than six miles wide across the Isthmus and the right to excavate, construct and operate and protect thereon a canal of such depth and capacity as would afford convenient passage to the largest ships now in use or which might be reasonably anticipated.

Later on a treaty was made with the Republic of Panama whereby the United States was granted control of a ten-mile strip constituting the Canal Zone. This was ratified by the Republic of Panama on December 2, 1903, and by the United States on February 23, 1904. On May 4, 1904, work was begun under United States control.

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The opening of the canal has greatly increased the effectiveness of the Navy of the United States. It has reduced the distance between the central points of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts from 13,000 to 5,000 miles and greatly reduced the problem of coaling on a cruise from coast to coast. It has made possible the concentration of a fleet at either entrance of the canal which, with a cruising speed of fifteen knots, could reach the center of the Pacific coast in nine days and the center of the Atlantic coast in five days.

Where, formerly, the fleets stationed opposite the middle of each coast were, from a cruising point of view, as far apart as opposite sides of the world, they are now as near as if one were off New York and the other off Buenos Aires.

With regard to the monetary saving to the United States resulting from the availability of the canal for naval use, it is apparent that the distance and time between the coasts have been reduced to less than two-fifths of the former figures. The cost of coast-to-coast movements is reduced accordingly, for though vessels of the Navy pay tolls, such payment is in effect a transfer of money from one branch of the government to another.

The strategic importance of the canal is inestimable from a monetary standpoint.

The Isthmus of Panama runs east and west and the canal traverses it from Colon on the north to Panama on the south in a general direction from northwest to southeast, the Pacific terminus being twenty-two miles east of the Atlantic entrance. The principal features of the canal are a sea-level entrance channel from the east through Limon Bay to Gatun, about seven miles long, five-hundred-foot bottom width and forty-one-foot depth at mean tide. At Gatun the eighty-five-foot lake level is obtained by a dam across the valley. The lake is confined on the Pacific side by a dam between the hills at Pedro Miguel, thirty-two miles away. The lake thus formed has an area of 164 square miles and a channel depth of not less than forty-five feet at normal stage.

At Gatun ships pass from the sea to the lake level, and vice versa, by three locks in flight. On the Pacific side there is one lowering of thirty feet at Pedro Miguel to a small lake fifty-five feet above sea level, held by dam at Miraflores, where two lowerings overcome the difference of level to the sea. The channel between the locks on the Pacific side is five hundred feet wide at the bottom and forty-five feet deep, and below the Miraflores locks the sea-level section, about eight miles in length, is five hundred feet wide at the bottom and forty-five feet deep at mean tide. Through the lake the bottom widths are not less than one thousand feet for about sixteen miles, eight hundred feet for about four miles, five hundred feet for about three miles and through the continental divide from Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel, a distance of about nine miles, the bottom width is three hundred feet. The total length of the canal from deep water in the Caribbean, forty-one-foot depth at mean tide to deep water in the Pacific, forty-five-foot depth at mean tide, is practically fifty miles, fifteen miles of which are at sea level.

The hydroelectric station uses water from Gatun Lake for driving three turbo-generators of 2,000-kilowatt capacity each, which supply electricity for the operation of the lock and spillway machinery, the terminal shops and adjacent facilities, and for the lighting of the locks and the canal villages and fortifications. Transmission over the Zone is effected through four substations and a connecting high voltage transmission line which follows the main line of the Panama Railroad.

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Gatun Lake, impounded by Gatun Dam, has an area of 164 square miles when its surface is at the normal elevation of eighty-five feet above sea level, and is the largest artificially-formed lake in the world. The area of the water-shed tributary to the lake is 1,320 square miles. During the rainy season, from April to the latter part of December, the run-off from this basin exceeds considerably the consumption of water, and the surplus is discharged through the spillway of Gatun Dam. Toward the end of the rainy season the surface of the lake is raised to about eighty-seven feet above sea level, in order to afford a surplus or reserve supply to keep the channel full to operating depth during the dry season, in part of which the consumption and evaporation are in excess of the supply. It is calculated that when this level has been attained at the beginning of the dry season the reserve is sufficient to assure a surface elevation of at least seventy-nine feet at the end of the dry season in spite of the consumption at the hydroelectric station, and allowing forty-one passages of vessels through the locks each day with the use of the full length of the chambers, or fifty-eight lockages a day when the shorter sections of the chambers are used and cross filling is employed, which would usually be the case. This is a greater number of lockages than can be made in one day.

The greatest difficulty encountered in the excavation of the canal was due to slides and breaks which caused large masses of material to slide or move into the excavated area, closing off the drainage, upsetting steam shovels and tearing up the tracks. The greatest slide was at Cucaracha, and gave trouble when the French first began cutting in 1884. Though at first confined to a length of 800 feet, the slide extended to include the entire basin south of Gold Hill, or a length of about 3,000 feet. Some idea of the magnitude of these slides can be obtained from the fact that during the fiscal year 1910 of 14,921,750 cubic yards that were removed, 2,649,000 yards, or eighteen per cent, were from slides or breaks that had previously existed or that had developed during the year.

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The one greatest undertaking of the whole excavation was the Gaillard Cut. Work had been in progress on this since 1880, and during the French control over 20,000,000 cubic yards were removed. On May 4, 1904, when the United States took charge, it was estimated that there was left to excavate 150,000,000 cubic yards. Some idea of the size of this big cut may be formed from the fact that this division has within its jurisdiction over 200 miles of five-foot-gage track laid, about fifty-five miles of which is within the side slopes of the Gaillard Cut alone.

The great dam at Gatun is a veritable hill—7,500 feet over all, 2,100 feet wide at the base, 398 feet through at the water surface, and 100 feet wide at the top, which is 115 feet above sea level. The dimensions of the dam are such as to assure that ample provision is made against every force which may affect its safety, and while it is made of dirt, a thing before unheard of, it is of such vast proportions that it is as strong and firm as the everlasting hills themselves.

Fluctuations in the lake due to floods are controlled by an immense spillway dam built of concrete. The front of the dam is the arc of a circle 740 feet long with fourteen openings which, when the gates are raised to the full height, permit a discharge of 140,000 cubic feet per second. The water thus discharged passes through a diversion channel in the old bed of the Chagres River, generating, by an enormous electric plant, the power necessary for operating the locks.

The locks of the canal are in pairs, so that if any lock is out of service navigation will not be interrupted, also, when all the locks are in use the passage of shipping is expedited by using one set of locks for the ascent and the other for descent. These locks are 110 feet wide and have usable lengths of 1,000 feet. The system of filling adopted consists of a culvert in each side wall feeding laterals from which are openings upward into the lock chamber. The entire lock can be filled or emptied in fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds when one culvert is used and seven minutes and fifty-one seconds, using both culverts. It requires about ten hours for a large ship to make the entire trip through the canal.

Many extraordinary feats of engineering were accomplished to overcome the difficulties presented. Special contrivances, wonderful in their operation, were invented to meet exigencies and emergencies.

The first and greatest problem attempted by the United States was to make the Canal Zone healthful. This strip of land from ocean to ocean abounded in disease-breeding swamps and filthy habitations unfit for human beings. The death-rate was appalling and the labor conditions terrible. During the first two and a half years, therefore, all energies were devoted to ridding the Isthmus of disease by sanitation, to recruiting and organizing a working force and providing for it suitable houses, hotels, messes, kitchens and an adequate food supply. This work included clearing lands, draining and filling pools and swamps for the extermination of the mosquito, the establishment of hospitals for the care of the sick and injured and the building of suitable quarantine quarters. Municipal improvements were undertaken in Panama and Colon and the various settlements in the Canal Zone, such as the construction of reservoirs, pavements and a system of modern roads. Over 2,000 buildings were constructed besides the remodeling of 1,500 buildings turned over by the French company.

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It was only after all this preliminary sanitation was accomplished that the real work of digging the canal could go forward with any hope of success. These hygienic conditions had the result of making the Canal Zone one of the most healthful spots in the world, and work on the canal became so popular that it was no longer necessary to enlist recruits from the West Indies, the good pay, fair treatment and excellent living conditions bringing thousands of laborers from Spain and Italy. The greatest number employed at any one time was 45,000, of which 5,000 were American.

The completion of this herculean task marked an epoch in the history of the world. A gigantic battle against floods and torrents, pestilence and swamps, tropical rivers, jungles and rock-ribbed mountains had been fought—and won! Well worthy a place in the halls of immortal fame are the names of the thousands of sturdy sons who, with ingenuity, pluck and perseverance never before equaled, succeeded in making a pathway for the nations of the world from ocean to ocean.

This great and daring undertaking, which had for its object the opening up of new trade routes and lines of commerce, annihilating distance and wiping out the width of two continents between New York and Yokohama and making the Atlantic seaboard and the Pacific coast close neighbors, is the climax of man’s achievement and the greatest gift to civilization. It will help in the consummation of man’s loftiest dreams of world friendship and world peace.[2] So far, in the use of the canal, over forty per cent of the vessels which have passed through it have been engaged in the coastwise trade of the United States—each of them saving about 7,800 miles on each trip. If their average speed be taken at ten knots, they have averaged a saving of over a month at sea on each voyage from coast to coast. Where formerly the round trip of a ten-knot vessel required about fifty-five days’ actual steaming, the time at sea for the same trip for the same vessel is now reduced to about twenty-two days.

The canal makes San Francisco nearer to Liverpool by 5,666 miles, a saving of two-fifths of the old journey by Magellan. The distance between San Francisco and Gibraltar has been reduced from 12,571 miles to 7,621 miles, a saving of 4,950 miles, or thirty-nine per cent of the former distance.

From San Francisco to Buenos Aires, via Valparaiso and Magellan, is approximately 7,610 miles, which is shorter than the route through the canal, by which the distance is 8,941 miles. To Rio de Janeiro, the distance via Magellan is 8,609 miles; by the canal 7,885 miles. To Pernambuco, on the eastern promontory of South America, the distance via Magellan is 9,748 miles; via the canal 6,746 miles. To Para the distances via Magellan and via the canal are 10,852 and 5,642 miles, respectively.

From San Francisco to Freetown, on the west coast of middle Africa, the distance by the most practicable route, using the Strait of Magellan, is 11,380 miles. Through the canal and by way of the island of Barbados, the distance is 7,277 miles. The new route is less than two-thirds of the former.

With reference to the trade between the Atlantic coast of the United States and the west coast of South America, New York is nearer to Valparaiso by 3,717 miles by virtue of the canal; to Iquique, one of the great nitrate ports, by 4,139 miles; and to Guayaquil by 7,405 miles. From New York to Guayaquil the present distance of 2,765 miles is approximately twenty-seven per cent of the former distance—10,270 miles.

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As to the Far East, New York is nearer to Yokohama by 3,768 miles than formerly by way of the Suez Canal, but the latter route is eighteen miles shorter than the Panama route for vessels plying between New York and Hongkong. New York is forty-one miles nearer Manila by Panama than by Suez, and 3,932 miles nearer Sydney by Panama. New York is now, by virtue of the Panama Canal, nearer than Liverpool to Yokohama by 1,880 miles, and nearer than Liverpool to Sydney by 2,424 miles.

When the ship enters the harbor of either of the terminal ports it is boarded by officers of the canal who examine its bill of health and clearance, see that its certificate of canal measurement is properly made out, and ascertain any of the vessel’s needs in the matters of fuel, supplies, extra men to handle the lines during the passage of the locks, etc. These matters are immediately reported to the Captain of the Port, who gives the necessary orders to insure proper attendance on the vessel’s needs and directs its start through the canal whenever it is ready.

In all stages of its transit of the canal the vessel must have on board a government pilot. There is no charge for pilotage on vessels going directly through the canal without stopping to discharge cargo or passengers at the terminal ports. The pilot is on board in an advisory capacity and is required to confer with the master of the vessel, giving him the benefit of his knowledge and advice as to the handling of the vessel in the various reaches, but the master, who is best acquainted with the peculiarities of his vessel and her ways of answering the helm, is responsible for the navigation of the vessel, except when she is passing through the locks.

The handling of a vessel during its transit of the canal is like the handling of a railway train on its “run.” The course is equipped with all requisite signals, facilities for mooring, like sidings, and a system of communication between points along the line, which includes a special telephone system connecting all the important points of control in series.

As soon as the vessel starts on its transit of the canal, the Captain of the Port at the point of entrance telephones its starting to the other stations along the course. As the vessel arrives and departs from each of these points, the fact is telephoned along the line, so that there is exact knowledge at each station all the time of the status of traffic, and complete co-operation from the several points of control.

The transit of the canal requires about ten hours, of which approximately three hours are spent in the locks. In the sea-level channels and Gaillard (formerly “Culebra”) Cut the speed of vessels is limited to six knots; through Gatun Lake they may make ten, twelve and fifteen knots, according to the width of the channel. A vessel may clear from the canal port at which it enters and, after passing through the last of the locks, put direct to sea without further stop.

The handling of a vessel all through the canal, except in the locks, is essentially the same as its handling through any charted channel where observance of signals, ranges and turns is necessary. The canal channel throughout is very accurately charted, fully equipped with aids to navigation, and governed by explicit rules with which the pilots, of course, are thoroughly familiar.

In the locks, the vessel is under the control of the lock-operating force. As the vessel approaches the locks, the operator in charge at the control house indicates by an electrically operated signal at the outer end of the approach wall if the vessel shall enter the locks and, if so, on which side; or if it shall keep back or moor alongside the approach wall. If everything is ready for the transit of the locks, the vessel approaches the center approach wall, which is a pier extending about a thousand feet from the locks proper, lines are thrown out, and connections are made with the electric towing locomotives on the approach wall.

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The vessel then moves forward slowly until it is in the entrance chamber, when lines are thrown out on the other side and connections are made with towing locomotives on the side wall. Six locomotives are used for the larger vessels, three on each wall of the lock chamber. Two keep forward of the vessel, pulling and holding her head to the center of the chamber; two aft, holding the vessel in check; and two slightly forward of amidships, which do most of the towing of the vessel through the chamber. The locomotives are powerful affairs, secured against slipping by the engagement of cogs with a rack running along the center of the track, and equipped with a slip drum and towing windlass, which allow the prompt paying out and taking in of hawser as required. No trouble has been experienced in maintaining absolute control over the vessels.

The water within the lock chamber proper, beyond the entrance chamber, is brought to the level of that in the approach, the gates toward the vessel are opened, the fender chain is lowered, and the locomotives maneuver the vessel into the chamber and bring it to rest. The gates are then closed, the water raised or lowered, as the case may be, to the level of that in the next chamber, the gates at the other end are opened, and the vessel moved forward. Three such steps are made at Gatun, two at Miraflores, and one at Pedro Miguel.

When the vessel has passed into the approach chamber at the end of the locks, the lines from the towing locomotives on the side wall are first cast off, then those from the locomotives on the approach wall, and the vessel clears under its own power.

Towing is not ordinarily required in any part of the canal, except in the locks, for steam or motor vessels. Tug service for sailing ships or vessels without motive power is at the rate of $15 per hour. If the channel in the cut has been disturbed by a slide, tugs may be used to handle vessels past the narrow places, but in such cases there is no charge for the service to vessels of less than 15,000 gross tonnage.

The famous geyser shown in the illustration is called “Old Faithful” because of the clock-like regularity of its eruptions. For over twenty years it has been spouting at average intervals of sixty-five minutes.

Geysers were first observed in Iceland and the name, therefore, comes from that language, being derived from the word “geysa,” meaning “to gush” or “rush forth.” That is just what they do.

There are really three different kinds of geysers; one which throws up hot water, either continually or, like “Old Faithful,” at intervals; one which simply emits steam and no water and one which is a sort of a hot-water cistern.

The “Grand Geyser” at Firehole Basin in Yellowstone Park is the most magnificent natural fountain in the whole world. The “Great Geyser” and the “New Geyser” are the most remarkable ones in Iceland, where there are about a hundred altogether. The basin of the former is about seventy feet in diameter, and at times it throws up a column of hot water to the height of from eighty to two hundred feet in the air.

The hot-lake district of Auckland, New Zealand, is also famous in possessing some of the most remarkable geyser scenery in the world. It was formerly noted for the number of natural terraces containing hot water pools, and its lakes all filled at intervals by boiling geysers and hot springs, but the formation of the country was considerably altered by a disastrous volcanic outbreak in 1886, its beautiful pink and white terraces being destroyed. It still has, however, a circular rocky basin, forty feet in diameter, in which a violent geyser is constantly boiling up to the height of ten to twelve feet, emitting dense clouds of steam. This is one of the natural wonders of the southern hemisphere and is much visited by tourists traveling through New Zealand.

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Prairie-dogs are not really dogs at all, but a kind of a squirrel called a marmot. As the visitors to city Zoological Parks already know, these animals make little mounds of earth, and a great many of these are found in one locality, which is known as a “dog-town.” It is possible to travel for days at a time through country which is dotted over with mounds, every one of which is the home of a pair or more of prairie-dogs. These mounds are usually about eighteen feet apart, and consist of about as much earth as would fill a very large wheelbarrow. This is thrown up by the prairie-dog when he digs out his subterranean home. His dwelling sometimes has one entrance and sometimes two, and there are many much-traveled paths between the different hillocks, showing that they are very neighborly and sociable with one another.

In choosing a town site, they select one which is covered with short, coarse grass, such as is found especially in fields on high ground and mountain sides, for it is on this grass and certain roots that the prairie-dogs feed. On the plains of New Mexico, where for miles you will not find a drop of water unless you dig down into the earth for a hundred feet or so, with no rain for several months at a time, there are many very large “dog-towns,” and it is, therefore, clear that they are able to live without drinking, obtaining enough moisture for their needs from a heavy fall of dew.

At about the end of October, when the grass dries up and the ground becomes frozen hard, so that digging is out of the question, the prairie-dog creeps into his burrow, blocking up the opening in order to keep out the cold and make everything snug, and goes to sleep until the following spring, without having had to lay up a store of food, as some animals do, to last him through the long, hard winter months. If he opens up his house again before the end of cold weather, the Indians say it is a sure sign that warmer days are near at hand.

If one approaches very cautiously so as not to be observed, a large “dog-town” presents a very curious sight. A happy, animated scene stretches away as far as the eye can see. Little prairie-dogs are found everywhere, on the top of their mounds, sitting up like squirrels, waving their tails from side to side and yelping to each other, until a most cheerful-sounding concert is produced. If you listen carefully, as you draw nearer, however, you will notice a different tone in the calls of the older and more experienced animals, and that is the warning signal for the whole population to disappear from view into their burrows. Then, if one hides quietly in the background and waits patiently for some time, sentinels will mount up to their posts of observation on top of the mounds and announce that it is safe to come out of their burrows and play about again, as the danger is past.

Spontaneous combustion is the burning of a substance or body by the internal development of heat without the application of fire.

It not infrequently takes place among heaps of rags, wool and cotton when sodden with oil; hay and straw when damp or moistened with water; and coal in the bunkers of vessels.

In the first case, the oil rapidly combines with the oxygen of the air, this being accompanied by great heat. In the second case, the heat is produced by a kind of fermentation; and in the third, by the pyrites of the coal rapidly absorbing and combining with the oxygen of the air.

The term is also applied to the extraordinary phenomenon of the human body, which has been told of some people, whereby it is reduced to ashes without the application of fire. It is said to have occurred in the aged and persons that were fat and hard drinkers, but most chemists reject the theory and altogether discredit it.

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As far back as 1855 inventors were experimenting with talking machines; but nothing practical was accomplished till 1877, when Thomas A. Edison constructed a primitive machine capable of recording and reproducing sounds. In the early Edison phonograph the sound vibrations were registered on a tinfoil-covered cylinder. Busy with other inventions, he postponed developing the idea of a talking machine; and meantime other brains were at work on the problem.

In 1885 Chichester A. Bell (cousin of Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame) and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the “graphophone.” This was the first practical and commercially usable talking machine. The experiments and discoveries resulting in the production of the Bell and Tainter graphophone were made in the laboratories of Alexander Graham Bell, near Washington, D. C., and the latter assisted and advised with the inventors, and on his own behalf conducted experiments which were productive of highly important results in the art of recording and reproducing sound.

The Bell and Tainter patent was granted in 1886, and although the subject of much controversy, it has been repeatedly sustained by the United States courts, and in one case (87 F. R. 873) Judge Shipman had to consider all that other inventors had done or attempted to do, and he there decided that Bell and Tainter were the first to make “an actual living invention which the public was able to use.”

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This method covered “a method of engraving records of sound, producing records of sound by engraving in a wax-like material which would permit of the handling, using and transporting of the record.” Another United States patent, covering a method of duplicating or copying sound records, was granted to Charles Sumner Tainter in 1886.

Of course the talking machine of to-day is a long way removed from the early Edison and the early Bell and Tainter machines, because many master minds have been working on the problem of developing and maturing the art of sound recording and reproducing, and in perfecting machines to be used in reproducing the sound records after they have been made.

Disk records have taken the place of the old-style cylinder records, the latter being confined for the most part to dictating machines for office use, as the Dictaphone, which has largely displaced the shorthand writer in many business houses.

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Since the original Thomas A. Edison patents and the Bell and Tainter patent there have been many thousands granted, but only a few need be referred to as constituting the milestones in the evolution and development of the art and industry.

First in point of time and importance is the Macdonald Spring Motor, the invention of Thomas Hood Macdonald, a prolific inventor and contributor of many valuable improvements to the talking machine art and industry. The Bell and Tainter machine was operated by a storage battery and this was an inconvenient and expensive form of power. To meet this condition the Macdonald Spring Motor was invented and from the start proved a tremendous success. Today most of the clockwork motor talking machines are built upon the principles disclosed in the Macdonald Spring Motor patent.

The next important step was the discovery by Macdonald that a critical speed for the surface of the record must be obtained in order to secure best results, and this wonderful principle in the art of sound recording was protected by United States patent issued to Macdonald covering what is known as the Macdonald Graphophone Grand. This discovery and invention has been largely instrumental in the rapid development of sound recording.

Although Bell and Tainter disclosed a method of recording sound on a flat surface, all of the earlier forms of talking-machine records were what are known as cylindrical, records in a cylindrical form. Later the disc record came into use and is now the most popular form. Relatively very few cylinder records are manufactured at the present time. The process of sound recording, as applied to disc records, is covered by United States patent to J. W. Jones, and marks a further important stage in the development of the art and industry.

In present-day sound recording the operation is briefly as follows: A recording machine is employed on which is mounted a rotating turntable carrying a wax-like disc blank. Suspended above, but in contact with the surface of the blank, is a recording needle or stylus, attached to a diaphragm which, in turn, is connected to an amplifying horn. The horn extends beyond the machine and the singer, band or orchestra is stationed in front of the mouth of this horn. As the singer interprets the song the vibrations set up by the singer’s voice are communicated to the diaphragm by the passage of the sound through the horn. These vibrations, striking upon the diaphragm, set in motion the recording needle or stylus, causing it to move rapidly, and its motion is traced upon the surface of the rotating disc in a line which is known as the sound line. Looked at with the naked eye this line has the appearance of a spiral traced upon the surface of the wax-like blank, but examined under a magnifying glass it shows myriad little indentations or grooves in the wall of the sound line. These indentations correspond to the vibrations imparted to the needle through the diaphragm, and are the recorded sounds made by the singer or band. When the song or selection is finished the surface of the wax-like blank has been covered over with this spiral sound line. The blank has become the “master record,” and the first stage of producing a talking-machine record has been passed. The next step is to secure from this master record a metallic counterpart or shell. This is done by the electro-plating process. When the shell is secured the next step is to provide a matrix which serves as a die or stamp from which to press copies or duplicates of the master record. These copies or duplicates are the talking-machine records which the public ultimately purchases. The matrix or die is placed in a power press and the records pressed from the material used in making the sound records. This material is prepared in a plastic form so that it can be forced under pressure into every line and indentation on the face of the matrix.

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The discovery of the art of recording and reproducing sound; the development of that art into a giant industry, and the present-day universal sovereignty of the talking machine are tributes to American inventive genius and American industrial enterprise. The contributions to the art and the improvements in the manufacture of talking machines and talking-machine records from sources outside of the United States have been very unimportant. The industry employs many thousands of people in the manufacture of these instruments and records which afford entertainment, instruction and amusement to the entire world.

In the first place, petrification is the name we give to the animal and vegetable bodies which have, by slow process, been converted into stone. We mean very much the same thing when we refer to “Fossil Forests.”

Although in most instances there are comparatively few traces of its vegetable origin left, coal owes its existence primarily to the vast masses of vegetable matter deposited through the luxuriant growth of plants in former epochs of the earth’s history, and since slowly converted into a petrified state.

Coal fields today present abundant indications of the existence of huge ancient forests, usually in the form of coal formed from the roots of the trees. Several such forests have been uncovered, of which one in Nova Scotia is a good example, remains of trees having been found there, six to eight feet high, one tree even measuring twenty-five feet in height and four feet in diameter.

The remains of a fossil forest have been found in an upright position in France, and in a colliery in England, in a space of about one-quarter of an acre, there have been found the fossilized stumps of seventy-three trees, with roots attached, and broken-off trunks lying about, one of them thirty feet long and all of them turned into coal.

A remarkable group of petrified trees, some of them twelve feet in diameter, exists in California, and another in Yellowstone Park, in which the trees are still erect, though converted into stone. An extraordinary forest of such trees has been found in Arizona, lying over a wide space of ground, some of them six feet in diameter and perfectly preserved.

These trees are rather mineralized than fossilized. They are found in volcanic regions and are supposed to be due to the action of hot water, which carried off the organic material and deposited dissolved silica in its place. In some instances the wood has been converted into solid jasper or has been changed into opal or agate, or filled with chalcedony or crystallized quartz, with beautifully variegated colors.

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Animals of a great many different kinds have helped show man the way, in taking advantage of the opportunities which nature affords him to feed, clothe and protect himself, but one of the smallest of the animal kingdom is probably the cleverest of all—the spider. Spiders have many different kinds of enemies, ranging from man down to the very smallest, but dangerous, insects, and most of their enemies possess enormous advantages over them in either strength or agility, or both combined; enemies with wings, swift in movement and able to retreat where the spider cannot follow them; enemies clad in an impenetrable coat of armor, against which the spider’s weapons are powerless, while the spider’s own body is soft and vulnerable. These handicaps have been met by the spider with a multitude of clever contrivances, and if invention and skill are to be regarded as an index to intellectual development, it should be very significant to realize how far spiders are ahead of our near relatives, the almost human members of the monkey family.

One of the most interesting of the spider race is the “trap-door” spider which inhabits warm countries all over the earth. The “trap-door” spider not only builds a home for herself by digging a deep hole in the ground and lining it with silk to prevent the sides from falling in, but she also adds a neat little door to keep out the rain and other troublesome things. She usually chooses sloping ground for her homestead so that the door, which she fastens at the edge of its highest point by a strong silk-elastic hinge, swings shut of its own weight after being opened. She disguises the entrance to her home in a manner superior to the famous art of concealment practiced by the Indians, by planting moss on the outside of the door—living moss taken from the immediate neighborhood—so that the entrance to her house harmonizes perfectly with its surroundings, its discovery being made more difficult by the fact that in her careful selection of a site for her dwelling she also appears to be influenced by the presence of patches of white lichen which distract the eye.

The male spider does not seem to take any part in designing, constructing or decorating the home and does not even share its occupancy, leaving it to the mother and her family—often forty or more children at a time—and living a vagrant life, camping out in holes and ditches when he is not tramping around over the whole countryside. The mother spider, however, like many other animals, takes excellent charge of her children, and guards them carefully from all harm. At the first sign of a commotion going on outside her front door she is known to invariably assemble her family behind her, out of harm’s way, and then place her back against the swinging door, holding it shut with some of her feet and clinging tightly to the inner walls of her home with the others.

There is one kind of spider which has developed an even more elaborate style of architecture, digging another room and adding an upper side gallery to her main residence, and placing a second door at the junction of the two tunnels. The doors are made to swing back and forth in both directions, and she constructs a handle on the outer one, by which she fastens it open with a few threads attached to any convenient grass stems or little stones, when she expects to come home from a hunting expedition with her arms full. If a dangerous enemy threatens her home she usually retreats to the second room, in the hope that he will decide she is out and depart in search of another victim elsewhere, but if he discovers her secret, she slams the second swinging door in his face. Should she be beaten in the pushing match at that point, she slips into the upper side gallery opening above the door, and her enemy’s presence within the inner room automatically blocks the entrance to her hiding place by holding up the swinging door across its only opening.

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Interest in the development of mechanically propelled two-wheel vehicles began soon after the introduction of the bicycle in its first practicable form. Man’s natural dislike for manual labor quickly found objection to the physical effort of bicycle travel, and accordingly sought to devise mechanical means of overcoming it.

The earliest known attempt to construct a two-wheel vehicle which would proceed under its own power was made by W. W. Austin, of Winthrop, Mass., in the year 1868. This crude affair consisted of a small velocipede upon which was mounted a crude coal-burning steam engine. The piston rods of the engine were connected directly with cranks on the rear wheel. The boiler was hung between the two wheels and directly back of the saddle, while the engine cylinders were placed slightly above horizontal just behind the boiler. Despite the crudity of this outfit, Austin claimed that he had traveled some 2,200 miles on this, the “granddaddy” of all motorcycles.

L. D. and W. E. Copeland, two Californian experimenters, are credited with the next known effort to produce a two-wheeler which would travel by its own power. Their first model appeared in 1884. The bicycle to which this miniature steam-power plant of the Copeland brothers’ invention was attached was one of the old high-wheel models with the small steering wheel forward. The steam engine of this truly ingenious contrivance, together with the boiler and the driving pulley, weighed[53] only sixteen ounces. The Copeland model was probably the first motorcycle to use belt drive. It should be understood that propulsion of this first Copeland model was not intended to depend solely upon mechanical power, but to be operated in connection with the foot pedals.

The Copeland brothers are to be credited with the first attempt to produce the motorcycle upon a commercial basis, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Their invention seemed to be far ahead of the times, and their project passed by unappreciated.

In 1886, S. H. Roper, of Roxbury, Mass., appeared with a steam-propelled bicycle which consisted of a specially designed engine placed in a bicycle frame of the type with which we are familiar today. This invention was awkward, and its weight of 150 pounds made it difficult to handle, but in spite of that its inventor is said to have obtained considerable use from it.

The year 1895 saw the first public exhibition of mechanically operated two-wheel vehicles held at Madison Square Garden, New York City. The sensation of the show was a motorcycle which was presented by E. J. Pennington of Cleveland. This was the first public appearance of a cycle propelled by a combustion engine, and in that regard it may be called the first appearance of the motorcycle in the form that it is known today. The Pennington machine was the first-known vehicle to attempt the use of gasoline. History fails to relate a great deal about the mechanical detail of the Pennington model, but it is said to have made a very creditable performance in exhibition. It appeared at the Madison Square Garden in two forms, as a single motorcycle and as a motor tandem.

There was little or no interest in motor vehicles of any description in that period of the early nineties, consequently the Pennington efforts were fruitless. Shortly after the public exhibition of his models, financial difficulties are said to have overtaken Pennington and he is reported to have departed suddenly for foreign climes, bringing his experiments to an abrupt end.

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Along in the late nineties a keen interest in bicycle racing led to the introduction of what is known as the motor-paced tandem. This consisted of a regulation tandem bicycle on which was mounted a gasoline motor geared up to the rear wheel with a chain drive. The tandem rider on the forward seat did the steering and the foot pedaling, and the rear rider operated the motor. It is believed that the first of these tandems came over here from France.

By 1898 the popularity of the motor-paced racing bicycle became so great that attention was soon directed toward their manufacture. Chief among the bicycle manufacturers who took up the making of the motor-paced tandem was Oscar Hedstrom, a racer with many notable victories to his credit. He believed that he could make a motor tandem which would prove far superior to any other American machine made, if not better even than any foreign machine.

The machine which he produced with a motor of his own design was entered in some big races at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 where nearly every record was broken. Mr. Hedstrom’s partner on this tandem outfit was Henshaw, a bicycle racer of some repute. Following their début on the motor tandem at Buffalo, this pair proceeded to make records throughout the country, several of which still stand today.

In 1901 a bicycle manufacturer of Springfield, Mass., foresaw a future for a motorcycle designed for pleasure purposes instead of exclusively for racing. Hitherto, all motor-propelled cycles had used the power of the engine of whatever form it was merely as an aid to locomotion. None had been successful in producing a machine that could proceed anywhere solely under its own power. Convinced that such a machine could be produced, and certain that it would find a ready market, this manufacturer set about to put his ideas into execution.

He recognized in Oscar Hedstrom, as the leader of the motor tandem racing field, the man who knew more about combustion engines than any other man in America, and accordingly enlisted his services. Oscar Hedstrom retired to a little mechanical laboratory in Middletown, Conn., and in a short four months emerged with a completed motorcycle which he had not only designed himself, but had constructed entirely by his own labor. Its performance on its first trial trip was absolutely astounding to every observer. In road tests under every conceivable condition, this first motorcycle of Oscar Hedstrom’s displayed a perfection of mechanical operation which had to that time never been approached. It moved[56] entirely under its own power, could climb hills and could travel on the level road at speeds which had never before been exhibited by vehicles of that type.

By reason of the successful performance of his first motorcycle, Oscar Hedstrom is given the credit, in many quarters, for producing the first motorcycle of practicable construction. All successful machines of this type since then are said to have been modeled more or less on the fundamental principles of that first Hedstrom machine. Part of Hedstrom’s success was due to his mastery of the important problem of carburetion, and a carburetor expressly designed for that first machine constituted a marked step in motorcycle development. The leading carburetors of today are said to be based upon the principles of the first Hedstrom carburetor. The date of the appearance of the first Hedstrom motorcycle was 1901.

Manufacture of the motorcycle upon a commercial scale forthwith commenced in the bicycle manufactory at Springfield, Mass. Such is said to have been the humble beginning of the motorcycle.

Their first motorcycle was offered to the public in 1902. Its mechanical detail is worthy of note for the sake of comparison with the models of the current year. Its motor was the Hedstrom single-cylinder motor of 1³⁄₄ horse-power; frame, 22 inches; tires, 1³⁄₄ inches, single tube; chain drive; weight, 93 pounds. From the year 1902 to 1909, the style of their motorcycle remained substantially the same in appearance. The models of that period are referred to as “camel backs” by reason of the location and shape of the gasoline tank on the rear mud guard. In 1909, the loop frame was introduced to provide additional strength to the machine, being required by the increased weight of the motor; 1906 saw the introduction of twin cylinders for racing models, and the following year they appeared in the regular models.

Motorcycle design has made wonderful progress. The powerful, easy-riding machines of today with their many refinements are truly marvelous pieces of mechanism. Mechanical perfection is as nearly approached as it is possible for the best brains and the most approved methods of manufacture to attain. There are numerous modern refinements which have contributed materially to the present-day[57] popularity of the motorcycle that are worthy of special note. Chief of these is the kick-starter, which enables the rider to start the engine of his machine without mounting it upon a stand or pedaling on the road. Improved clutches, gear ratios which permit varying speeds, double-braking systems and electric lights are present-day refinements which add zest to the sport of motorcycling.

One of the greatest of all motorcycling comfort creations is a device known as the cradle spring frame which consists of pairs of cushion-leaf springs of the semi-elliptical type, which are located at the rear of the frame just beneath the saddle. This affords the maximum of riding comfort by the elimination of all jar and jolt occasioned by an uneven roadway.

Magneto ignition first appeared in 1908; previous to that date all ignition had been dependent upon batteries of the ordinary dry-cell variety.

The last two years has seen the introduction of what is known as the light-weight model. This style of motorcycle has a smaller motor, which is usually of the two-stroke type, single cylinder. The frame is of lighter construction, the mechanism is simpler, and of course the speed is reduced. This type of two-wheeler, however, finds favor among those who like power and speed but in modified form. Lower initial cost and lower operation expense are factors which especially recommend the light-weight models.

There has been considerable difference of opinion as regards the comparative efficiency of chain drive and belt drive. The consensus of opinion, however, seems to favor the chain drive, as evidenced by its use on most of the leading makes of present-day machines. Some of the light-weight models are using belt drive, but chain drive is generally conceded to be superior. In the early days of motorcycling, belt drive was rather generally used, but the heavy duty required soon brought about the change to present usage.

Motorcycle manufacture is today carried on in some of the largest and most up-to-date manufactories that can be found in the United States. The oldest and the largest factory devoted to motorcycle manufacture is said to be that which has been built up under the direction of the Springfield manufacturer, the man who first saw the great commercial possibilities in the development of the motorcycle for pleasure and business purposes. His company had a capitalization of $12,500,000[58] in 1916. Some 2,400 skilled workmen were employed in its two big Springfield plants. Its output, said to be the largest in the industry, is over 25,000 machines per year. Numerous models meeting varying requirements are produced.

Soon after the first practicable motorcycle appeared in 1902 there arose a demand for a contrivance that would accommodate an additional passenger. Consequently, there was produced an attachment called a tri-car. This was mounted on two pneumatic-tired wheels which were fitted to the front fork together with necessary steering devices. Later it was found that the passenger conveyance could better be carried at the side mounted upon a springed chassis which was supported by a third wheel. That form was thereupon generally adopted, and remains today the general practice in the manufacture of motorcycle side-cars, as they are called.

Naturally enough, interest in motorcycles was quickly directed toward their application to commercial uses, and to that end there were produced numerous styles of side vans and parcel carriers intended for parcel delivery.

The use of the motorcycle for commercial purposes was for a time overshadowed by the abnormally rapid development of the automobile, but the factor of upkeep and operation costs of an automobile is bringing the motorcycle into prominence now. In this respect the motorcycle is said to have the advantage overwhelmingly. The tendency, however, among business houses is to investigate their individual requirements for delivery service and determine to what purposes either form of motor vehicle is best adapted. For light parcel system there is said to be no form of delivery that excels the motorcycle in speed and efficiency and nothing with operation costs so low. The commercial motorcycle is said to be gaining widespread favor, and therein lies its greatest future.

Foreign countries have contributed little or nothing to the development of the motorcycle. To be sure, efforts were made to produce two-wheel motor vehicles, but little success is recorded. Record of the earliest known effort was found in an English newspaper of 1876. This report, however, was very meager and lacking in any profusion of mechanical detail. Moreover, beyond the newspaper reports there is little verification that any steps were really taken at that time. The French contribute the only known features that are credited to foreign inventors. The DeDion motor was used in some of the racing motor tandems which appeared in this country in the late nineties. Other French racing bicycles were no doubt in existence, but there is no history which can ascribe any truly constructive innovations in motorcycle making to any foreign country. The motorcycle in its form of today was designed and built by America.

The Weather Bureau was founded in 1870 by the United States Government, its purpose being to make daily observations of the state of the weather in all parts of the country, and to calculate from the results a forecast for each section of the country, based on the information thus obtained, these predictions being published so that the people of each district may know in advance the kind of weather likely to occur.

While these forecasts are of great convenience to practically everyone, and of importance to the agriculturist, they are frequently of still more importance to ship masters, storm warnings being given that may keep them in port when storms are expected and thus save their ships from the danger of injury or shipwreck. This system has made great progress since its institution, and reports are now received daily from more than 3,500 land stations and about fifty foreign stations, while by means of wireless telegraphy, under normal conditions, some 2,000 ships send reports of the weather conditions at sea.

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Study of results has led to the belief that more than eighty per cent of winds and storms follow beaten paths, their movements being governed by physical conditions, a knowledge of which enables the Weather Bureau officials to estimate very closely their probable speed and direction and send warning of their coming in advance. Within two hours after the regular morning observation at eight o’clock, the forecasts are telegraphed to more than 2,300 principal distributing points, from which they are further sent out by mail, telegraph and telephone, being mailed daily to 135,000 addresses and received by nearly 4,000,000 telephone subscribers.

One of the most valuable services rendered is that of the warnings of cyclonic storms for the benefit of marine interests. These are displayed at nearly three hundred points on the ocean and lake coasts, including all important ports and harbors, warnings of coming storms being received from twelve to twenty-four hours in advance. The result has been the saving of vast amounts of maritime property, estimated at many millions of dollars yearly.

Agriculturists also derive great advantage from these warnings, especially those engaged in the production of fruits, vegetables and other market garden products. Warnings of frosts and of freezing weather have enabled the growers of such products to protect and save large quantities of valuable plants. It is said that on a single night in a small district in Florida, fruits and vegetables were thus saved to the amount of more than $100,000. In addition, live stock of great value has been saved by warnings a week in advance of the coming of a flood in the Mississippi; railroad companies take advantage of the forecast for the preservation, in their shipping business, of products likely to be injured by extremes of heat or cold, and in various other ways the forecasts are of commercial or other value.

One of the chief stations for observations is that at Mount Weather, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. This is equipped with delicate instruments in considerable variety for the study of varying conditions of the upper air. Kites and captive balloons are sent up every favorable day, ascending to heights of two or three miles, and equipped with self-registering instruments to record the temperature and other conditions of the atmosphere. At other times, free balloons are liberated, carrying sets of automatic registering instruments. Some of these travel hundreds of miles, but nearly all are eventually found and returned.

There are a great many different kinds of signals for the guidance of vessels during fogs, when lights or other visible signals cannot be perceived.

One of the most powerful signals is the siren fog horn, the sound of which is produced by means of a disk perforated by radial slits made to rotate in front of a fixed disk exactly similar, a long iron trumpet forming part of the apparatus. The disks may each contain say twelve slits, and the moving disk may revolve 2,800 times a minute; in each revolution there are of course twelve coincidences between the slits in the two disks; through the openings thus made steam or air at a high pressure is caused to pass, so that there are actually 33,600 puffs of steam or compressed air every minute. This causes a sound of very great power, which the trumpet collects and compresses, and the blast goes out as a sort of sound beam in the direction required. Under favorable circumstances this instrument can be heard from twenty to thirty miles out at sea.

Fog signals are also used on railways during foggy weather; they consist of cases filled with detonating powder, which are laid on the rails and exploded by the engine when it runs over them.

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Clocks and watches are often called “timekeepers,” but they do not keep time. Nothing can keep it. It is constantly flying along, and carrying us with it, and we cannot stop it. What we call “time keepers” are really time measures, and are made to tell us how rapidly time moves, so that we may regulate our movements and occupations to conform to its flight.

Of course, you understand that measurement of anything is the comparing of it with some established standard. So that if you want to measure the length of anything you use a rule or a yard stick, or some other scale which is graduated into fractions of the whole standard measure. Do you know that the United States government has in a secure, fireproof vault, in one of the government buildings in Washington, a metal bar which is the authorized standard “yard” of this nation? It is a very carefully made copy of the standard yard of Great Britain. I believe that each one of the United States has also a standard which must agree in length with the government, or national standard. The same thing is true concerning standards of capacity, and standards of weight. But no vault can contain the authorized standard of time. Yet there is such a standard. And it is as accessible to one country as to another, and it is a standard which does not change. But, because all other time measures are more or less imperfect, our government tries to compare its standard clock with the ultimate standard every day.

The first mention of time which we have is found in the Book of Genesis, where it is written “and the evening and the morning were the first day.” That statement gives a “measure” which was sufficient for the purpose intended, but there is nothing very accurate in it. If it had said “the darkness and the light” were the first day, it would have been just as accurate. The people who lived in those far-off days had no special occasion to know or to care what time it was. We may suppose that they were hungry when they waked at sunrise, and if they had no food “left over” from the previous day’s supply they would have to hustle and find some, and if possible secure a little surplus beyond that day’s needs, and so they would work, or hunt, until the “evening” came and the sun disappeared. When a man was tired, and the sun was hot, he sat down under a tree for shelter and rest. As he sat under the tree and looked about him he could not fail to notice that upon the ground was a shadow of the tree under which he sat. And as he was tired and warm he lay down and fell asleep, and when he woke, he again saw the shadow, but in another place. He noticed that the same thing occurred every day. He saw also that in the morning the shadow was stretched out in one direction, and that in the evening it lay in exactly the opposite direction, and that every day it moved very nearly the same, so he put a mark on the ground about where the shadow first appeared, and another mark at the place where it disappeared. Then one day he stuck his staff in the ground about half-way between the places of the morning and the evening shadows, which served as a noon mark. As the staff cast a shadow as readily as did the tree, the man found that it was really a better index of time than was the tree shadow, for it was much smaller and more clearly defined, and so he put up a straight stick in the ground near the hut in which he lived, and as the ground was level and smooth he drove a lot of little stakes along the daily path of the shadow, and in that way divided the day into a number of small parts. That was a crude “sun dial.” (The Bible tells of the sun dial in the thirty-eighth chapter of Isaiah.) But there was nothing very accurate in the sun dial. Several hundred years later the days were divided into sections which were called “hours,” such as the “sixth hour” (noon), the “ninth hour” (three o’clock), the “eleventh hour” (five o’clock), etc. There was, however, nothing very accurate in those expressions, which simply indicate that there were recognized divisions of time, but with no suggestions as to the means used to determine their limits or boundaries. It is recorded of Alfred the Great, who lived in the ninth century, A. D., that he was very methodical in his employment of time, and in order to insure a careful attention to his religious duties as well as his kingly duties, he divided the day into three parts, giving one part to religious duties, one to the affairs of his kingdom, and the remainder to bodily rest. To secure an equal division of the day he procured a definite quantity of wax which he had made into six candles, of twelve inches in length, and all of uniform weight, for he found that each inch in length of candle would burn for twenty minutes—one candle for each four hours. This was an approach toward accuracy and it was effective for night use as well as for the daytime.

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Perhaps the earliest mechanical time measure was the clepsydra, or water clock. It is quite probable that, in its earliest form it consisted of a vessel containing water, which was allowed to escape through a small orifice. Suitable marks, or graduations, on the sides of the vessel served to indicate the lapse of time as the water gradually receded. This device was constructed in a variety of forms, some of which employed some simple mechanism also; but from their nature they could not give very accurate indications concerning the passage of time. The “hour glass” was another form of time indicator, which was capable of uniform, though extremely limited, action. It is said that its original use was to limit the length of sermons.

It is interesting to note that discoveries and inventions, which may seem slight in themselves, sometimes form the basis of, or contribute to, other important inventions. In the year 1584 a bright young Italian was sitting in the gallery of the cathedral, in the City of Pisa, and as the lofty doors of the building opened to admit the incoming worshipers, a strong draft of air caused the heavy chandelier, which was suspended from the lofty ceiling, to swing quite a distance from its position of rest. This unusual movement attracted the attention of the young man, and as he continued to watch its deliberate movements, he did more than watch. He thought—for he noticed that the time occupied by the movement of the chandelier from one extreme position to the opposite point, seemed to be exactly uniform. He wondered why. It is the careful observation of things, and the trying to learn why they are as they are, and why they act as they do, that enables studious people to discover the laws which govern their actions. This young man, Galileo, was a thinker, and while some of his conclusions and theories have since been found erroneous, his thinking has formed the basis of much of the scientific thought and theory of later years. Galileo’s swinging chandelier was really a sort of a pendulum, and we have made mention of it because it has been found that no mechanical means for obtaining and maintaining a constant and accurate movement will equal the free movement of a vibrating pendulum. This fact has led to its adoption as a means of regulating the mechanism of clocks. For, when operated under the most favorable conditions, such a clock constitutes the most accurate “time measure” yet made.

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Watches are made to measure time. If anything is to be measured there must be some standard with which to compare it, for we have seen that measuring is a process of comparing a thing with an appropriate or acknowledged and fixed standard. The only known standard for the measurement of time is the movement of the earth in relation to the stars. It has taken thousands of years for mankind to learn what is now known concerning time. It has also taken hundreds of years to secure the wonderful accuracy in the measuring of time which has now been attained. We have said that nothing has been devised which will equal the accuracy of a “pendulum clock.” A story was told of a professor of a theological seminary who was one day on his way to a jeweler’s store, carrying in his arms the family clock, which was in need of repairs. He was accosted by one of his students with the question, “Look here, Professor, don’t you think it would be much more convenient to carry a watch?” A pendulum clock must of necessity be stationary, but it is now needful that people should be able to have a timepiece whenever and wherever wanted. This need is supplied by the pocket watch.

If Galileo watched the swinging of the big chandelier long enough he found that the distance through which it swung was gradually diminishing, till, at last, it ceased to move; what stopped it? It was one of the great forces of nature, which we call gravitation, and the force which kept it in motion we call momentum. But gravitation overcame momentum.

In order to maintain the constant vibration of a pendulum it is needful to impart to it a slight force, in a manner similar to that given by a boy who gives another boy a slight “push,” to maintain his movement in a swing. A suspended pendulum being impossible of application to a pocket watch, a splendid substitute has been devised—in the form of the balance wheel of the watch, commonly called the “balance.” The balance is, in its action and adaption, the equivalent of the vibrating, or oscillating, pendulum; and the balance spring (commonly called the hairspring), which accompanies it, is in its action equivalent to the force of gravity in its effect upon a pendulum. For the tendency and (if not neutralized by some other force) the effects of the hairspring upon the watch balance, and of gravitation on the pendulum, are to hold each at a position of rest, and consequent inaction.

But we have in a pocket watch a “mainspring” to actuate the train of gear wheels which by their ultimate action give the delicate “push” to the balance wheel at distinct intervals, and so keep the balance in continued motion. In the same manner, the “weight” of a clock, acting through the force of gravity, carries the various wheels of the clock train, and gives the slight impulse to the swinging clock pendulum.

Both clocks and watches are “machines” for the measurement of time, and, therefore, it is absolutely imperative that their action must be constant, and, if accurate time is to be indicated, the action must be uniform.

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The illustration shows the “time train” of an ordinary pocket watch. The various wheels are here shown in a straight line, so that their successive order may be seen, but for economy and convenience they are arranged in such way as is most convenient when constructing a pocket watch. The large wheel at the left is the “main wheel,” called by watchmakers the “barrel.” In it is coiled the mainspring—a strip of steel about twenty-three inches long, which is carefully tempered to insure elasticity and “pull.” The outer end of the mainspring is attached to the rim of the barrel, and the inner end to the barrel arbor. Bear in mind the fact that the power which is sufficient to run the watch for thirty-six hours or more, is not in the watch itself. It is in yourself, and by the exertion of your thumb and finger, in the act of winding, you transfer that power to the spring, and thereby store the power in the barrel, to be given out at the rate which the governing mechanism of the watch will permit. The group of wheels here shown are known as the “time train,” and the second wheel is called the “center,” because that, in ordinarily constructed watches, is located in the center of the group, and upon its axis are put the “hour hand” and the “minute hand.” On the circumference of the barrel are gear teeth, and those teeth engage corresponding teeth on the arbor of the center. These arbor teeth are in all cases called, not “wheels” but “pinions,” and in watch trains the wheels always drive the pinions. Next to the center comes the third pinion and wheel, and then the fourth, which is the last wheel in the train which has regular gear teeth. Now let us look back a little and see that the wheel teeth of the barrel drive the center pinion, and the center wheel drives the third pinion and the third wheel drives the fourth pinion, etc. The speed of revolution of the successive wheels increases rapidly. The center wheel must revolve once in each hour, which is 6¹⁄₂ times faster than the barrel. The third wheel turns eight times faster than the center, and the fourth wheel turns 7¹⁄₂ times faster than the third, or 60 times faster than the center, so that the fourth pinion, which carries the “second hand,” will revolve 60 times while the “center,” which carries the minute hand, revolves once. If we should put all the wheels and pinions in place, and wind up the main spring, the wheels would begin to turn, each at its relative rate of speed, and we should find that, instead of running thirty-six hours, it would have run less than two minutes. What was needed was some device to serve as an accurate speed governor—and the attainment of this essential device is the one thing on which accurate time measuring depends. Without any mention of the various attempts to produce such a device, let us, as briefly as possible, describe the means used in most watches of American manufacture. While there are several distinct parts of this device, each having its individual function, they may be considered as a whole under the general term of “the escapement.” Returning now to the fourth pinion, we see that it also carries a wheel, which engages another little pinion, called the escape pinion. This escape pinion also carries a wheel, but it is radically different in appearance, as well as in action, from any of the previously mentioned wheels. An examination of the “escape wheel” would show that it has a peculiarly shaped piece, which is called the “pallet,” the extended arm of which is called the “fork.” The fork encloses a sort of half-round stud or pin. This stud projects from the fact and near the edge of a small steel disc. The stud is formed from some hard precious stone and is called the “jewel pin,” or “roller pin,” and the little steel disc which carries it is called the “roller.” In the center or axial hole of the roller fits the “balance staff,” which staff also carries the “balance wheel,” and the balance spring, commonly called the “hair spring.” The ends of the balance staff are made very small so as to form very delicate pivots which turn in jewel bearings. The balance wheel moves very rapidly, and, therefore, its movement must be as free as possible from retarding friction, so its bearing pivots are made very small.

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Now that we have given the names of each of the different parts which compose the escapement, let us see how they perform their important work of governing the speed of the little machine for measuring time. In the escape wheel, the left arm of the pallet rests on the inclined top of one of the wheel teeth. This is the position of rest. If we wind up the mainspring of the watch it will immediately cause the main wheel to turn, and, of course, that will turn the next wheel, and so on to the escape wheel. When that wheel turns to the right, as it must, it will force back the arm of the pallet which swings on its arbor. In swinging out in this way it must also swing in the other pallet arm, and that movement will bring it directly in front of another wheel tooth, so that the wheel can turn no further. It is locked and will remain so until something withdraws it. When the pallet was swung so as to cause this locking, the fork was also moved, and as it enclosed the roller pin, that too was moved and carried with it the roller and the balance wheel, and in so doing it deflected the hair spring from its condition of rest. And as the spring tried to get back to its place of rest it carried back the balance also. In going back, the balance acquired a little momentum, and so could not stop when it reached its former position, but went a little further, and, of course, the roller and its pin also went along in company, the pin carrying the fork and the pallet swinging in the other direction,[70] which unlocked the escape wheel tooth. Its inclined top gave the pallet a little “push” so that the first pallet was locked, forcing the fork and roller, and the balance and hair spring, to move in the opposite direction. And so the alternate actions proceed, and the balance wheel travels further each time, until it reaches the greatest amount which the force of the mainspring can give. But before this extreme is reached, the momentum of the revolving balance carries the roller pin entirely out of the fork. As the fork is allowed to move only just far enough to allow the pin to pass out, it simply waits until the fork returns and enters its place, only to escape again on the other side. And so the motions continue to the number of 18,000 times per hour. If that number can be exactly maintained, the watch will measure time perfectly. But if it should fall short of that exact number only once each hour, it would result in a loss of 4.8 seconds each day, or 2.4 minutes in one month. A watch as bad as that would not be allowed on a railroad.

Isn’t it wonderful that such a delicate piece of mechanism can be made to run so accurately? And the wonder is increased by the fact that the little machine is, to a great extent, continually moved about, and liable to extreme changes in position and in temperature. Watches of the highest grades are adjusted to five positions as well as to temperature. Some are adjusted to temperature and three positions, and still others to temperature only. The way in which a watch is made to automatically compensate for temperature changes is interesting. Varying[71] degrees of heat and cold always affect a watch. It is a law of nature that all simple metals expand under the influence of heat and therefore contract when affected by cold. Alloys, or mixtures of different metals, act in a similar manner, but in varying degrees. Some combinations of metals possess the quality of relatively great expansibility. Another natural law is that the force required to move a body depends upon its size and weight. So it follows that with only a certain amount of available force a large body cannot be moved as rapidly as a small one. The force of 200 pounds of steam in a locomotive boiler might be sufficient to haul a train of six cars at a speed of thirty miles per hour, but if more cars be added it will result in a slower speed. The same principle applies to a watch as to a railway train. Therefore if the balance wheel becomes larger as it grows warmer, and the force which turns the wheel is not changed, the speed of movement must be reduced. One other natural law which affects the running of watches is this: Variations in temperature affect the elasticity of metals. Now the balance spring of a watch is made from steel, and is carefully tempered in order to obtain its highest elasticity. Increase in temperature therefore introduces three elements of disturbance, all of which act in the same direction of reducing the speed. First, it enlarges the balance wheel; second, it increases the length of the spring; third, it reduces the elasticity of the spring. To overcome these three disturbing factors a very ingenious form of balance has been devised.

A watch balance is made with a rim of brass encircling and firmly united to the rim of steel. In order to permit heat to have the desired effect upon this balance, the rim is completely severed at points near each of the arms of the wheel. If we[72] apply heat to this balance the greater expansion of the brass portion of its rim would cause the free ends to curl inward.

In order to obtain exactly 18,000 vibrations of the balance in an hour, it will be seen that the weight of the wheel and the strength of the hair spring must be perfectly adapted each to the other. The shorter the spring is made the more rigid it becomes, and so the regulator is made a part of the watch, but its action must be very limited or its effect on the spring will introduce other serious disturbances. The practical method of securing the proper and ready adaptation of balances to springs is to place in the rims of the balance a number of small screws having relatively heavy heads. Suppose now that we have a balance fitted with screws of the number and weight to exactly adapt it to a spring, so that at a normal temperature of, say, 70 degrees, it would vibrate exactly 18,000 times per hour. When we place the watch in an oven the heat of which is 95 degrees, we might find that it had lost seven seconds. That would show that the wheel was too large when at 95 degrees, although just right at 70 degrees. Really, that is a very serious matter—it would lose at the rate of 2⁴⁄₅ minutes in a day. But after all it need not be so very serious, because if we change the location of one screw on each half of the balance so as to place it nearer the free end of the rim when the heat curls the rim inward, it will carry a larger proportion of the weight than if the screws had not been moved. It may require repeated trials to determine the required position of the rim screws, and both skill and good judgment are essential. It will be readily understood that numerous manipulations of this kind constitute no small items in the cost of producing high-grade watches.

Large quantities of the cheaper class of watches are now made by machinery in the United States, Switzerland, France, Germany and England. They are generally produced on the interchangeable system, that is, if any part of a watch has become unfit for service, it can be cheaply replaced by an exact duplicate, the labor of the watch repairer thus becoming easy and expeditious.

The last decade has brought a railway with a single line of rails, on which the car is kept erect by the steadying power of a pair of heavy gyroscopes, or flywheels, rotating in opposite directions at very high velocity. There are two recent inventions of this kind, an English and a German, practically the same in character.

The English, the invention of an Australian named Brennan, had its first form in a model, a small car on which the gyroscopes rotated at the enormous speed of seventy-five hundred revolutions per minute. They were hung in special bearings and rotated in a partial vacuum, the friction being so slight that the wheels would continue to revolve and give stability to the car for a considerable time after the power was shut off. Also, in such a case, supports at the side kept the car from overturning. This model showed itself capable of traveling at high speed on a single rail, rounding sharp curves and even traversing with ease a wire cable hung in the air.

In 1909 a car was tried fourteen feet long and ten feet wide, capable of carrying forty passengers. The gyroscopes in this, moved by a gasoline engine, revolved in a vacuum at a speed of three thousand rotations a minute. They were three and a half feet in diameter and weighed together one and a half tons. With a full load of passengers, this car sped easily around a circular rail two hundred and twenty yards long and proved that it could not be upset, since when all the passengers crowded to one side the car remained firmly erect, the gyroscopes lifting it on the weighted sides. It is claimed that in the monorail system so equipped with the gyroscope, a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour is possible with perfect safety.

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The German invention, displayed by Herr Schorl, a capitalist of Berlin, is in many respects like the English one. The experimental car was eighteen feet long and four feet wide, the gyroscopic flywheels being very light, weighing but a hundred and twenty-five pounds each, while their speed of rotation was eight thousand per minute. The same success was attained as in the English experiments, and there seems to be a successful future before this very interesting vehicle of travel. There is also another type of monorail of overhead construction, the wheels running on the rail from which the car hangs.

The fundamental principle of the gyroscope lies in the resistance which a flywheel in rapid motion presents to any change of direction in the axis of rotation.

The gyroscope has been utilized to give steadiness to vessels in rough seas, and Sperry has made considerable progress in this country in applying it to give stability to an aeroplane. One of the most successful of the recent applications of the gyroscope is in its connection with the marine compass. All battleships in the United States Navy are now fitted with the gyroscopic compass. As a gyro compass is independent of the magnetism of the earth and of the ship, and, when running properly, always points to the North Pole, its great convenience in vessels carrying heavy guns and armor, the attraction of which would materially interfere with the operation of the ordinary type of compass, is at once apparent. Another important use of the gyroscope is found in its relation to the vertical and horizontal steering gear of the naval torpedo, especially the Whitehead pattern. Its first application to this purpose was made by an officer in the Austrian navy in 1895, and this device, or an improved modification of it, such as the Angle Gyroscope, invented by Lieut. W. I. Chambers of the United States Navy, is in use on all torpedoes.

The plan of identifying people by their finger-prints, although at first used only on criminals, is now put to many other uses. It was introduced originally in India, where it was of very great assistance to the British authorities in impressing the natives with the fact that at last no evasion of positive identification of culprits was possible. It was later taken up by the Scotland Yard authorities in England, and its use has since spread to practically every country in the civilized world.

It has been proven, to the entire satisfaction of everyone who has ever made a careful study of the subject, that every human being has a marking on his or her fingers which is different from that of any other person on earth. Not only is it sure that no one else has a thumb or finger marked like yours, but it has also been established beyond dispute that every little detail will continue peculiar to your fingers as long as you have them.

There are many ways in which this knowledge is used to advantage; two methods now employed are particularly valuable. It is seldom that an unpremeditated crime is committed without its author leaving finger-marks on some object which is unconsciously touched, such as silver plate, cash boxes or safes, glassware or windows, polished wood-work, etc., and very often the professional criminal also neglects to take precautions against leaving his signature behind him. It is then a simple matter for the police to collect such marks for comparison with the finger-prints of anyone to whom suspicion may be directed.

The plan has also been utilized a great deal in recent years for the identification of enlisted men in the army and navy. Finger-prints are made, immediately upon enlistment, of each separate finger and thumb of both hands. Group impressions are also taken with the four fingers of each hand pressed down simultaneously. When needed for any particular purpose, such finger-prints are usually enlarged by means of a special camera, to five times their natural size.

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A naked savage found himself in the greatest danger. A wild beast, hungry and fierce, was about to attack him. Escape was impossible. Retreat was cut off. He must fight for his life—but how?

Should he bite, scratch or kick? Should he strike with his fist? These were the natural defenses of his body, but what were they against the teeth, the claws and the tremendous muscles of his enemy? Should he wrench a dead branch from a tree and use it for a club? That would bring him within striking distance to be torn to pieces before he could deal a second blow.

There was but a moment in which to act. Swiftly he seized a jagged fragment of rock from the ground and hurled it with all his force at the blazing eyes before him; then another, and another, until the beast, dazed and bleeding from the unexpected blows, fell back and gave him a chance to escape. He knew that he had saved his life, but there was something else which his dull brain failed to realize.

He had invented arms and ammunition!

In other words, he had needed to strike a harder blow than the blow of his fist, at a greater distance than the length of his arm, and his brain showed him how to do it. After all, what is a modern rifle but a device which man has made with his brain permitting him to strike an enormously hard blow at a wonderful distance? Firearms are really but a more perfect form of stone-throwing, and this early Cave Man took the first step that has led down the ages to the present-day arms and ammunition.

This strange story of a development that has been taking place slowly through thousands and thousands of years, so that today you are able to take a swift shot at distant game instead of merely throwing stones.

The Cave Man and his descendants learned the valuable lesson of stone-throwing, and it made hunters of them, not big-game hunters—that was far too risky; but once in a while a lucky throw might bring down a bird or a rabbit for food. And so it went on for centuries, perhaps. Early mankind was rather slow of thought.

At last, however, there appeared a great inventor—the Edison of his day.

He took the second step.

We do not know his name. Possibly he did not even have a name, but in some way he hit upon a scheme for throwing stones farther, harder and straighter than any of his ancestors.

The men and women in the Cave Colony suddenly found that one bright-eyed young fellow, with a little straighter forehead than the others, was beating them all at hunting. During weeks he had been going away mysteriously, for hours each day. Now, whenever he left the camp he was sure to bring home game, while the other men would straggle back for the most part empty-handed.

Was it witchcraft? They decided to investigate.

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Accordingly, one morning several of them followed at a careful distance as he sought the shore of a stream where water-fowl might be found. Parting the leaves, they saw him pick up a pebble from the bank and then, to their surprise, take off his girdle of skin and place the stone in its center, holding both ends with his right hand.

Stranger still, he whirled the girdle twice around his head, then released one end so that the leather strip flew out and the stone shot straight at a bird in the water.

The mystery was solved. They had seen the first slingman in action.

The new plan worked with great success, and a little practice made expert marksmen. We know that most of the early races used it for hunting and in war. We find it shown in pictures made many thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt and Assyria. We find it in the Roman army where the slingman was called a “funditor.”

We find it in the Bible where it is written of the tribe of Benjamin: “Among all these people there were seven hundred chosen men left-handed; every one could sling a stone at an hair breadth and not miss.” Surely, too, you remember the story of David and Goliath when the young shepherd “prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone.”

Today shepherds tending their flocks upon these same hills of Syria may be seen practicing with slings like those of David. Yes, and slings were used in European armies until nearly a hundred years after America was discovered.

Yet they had their drawbacks. A stone slung might kill a bird or even a man, but it was not very effective against big game.

What was wanted was a missile to pierce a thick hide.

Man had begun to make spears for use in a pinch, but would you like to tackle a husky bear or a well-horned stag with only a spear for a weapon?

No more did our undressed ancestors. The invention of the greatly desired arm probably came about in a most curious way.

Long ages ago man had learned to make fire by patiently rubbing two sticks together, or by twirling a round one between his hands with its point resting upon a flat piece of wood.

In this way it could be made to smoke, and finally set fire to a tuft of dried moss, from which he might get a flame for cooking. This was such hard work that he bethought him to twist a string of sinew about the upright spindle and cause it to twirl by pulling alternately at the two string ends, as some savage races still do. From this it was a simple step to fasten the ends of the two strings to a bent piece of wood, another great advantage, since now but one hand was needed to twirl the spindle, and the other could hold it in place. This was the “bow-drill” which also is used to this day.

But bent wood is apt to be springy. Suppose that while one were bearing on pretty hard with a well-tightened string, in order to bring fire quickly, the point of the spindle should slip from its block. Naturally, it would fly away with some force if the position were just right.

This must have happened many times, and each time but once the fire-maker may have muttered something under his breath, gone after his spindle, and then settled down stupidly to his work. He had had a golden chance to make a great discovery, but didn’t realize it.

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But, so it has been suggested, there was one man who stopped short when he lost his spindle, for a red-hot idea shot suddenly through his brain.

He forgot all about his fire-blocks while he sat stock still and thought.

Once or twice he chuckled to himself softly. Thereupon he arose and began to experiment.

He chose a longer, springier piece of wood, bent it into a bow, and strung it with a longer thong. He placed the end of a straight stick against the thong, drew it strongly back and released it.

The shaft whizzed away with force enough to delight him, and, lo, there was the first bow-and-arrow!

After that it was merely a matter of improvement. The arrow-end was apt to slip from the string until some one thought to notch it. Its head struck with such force that the early hunter decided to give it a sharp point, shaped from a flake of flint, in order that it might drive deep into the body of a deer or bear.

But, most of all, it must fly true and straight to its mark. Who of all these simple people first learned to feather its shaft? Was it some one who had watched the swift, sure-footed spring of a bushy-tailed squirrel from branch to branch? Possibly, for the principle is the same. At all events with its feathers and its piercing point the arrow became the most deadly of all missiles, and continued to be until long after the invention of firearms.

It is interesting to see how many different forms of bow were used. The English had a six-foot “long bow” made of yew or ash, in a single straight piece, that shot arrows the length of a man’s arm. The Indians had bows only forty inches on the average, since a short bow was easier to handle in thick forests. They used various kinds of wood, horn or even bone, such as the ribs of large animals. These they generally backed with sinew.

Sometimes they cut spiral strips from the curving horns of a mountain sheep, and steamed them straight. Then they glued these strips together into a wonderfully tough and springy bow. Once in a while they even took the whole horns of some young sheep, that had not curved too much, and used the pair just as they grew. In this case each horn made one-half of the bow, and the piece of skull between was shaped down into a handle. This gave the shape of a “Cupid’s Bow,” but it could shoot to kill.

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The arrows were quite as important, and their making became a great industry with every race. This was because so many must be carried for each hunt or battle.

Who is not familiar with the chipped flint arrow-heads that the farmer so often turns up with his plow as a relic of the period when Americans were red-skinned instead of white? These arrow-heads have generally a shoulder where the arrow was set into the shaft, there to be bound tightly with sinew or fiber. Many of them are also barbed to hold the flesh.

But the age of machinery was coming on. Once in a while there were glimpses of more powerful and complicated devices to be seen among these simple arms.

A new weapon now came about through warfare. Man has been a savage fighting animal through pretty much all his history, but while he tried to kill the other fellow, he objected to being killed himself.

Therefore he took to wearing armor. During the Middle Ages he piled on more and more, until at last one of the knights could hardly walk, and it took a strong horse to carry him. When such a one fell, he went over with a crash like a tin-peddler’s wagon, and had to be picked up again by some of his men. Such armor would turn most of the arrows. Hence invention got at work again and produced the cross-bow and its bolt. We have already learned how the tough skin of animals brought about the bow; now we see that man’s artificial iron skin caused the invention of the cross-bow.

What was the cross-bow? It was the first real hand-shooting machine. It was another big step toward the day of the rifle. The idea was simple enough. Wooden bows had already been made as strong as the strongest man could pull, and they wished for still stronger ones—steel ones. How could they pull them? At first they mounted them upon a wooden frame and rested one end on the shoulder for a brace. Then they took to pressing the other end against the ground, and using both hands. Next, it was a bright idea to put a stirrup on this end, in order to hold it with the foot.

Still they were not satisfied. “Stronger, stronger!” they clamored; “give us bows which will kill the enemy farther away than he can shoot at us! If we cannot set such bows with both arms let us try our backs!” So they fastened “belt-claws” to their stout girdles and tugged the bow strings into place with their back and leg muscles.

“Stronger, stronger again, for now the enemy has learned to use belt-claws and he can shoot as far as we. Let us try mechanics!”

So they attached levers, pulleys, ratchets and windlasses, until at last they reached the size of the great siege cross-bows, weighing eighteen pounds. These sometimes needed a force of twelve hundred pounds to draw back the string to its catch, but how they could shoot!

Human muscle seemed to have reached its limit, mechanics seemed to have reached its limit, but still the world clamored, “Stronger, stronger! How shall we kill our enemy farther away than he can kill us?” For answer, man unlocked one of the secrets of Nature and took out a terrible force. It was a force of chemistry.

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Who first discovered the power of gunpowder? Probably the Chinese, although all authorities do not agree. Strange, is it not, that a race still using cross-bows in its army should have known of explosives long before the Christian Era, and perhaps as far back as the time of Moses? Here is a passage from their ancient Gentoo Code of Laws: “The magistrate shall not make war with any deceitful machine, or with poisoned weapons, or with cannons or guns, or any kind of firearms.” But China might as well have been Mars before the age of travel. Our civilization had to work out the problem for itself.

It all began through playing with fire. It was desired to throw fire on an enemy’s buildings or his ships, and so destroy them. Burning torches were thrown by machines, made of cords and springs, over a city wall, and it became a great study to find the best burning compound with which to cover these torches. One was needed which would blaze with a great flame and was hard to put out.

Hence the early chemists made all possible mixtures of pitch, resin, naphtha, sulphur, saltpeter, etc.; “Greek fire” was one of the most famous.

Many of these were made in the monasteries. The monks were pretty much the only people in those days with time for study, and two of these shaven-headed scientists now had a chance to enter history. Roger Bacon was the first. One night he was working his diabolical mixture in the stone-walled laboratory, and watched, by the flickering lights, the progress of a certain interesting combination for which he had used pure instead of impure saltpeter.

Suddenly there was an explosion, shattering the chemical apparatus and probably alarming the whole building. “Good gracious!” we can imagine some of the startled brothers saying, “whatever is he up to now! Does he want to kill us all?” That explosion proved the new combination was not fitted for use as a thrown fire; it also showed the existence of terrible forces far beyond the power of all bow-springs, even those made of steel.

Roger Bacon thus discovered what was practically gunpowder, as far back as the thirteenth century, and left writings in which he recorded mixing 11.2 parts of the saltpeter, 29.4 of charcoal, and 29 of sulphur. This was the formula developed as the result of his investigations.

Berthold Schwartz, a monk of Freiburg, studied Bacon’s works and carried on dangerous experiments of his own, so that he is ranked with Bacon for the honor. He was also the first one to rouse the interest of Europe in the great discovery.

And then began the first crude, clumsy efforts at gunmaking. Firearms were born.

Hand bombards and culverins were among the early types. Some of these were so heavy that a forked support had to be driven into the ground, and two men were needed, one to hold and aim, the other to prime and fire. How does that strike you for a duck-shooting proposition? Of course such a clumsy arrangement could only be used in war.

Improvements kept coming, however. Guns were lightened and bettered in shape. Somebody thought of putting a flash pan for the powder, by the side of the touch-hole, and now it was decided to fasten the slow-match, in a movable cock, upon the barrel and ignite it with a trigger. These matches were fuses of some slow-burning fiber, like tow, which would keep a spark for a considerable time. Formerly they had to be carried separately, but the new arrangement was a great convenience and made the matchlock. The cock, being curved like a snake, was called the “serpentine.”

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Everybody knows what the flint-lock was like. You simply fastened a flake of flint in the cock and snapped it against a steel plate. This struck off sparks which fell into the flash-pan and fired the charge.

It was so practical that it became the form of gun for all uses; thus gunmaking began to be a big industry. Invented early in the seventeenth century, it was used by the hunters and soldiers of the next two hundred years. Old people remember when flint-locks were plentiful everywhere. In fact, they are still being manufactured and are sold in some parts of Africa and the Orient. One factory in Birmingham, England, is said to produce about twelve hundred weekly, and Belgium shares in their manufacture. Some of the Arabs use them to this day in the form of strange-looking guns with long, slender muzzles and very light, curved stocks.

Primers were tried in different forms called “detonators,” but the familiar little copper cap was the most popular. No need to describe them. Millions are still made to be used on old-fashioned nipple guns, even in this day of fixed ammunition.

Then came another great development, the breech-loader.

Breech-loaders were hardly new. King Henry VIII of England, he of the many wives, had a match-lock arquebus of this type dated 1537. Henry IV of France even invented one for his army, and others worked a little on the idea from time to time. But it was not until fixed ammunition came into use that the breech-loader really came to stay—and that was only the other day. You remember that the Civil War began with muzzle-loaders and ended with breech-loaders.

Houiller, the French gunsmith, hit on the great idea of the cartridge. If you were going to use powder, ball and percussion primer, to get your game, why not put them all into a neat, handy, gas-tight case? Simple enough, when you come to think of it, like most great ideas. But it required good brain-stuff to do that thinking.

Two men, a smith and his son, both named Eliphalet Remington, in 1816, were working busily one day at their forge in beautiful Ilion Gorge, when, so tradition says, the son asked his father for money to buy a rifle, and met with a refusal.

The boy set his wits to work. Looking around the forge, he picked up enough scrap iron to make a gun barrel, and with this set to work to make a rifle for himself. At that time gun barrels were made, not by drilling the bore out of a solid rod of metal, but by shaping a thick, oblong sheet of metal around a rod the size of the[86] bore, and lapwelding the edges. When the rod was withdrawn, there was your barrel.

It took him several weeks to work out this job and get it right, but he succeeded. He had no tools to cut the rifling. There was a gunsmith in Utica, and he walked there, fifteen miles over the hills, to have his barrel finished. The gunsmith was so impressed by the boy and his accomplishment that, after rifling the barrel, he fitted it with a lock. Then when Remington fitted on a wooden stock his weapon was ready.

This was the first Remington rifle, and it proved a surprisingly good one.

Neighbors tried it, and wanted guns like it. Remington made them. The first rifle—or one exactly like the first one, at least—that Remington made is still in Ilion, the property of Walter Green. Before long the demand was so brisk that Remington would take as many barrels as he could carry over to the Utica gunsmith to be rifled, bringing back a load that had been left there on a previous trip, a journey of thirty miles on foot.

When a new business grows at that rate, of course, it soon needs power. So, later, in 1816, the two Remingtons went “up the creek,” building a shop three miles from home, at Ilion Gulph, which was part of the father’s farm. That was the actual beginning of the plant and the industry of which the centennial was celebrated in 1916. During its early years this shop made anything in its line that could be sold in the neighborhood—rifles, shotguns, crowbars, pickaxes, farm tools. The power was taken from a water wheel in Steele’s Creek, and the first grindstones for smoothing down the welded edges in gun barrels were cut from a red sandstone ledge up the gorge.

Guns sold better than all other products. Orders came from greater distances. By and by shipments were made on the new Erie Canal. For a while, as packages were small, they were taken to the canal bridge, a board lifted from the floor, and the package dropped onto a boat as it passed under. There was no bill of lading. Remington took down the name of the boat and notified his customer by mail, so the latter would know which craft was bringing his guns.

When the trade had extended into all the surrounding counties, however, the new business needed another prime essential of industry—transportation facilities. Shipments were growing larger, and materials like grindstones, bought outside, had to be brought from the canal to Ilion Gulph. In 1828, therefore, the elder Remington bought a large farm in Ilion proper, and there, on the canal, the present plant was started. This was also the beginning of Ilion, for at that period the place was nothing more than a country corner. In 1828 the elder Remington met his death through accident and the business was carried on by his son, who brought water for several power wheels from Steele’s Creek, built a house to live in, and installed in his wooden shop quite a collection of machinery for gunmaking—the list names a big tilt hammer, several trip hammers, boring and rifling machines, grindstones, and so on.

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Not so many years before that, in England, James Watt was complaining about the difficulty of boring a six-inch cylinder for his steam engine with sufficient accuracy to make it a commercial success. No matter how he packed the piston with cork, oiled rags and old hats, the irregularities in the cylinder let the steam escape, and it was believed that neither the tools nor the workmen existed for making a steam engine with sufficient precision. When a young manufacturer named Wilkinson invented a guide for the boring tool, and machined cylinders of fifty inches diameter so accurately that, as Watt testified, they did not err the thickness of an old shilling in any part, it seemed as though the last refinement in machinery had been achieved. That was not very accurate by present-day standards of the thousandth part of an inch, for a shilling is about one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness.

Remington was right in the thick of development with a gunmaking plant, of course, for as his business grew he had to invent and adapt machines to increase output. The lap-welded barrel was standard until 1850, and he got together a battery of trip hammers for forging and welding his barrels. Finer dimensions became a factor in his business when the output grew large enough to warrant carrying a stock of spare parts for his customers, and so he improved those parts in ways that gave at least the beginnings of interchangeability.

Materials were very crude. There was no buying of foundry iron by analysis, no high carbon steels, no fancy tool steels—nor any “efficiency experts” with their stop watches and scientific speed-and-feed tables. Iron was secured by sending teams around the neighborhood to pick up scrap, and when the scrap iron was all cleaned up, fresh metal was brought from ore beds in Oneida County. Coal was scarce, and charcoal made the chief fuel, burnt in the hills round about Ilion.

And the world was fairly swarming with inventors!

That was long before invention became a research department full of engineers. The individual inventor, with a queer-shaped factory process, carried on by a head and a rough model in his carpet-bag, had a chance to influence industry. Few of the useful contrivances had been invented yet, and almost any one of these chaps might be a genius. So, from the very first, Remington was interested in inventors. He was an inventor himself! His pioneer spirit was so strong that Ilion became a place of pilgrimage for men with ideas. Inventors came from everywhere, and Remington listened to them all. Some brought models, others drawings, still others a bare idea, and a few, of course, had just a plain “bug.”

The first government contract came in 1845. War with Mexico loomed up on the horizon. William Jencks had invented a carbine, and Uncle Sam wanted several[88] thousand guns made in a hurry under the patent. A contract had been let to Ames & Co., of Springfield, Mass., and they had made special machinery for the job. Remington took over the contract and the machinery, added to his power, secured by putting in another water race, erected the building now known as the “Old Armory,” and made the carbines.

In 1850 the art of gunmaking began to improve radically. The old lap-welded barrel gave way to the barrel drilled from solid steel. This was accomplished for the first time in America at the Remington plant, in making Harper’s Ferry muskets. Then followed the drilling of small-bore barrels from solid steel, the drilling of doubled-barrel shotguns from one piece of steel, the drilling of fluid steel and nickel steel barrels, all done for the first time in this country at the Ilion shops. Three-barrel guns were also made from one piece of steel, two bores for shot and the third rifled for a bullet. A customer wanted some special barrels with nine bores in a single piece of steel. These were made at Ilion, and the Remington plant soon became noted for its ability to bore almost anything in the shape of a gun, from the tiniest squirrel calibers up to boat guns weighing sixty pounds or more, which were really small caliber cannon.

Between the time when Remington made his first rifle at Ilion Gulph and the outbreak of the Civil War, most of the basic things in machine tools had been adapted to general production—the slide-rest lathe, planer, shaper, drill press, steam hammer, taps and dies, the vernier caliper that enabled a mechanic at the bench to measure to one-thousandth of an inch, and so on.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon, Uncle Sam turned to the Remington plant, among others, for help out of his dilemma of “unpreparedness.” The first contract was given for 5,000 Harper’s Ferry rifles, and it took two years to complete it. Five thousand Harper’s Ferry muskets came in to be changed so that bayonet or sabre could be attached, and this particular job was finished in two weeks, every man and boy in Ilion working at it. There was a big contract for army revolvers, and that had to be taken care of by starting a separate plant in Utica, which ran until the end of the war, when its machinery and tools were moved to Ilion. Steam power was now installed, and the plant, increased by new buildings and machinery, ran day and night.

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In 1863, the Remington breech-loading rifle was perfected, and proved to be so great an improvement over previous inventions in military arms that an order for 10,000 of them was obtained from our government. The Ilion plant being taxed to its utmost capacity, the contract was transferred to the Savage Arms Company, of Middletown, Conn., which completed the job in 1864.

The tools and fixtures used in making Remington breech-loading rifles for the United States were brought back from Connecticut in 1866, and an inventive genius named John Rider was set to work, with a staff of the best mechanics obtainable, to develop this gun still further. He devised the famous system of a dropping breech block, backed up by the hammer.

Uncle Sam had a great number of muzzle-loading Springfield rifles left from the Civil War. By the Berdan system, these were turned into breech-loaders at the Ilion plant, the breech being cut out of the barrel and a breech-block inserted, swinging upward and forward. Spain had 10,000 muskets to modernize by the same system, and the breech-block attachments were made at Ilion.

The Berdan system, with a slight alteration, was the foundation of the Allen gun, made by the United States government for the army until superseded by the Krag-Jorgensen.

The repeating rifle now seemed an interesting possibility and large sums were spent in developing a weapon of this type. It did not prove to have merit, however.

Then James P. Lee designed the first military rifle with the bolt type of cartridge chamber, the parent of the military rifle of today. The model was made at Ilion, but another type of bolt gun, the Keene, seemed to offer still greater possibilities at the moment, and the plant was being prepared to manufacture this. The Lee gun was taken up at Bridgeport, but not made successfully, and finally, as the Keene gun had not met expectations, falling short of government tests, the Lee type was brought back to Ilion, tools worked out and manufacture undertaken in quantities. It afterwards became the basis for the famous British army rifle, the Lee-Metford.

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At this period the plant made many other interesting guns. The Whitmore double-barrel breech-loading shotgun was designed, and later developed into the Remington breech-loading shotgun. Eliott hammerless breech-loading pistols with one, two, four and five barrels, discharged by a revolving firing pin, were made in large quantities, as well as a single-barrel Eliott magazine pistol. The Eliott magazine pump rifle was perfected in Ilion, but afterwards made in New England. Vernier and wind gauge sights, attachable to any rifle, were made, and novelties like the “gun cane,” which had the appearance of a walking-stick, but was a perfect firearm, carried as a protection against robbery.

One of the most important features is, of course, the making of barrels. The machines for drilling and boring are the best that money can buy, and the operatives the most skilful to be found anywhere. Care at this stage reduces the necessity for straightening later. Every point is given the minutest attention. In drilling 22-calibers, for example, the length of the hole must be from 100 to 125 times the diameter of the drill.

Improvements have made it possible to drill harder steel than formerly. This reduces the weight of the gun, and is important to the man who carries it.

The boring is an especially delicate task. In choke-boring your shotgun, for example, the final reamer took off only ²⁄₁₀₀₀ of an inch. Think of such a gossamer thread of metal! But it insures accuracy. No pains can be too great for that.

This exquisite painstaking will be seen still more in the barrel-inspection department, to which we will go now. In passing, we must not forget the grinding shop, where is, perhaps, the finest battery of grinding machines in the United States; or the polishers running at the dizzy speed of 1,500 to 1,700 revolutions per minute and making the inside of the barrel shine like glass. This high polish is important, for it resists rust and prevents leading.

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That is the atmosphere of the whole place. Every action has its reason. There is not an unnecessary motion made by any one, and there is not one necessary thing omitted, whatever the cost or trouble.

It is no easy matter to secure a pass to the Bridgeport plant. Its great advantage over other concerns lies, to a large degree, in the exclusive machinery that has been developed at so much pains and expense and the secrets of which are so carefully guarded. In our case, however, there will be nothing to hinder us from getting a few general impressions, provided we do not go into mechanical details too closely.

The very size of the great manufactory is impressive—sixteen acres of floor space, crowded with machinery and resounding with activity. In building after building, floor above floor, the sight is similar: the long rows of busy machines, the whirling network of shafts and belts above, the intent operatives, and the steady clicking of innumerable parts blended into a softened widespread sound. It seems absolutely endless; it is a matter of hours to go through the plant. Stop at one of the machines and see the speed and accuracy with which it turns out its product; then calculate the entire number of machines and you will begin to gain a little idea as to what the total output of this vast institution must be.

More than once you will find yourself wondering whether there can be guns enough in the world, or fingers enough to press their triggers, to use such a tremendous production of ammunition. But there are, and the demand is steadily increasing. This old world is a pretty big place after all.

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Operatives, girls in many cases, handle the most terrible compounds. We stop, for example, where they are making primers to go in the head of your loaded shell, in order that it may not miss fire when the bunch of quail whirrs suddenly into the air from the sheltering grasses. That grayish, pasty mass is wet fulminate of mercury. Suppose it should dry a trifle too rapidly. It would be the last thing you ever did suppose, for there is force enough in that double handful to blow its surroundings into fragments. You edge away a little, and no wonder, but the girl who handles it shows no fear as she deftly but carefully presses it into molds which separate it into the proper sizes for primers. She knows that in its present moist condition it cannot explode.

Or, perhaps, we may be watching one of the many loading machines. There is a certain suggestiveness in the way the machines are separated by partitions. The man in charge takes a small carrier of powder from a case in the outside wall and shuts the door, then carefully empties it into the reservoir of his machine, and watches alertly while it packs the proper portions into the waiting shells. He looks like a careful man, and needs to be. You do not stand too close.

The empty carrier then passes through a little door at the side of the building, and drops into the yawning mouth of an automatic tube. In the twinkling of an eye it appears in front of the operator in one of the distributing stations, where it is refilled and returned to its proper loading machine, in order to keep the machine going at a perfectly uniform rate; while at the same time it allows but a minimum amount of powder to remain in the building at any moment. Each machine has but just sufficient powder in its hopper to run until a new supply can reach it. Greater precaution than this cannot be imagined, illustrating as it does, that no effort has been spared to protect the lives of the operators.

Artesian wells are named after the French Province of Artais, where they appear to have been first used on an extensive scale.

They are perpendicular borings into the ground through which water rises to the surface of the soil, producing a constant flow or stream. As a location is chosen where the source of supply is higher than the mouth of the boring, the water rises to the opening at the top. They are generally sunk in valley plains and districts where the formation of the ground is such that that below the surface is bent into basin-shaped curves. The rain falling on the outcrops of these saturates the whole porous bed, so that when the bore reaches it the water by hydraulic pressure rushes up towards the level of the highest portion of the strata.

The supply is sometimes so abundant as to be used extensively as a moving power, and in arid regions for fertilizing the ground, to which purpose artesian springs have been applied from a very remote period. Thus many artesian wells have been sunk in the Algerian Sahara which have proved an immense boon to the district. The same has been done in the arid region of the United States. The water of most of these is potable, but a few are a little saline, though not to such an extent as to influence vegetation.

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The hollows in which London and Paris lie are both perforated in many places by borings of this nature. At London they were first sunk only to the sand, but more recently into the chalk. One of the most celebrated artesian wells is that of Grenelle near Paris, 1,798 feet deep, completed in 1841, after eight years’ work. One at Rochefort, France, is 2,765 feet deep; at Columbus, Ohio, 2,775; at Pesth, Hungary, 3,182, and at St. Louis, Mo., 3,843¹⁄₂. Artesian borings have been made in West Queensland 4,000 feet deep. At Schladebach, in Prussia, there is one nearly a mile deep.

As the temperature of water from great depths is invariably higher than that at the surface, artesian wells have been made to supply warm water for heating manufactories, greenhouses, hospitals, fishponds, etc. The petroleum wells of America are of the same technical description. These wells are now made with larger diameters than formerly, and altogether their construction has been rendered much more easy in modern times.

Boring in the earth or rock for mining, geologic or engineering purposes is effected by means of augers, drills or jumpers, sometimes wrought by hand, but now usually by machinery, driven by steam or frequently by compressed air.

In ordinary mining practice a bore-hole is usually commenced by digging a small pit about six feet deep, over which is set up a shear-legs with pulley, etc. The boring rods are from ten to twenty feet in length, capable of being jointed together by box and screw, and having a chisel inserted at the lower end. A lever is employed to raise the bore-rods, to which a slight twisting motion is given at each stroke, when the rock at the bottom of the hole is broken by the repeated percussion of the cutting tool. Various methods are employed to clear out the triturated rock.

The work is much quickened by the substitution of steam power, water power, or even horse power for manual labor. Of the many forms of boring machines now in use may be mentioned the diamond boring machine, invented by Leschot, a Swiss engineer. In this the cutting tool is of a tubular form, and receives a uniform rotatory motion, the result being the production of a cylindrical core from the rock of the same size as the bore or caliber of the tube. The boring bit is a steel thimble about four inches in length, having two rows of Brazilian black diamonds firmly embedded therein, the edges projecting slightly. The diamond teeth are the only parts which come in contact with the rock, and their hardness is such that an enormous length can be bored with but little appreciable wear.

Besides the dried dates which we are accustomed to seeing in this country, they are used extensively by the natives of Northern Africa and of some countries of Asia.

It consists of an external pericarp, separable into three portions, and covering a seed which is hard and horny in consequence of the nature of the albumen in which the embryo plant is buried.

Next to the cocoanut tree, the date is unquestionably the most interesting and useful of the palm tribe. Its stem shoots up to the height of fifty or sixty feet without branch or division, and of nearly the same thickness throughout its length. From the summit it throws out a magnificent crown of large feather-shaped leaves and a number of spadices, each of which in the female plant bears a bunch of from 180 to 200 dates, each bunch weighing from twenty to twenty-five pounds.

The fruit is eaten fresh or dried. Cakes of dates pounded and kneaded together are the food of the Arabs who traverse the deserts. A liquor resembling wine is made from dates by fermentation.

Persia, Palestine, Arabia and the north of Africa are best adapted for the culture of the date-tree, and its fruit is in these countries an important article of food. It is now being introduced into California.

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Rubber is the coagulated sap of more than 300 varieties of tropical trees and vines—the Landolphia of Africa, the Ficus of the Malay Peninsula, the Guayule shrub of Mexico and the Castilloa of South America, Central America and Southern Mexico are all important rubber producers, but far more important than all of the others together is the Hevea, a native of Brazil.

Hevea trees are scattered through the dense forests of practically every part of the Amazon Basin, a territory more than two-thirds as large as the United States.

Down in Brazil, several hundred miles up the Amazon River, there stood a great forest of trees and in this forest—the same as in forests of today—were birds and animals and bugs and beetles, etc. All trees are protected by nature; some are protected from bugs eating their leaves, by other bugs eating up these bugs; other trees are protected by having a thorny or bristly bark.

In these forests in which the rubber tree grows there was a wood-boring beetle, and this beetle would attack these rubber trees, boring into them; but the tree, in order to protect itself, had a poisonous juice, and as soon as the beetle bored into the tree, this juice killed him. Then the juice would fill up the hole the beetle had made, and the tree would go on growing as before.

In those days the natives around these forests (who were half Indian and half Negro) happened to find some of this juice sticking on the tree. They cut it off, rolled it together and made a ball, with which they would play games. The first mention of it was made by Herrera in his account of the second voyage of Columbus, wherein he speaks of a ball used by Indians, made from the gum of a tree which was lighter and bounced better than the far-famed balls of Castile.

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The way they gather this rubber is very interesting. When it comes from the tree it is nothing but a milky juice. The natives of South America soon discovered that the white man was willing to pay them beads and other trinkets for chunks of this rubber, so they became active in gathering it.

In this locality the rubber harvest commences as soon as the Amazon falls which is usually about the first of August. When this date approaches bands of natives set out from their primitive homes and go, in many instances, hundreds of miles into the forest lowlands. There, within easy reach of the rubber trees, they set up their camp and the actual work of harvesting the rubber crop begins. It usually covers a period of about six months, extending from August to January or February.

The camps are usually great distances from the nearest town and procuring supplies is not only difficult but very expensive as well. The natives build their huts out of small poles covered with palm thatch and live in little colonies while the rubber harvest is going on. The Brazilian name for a rubber gatherer is “seringuero.”

A roof and floor with the flimsiest of walls, set up on piling for coolness, defense against animals and insects, and to keep the building dry during flood season, forms the home of the rubber gatherer. The more pretentious and better furnished home of the superintendent of the “estate,” together with the storehouses, etc., are called the “seringal.”

The buildings are usually grouped together at a favorable spot on the banks of the Amazon or one of its tributaries.

Furniture is of the most primitive type. The laborers and their families sleep in hammocks or on matting on the floor. Food is largely made up of canned goods and the ever-present farina, a sort of tapioca flour.

The climate of the South American rubber country is usually fatal to white[101] men, and even among the Indians the fevers, the poisonous insects and reptiles, and the other perils of a tropical forest cause a high death rate. The production of South American rubber is limited by a shortage of men rather than a shortage of trees.

In December the rainy season begins. The waters of the Amazon begin to rise and the work ceases. The superintendent and many of the workers go down the river to Para and Manaos or to villages on higher ground. However, a number of the laborers usually remain in the huts, loafing and fighting the animals and insects that seek refuge from the rising waters. They have but little to eat, and during the entire season practically no communication with the outside world.

At the end of the rainy season, early in May, the laborers return to their task. The quick-growing vegetation has filled the estradas and this must be cleared away and perhaps new estradas opened. An estrada is simply a path leading from one Hevea tree to another and circling back to camp. Each estrada includes about one hundred of the scattered Heveas.

After having established themselves in camp the natives take up their monotonous round, which is followed day after day as long as the rubber trees continue to yield their valuable sap. When the seringuero starts out he equips himself with a tomahawk-like axe having a handle about thirty inches long. This is called a “macheadino.”

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The trees are tapped very much like maple syrup trees. Only the juice is found between the outer bark and the wood. So these men make a cut in the tree through the bark, almost to the wood. A little cup is then fastened to the tree with a piece of soft clay to press the cup against it, and the juice runs into this cup. Sometimes they have from ten to thirty cups on one tree and the average yield of a tree is ten pounds of rubber a year.

Some two hours after the tapping is done the flow entirely ceases and the tree must be tapped anew to secure a fresh flow.

The film of rubber that forms on the inside of the cup and the bits of rubber remaining on the tree are collected and sold as coarse Para.

The rubber gatherer carries in addition to a macheadino and many small tin cups, a larger vessel for gathering the liquid and carrying it to camp. One man will tap as many as 100 trees in a single morning and then cover the same ground again in the afternoon or on the following morning, gathering the sap that drips slowly[104] from the cuts made in the trees. On these journeys the harvester frequently travels long distances over paths so buried by the undergrowth of the jungle that they are almost invisible to the untrained eye. On such expeditions rubber gatherers usually go armed with rifles to protect themselves against wild animals, reptiles and savage Indians.

After the juice has been gathered in this way, the native builds a fire; over it he places a cover shaped like a large bottle with the bottom knocked out of it. This fire is built of oily nuts found in the forest, and the thick smoke arises through what would be the neck of the bottle.

With a stick shaped something like the wooden shovels used at the seashore, he dipped into the milky juice in the bowl, then turned this stick or paddle around very rapidly in the smoke until the juice baked on the paddle. He then added more juice and went through the same operation again and again until there were between five and six pounds of rubber baked on this paddle. He then cuts this off with a[105] wet knife which made it cut more rapidly. That formed what is called a rubber “biscuit,” and he then started over again for his next five or six pounds. Later, as the demand for these “biscuits” increased, instead of the native using the paddle, he erected two short fence-like affairs about six feet apart, but parallel with each other, and in between was the smoky fire. Then he obtained a long pole, stretched it across these two rails and poured a small quantity of this juice on this pole, over where the smoke came in contact with it, and rolled the pole around until this juice was baked, adding more, until, instead of a small five- or six-pound “biscuit,” he would get an immense ball. In order to get this off his pole, he would jog one end of the pole on the ground until the “biscuit” would slide off. This is the way crude rubber first came into our market and the way it comes today.

Up to this time, these “biscuits,” when exposed to heat, would become very soft and sticky, and when exposed to the cold, would become hard like a stone.

There was an American by the name[106] of Charles Goodyear who had heard how the natives of the rubber-growing countries used this milky juice in many ways for their own benefit. One use they put it to was the waterproofing of their cloaks. How could this be done so that our clothing would be made water-tight and yet not be sticky in summer or stiff in winter? Goodyear devoted a great deal of his time to solving this problem, and, like many other great inventors, he passed through many trials. His many failures caused his friends to forsake him and he was put in prison for not paying his debts. He persisted in his quest, however, and it was accident at last that opened the way to discovery of the processes of vulcanization for which Goodyear was seeking.

At Woburn, Mass., one day, in the spring of 1839, he was standing with his brother and several other persons near a very hot stove. He held in his hand a mass of his compound of sulphur and gum, upon which he was expatiating in his usual vehement manner, the company exhibiting the indifference to which he was accustomed. In the crisis of his argument he made a violent gesture, bringing the mass in contact with the stove, which was hot enough to melt India-rubber instantly; upon looking at it a moment afterwards, he perceived that his compound had not melted in the least degree! It had charred as leather chars, but no part of the surface had dissolved. There was not a sticky place upon it. To say that he was astonished at this would but faintly express his ecstasy of amazement. The result was absolutely new to all experience—India-rubber not melting in contact with red-hot iron! He felt as Columbus felt when he saw the land bird alighting upon his ship and the driftwood floating by. In a few years more his labors were crowned with success.

This great invention made it possible for us to have rubber boots and rubber shoes and many other things made of rubber.

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Up to this time, all the rubber was called Para rubber, named from the town of Para in Brazil, from which all rubber was shipped. The full-grown tree is quite large, ranging sixty feet and over in height and about eight feet around the trunk. It has a flower of pale green color and its fruit is a capsule containing three small brown seeds, with patches of black. These seeds lose their life very quickly, so a great deal of care is necessary to pack them if they are wanted to plant in another place. The safest way is to lay them loosely in a box of dry soil or charcoal.

The rubber tree grows best in rich, damp soil and in countries where the temperature is eighty-nine to ninety-four degrees at noon-time and not less than seventy-four degrees at night, and where there is a rainy season for about six months in the year, and the soil and atmosphere is damp the year round.

The name of this species of tree is Hevea, but many years ago it was called Siphonia on account of the Omaqua Indians using squirts made of a piece of pipe stuck into a hollow ball of rubber.

Back in the seventies an English botanist, Wickham by name, smuggled many Hevea seeds out of Brazil. The tree was found to grow well in the Eastern tropics and today the rubber plantations of Ceylon, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and neighboring regions are producing more than half of the world’s supply of crude rubber. Here the natives work under pleasant climatic conditions and the trees under cultivation grow better and yield better than in the forest.

On these plantations, rubber trees are cultivated just the same as other crops. All weeds are removed and great care is used with the young trees. Low-growing plants which absorb nitrogen from the air which enriches the soil, such as the passion flower and other sensitive plants, were planted around these small rubber trees, for it was found that when the weeds were removed to give the trees a chance to grow, the ground became hard and dry.

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The method of tapping is different, too. Instead of ten to thirty taps, a series of cuts the shape of a V is made on four sides of the tree, from the bottom up to as high as a man can reach, and a cup placed at the point of the V. Another way is to make one long cut down the tree and then cut out slanting channels about one foot apart into this, and put a cup at the bottom of the long cut; another is making a spiral around the tree with the cup at the bottom.

With these big plantations some other way to cure the rubber had to be devised from the smoking process used in curing the native rubber which comes from South America. The milky juice is emptied from the cups into a tank and lime juice is added and it is then allowed to stand. The juice, as it comes from the tree, contains considerable water: the lime juice is added to separate the rubber from the water.

Sometimes separators are used much like our cream separators; in fact, the whole process and the appearance of the interior of these rubber “dairies” very much resembles our own dairies where real milk is made into butter, curds or cheese.

Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, and Manaos, a thousand miles up, are both modern cities of more than one hundred thousand population. They have schools, churches, parks, gardens and museums, and, except for the Indians, certain peculiarities in architecture and the ever-present odor of rubber, they differ but little from our northern cities of equal size. Here the rubber markets are located and here the rubber is carefully examined, graded, boxed and shipped to New York or Liverpool.

Plantation rubber usually comes in the form of sheets of various shapes and sizes. The rubber shown here is in oblong sheets. Sometimes it is in the form of “pancakes” or in “blocks.” Often, after being coagulated, it is smoked, and “smoked plantation sheet” is, next to Para, the best rubber obtainable.

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Crude rubber is received in many forms under various names. There are more than three hundred standard kinds, depending on source and method of handling; e. g., “Sernamby” is simply bundles of Para tree scrap and scrap from the cups where milk has cured in the open air. “Guayule” is a resinous rubber secured from a two-foot shrub that grows on the arid plains of Texas and Northern Mexico.

Our picture shows a bin of crude up-river Para the finest rubber known. Every “biscuit” or “ham” has been cut in two to find out whether the native has loaded it in any way.

Now that we have rubber so that it can be used, we find there are a great many operations necessary between gathering the crude rubber and finally the finished rubber coat or shoe. These various operations are called washing, drying, compounding, calendering, cutting, making, varnishing, vulcanizing and packing and each one of these main operations requires several smaller operations.

The grinding and calendering department is the one in which the crude rubber is washed, dried, compounded and run into sheets ready to be cut into the various pieces which constitute a boot or shoe.

The cultivated rubber comes practically clean, but the crude rubber “biscuits” contain more or less dirt and foreign vegetable matter which have to be removed. The rubber is softened in hot water for a number of hours and then passed through the corrugated rolls of a wash mill in which a stream of water plays on the rubber as it is thoroughly masticated and formed into thin sheets. These sheets are taken to the drying loft. Here they are hung up so that the warm air can readily circulate through them and are allowed to remain from six to eight weeks, until every trace of moisture has been removed. The vacuum dryer is used where rubber is wanted dry in a short space of time. This is a large oven containing shelves. The wet sheets of rubber are cut in square pieces, placed on perforated tin pans and loaded into the dryer, which will hold about eight hundred pounds of rubber. The doors are closed, fastened, and by the vacuum process the water is extracted, leaving the rubber perfectly dry in about three hours’ time.

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After the rubber is dry, and has been tested by the chemist, it goes to the grinding mills where it is refined on warm rolls and made ready for the compounding or mixing. It is impossible to make out of rubber alone, shoes or other products that will withstand extreme changes in temperature; certain amounts of sulphur, litharge and other ingredients are necessary in combination with the pure rubber to give a satisfactory material. The gum from the grinding mills is taken to the mixing mills, where, between the large rolls, the various materials are compounded into a homogeneous mass. The compounded rubber goes from the mixing mills to refining mills, to be prepared for the calenders.

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Automobile, motorcycle and bicycle tires, belting, footwear and many other rubber articles must have a base or backbone of cotton fabric, and in order that the fabric may unite firmly with the rubber it must be “frictioned” or forced full of rubber. This is done by drawing it between enormous iron rollers, rubber being applied on its surface as it passes through. The pressure is so great that every opening between the fibers of cotton, every space between threads is forced full of rubber.

The fabric is then ready to go with the milled rubber to the various departments of the factory to be incorporated into rubber goods. The calender is also used to press rubber into sheets of uniform thickness.

In making footwear, the linings and such parts as can be piled up layer on layer are cut by dies, usually on the large beam-cutting machines, commonly seen in leather shoe factories. The uppers are cut by hand from the engraved sheets, while metal patterns are used on the plain stock. The soles are cut by specially designed machines. The sheets of rubber from which the uppers and soles are cut are at this stage of the work plastic and very sticky. It is necessary on this account to cut the various pieces one by one and keep them separate, by placing them between the leaves of a large cloth book. In an ordinary rubber shoe there are from twelve to fifteen pieces, while in a common boot there are over twenty-five pieces.

The various pieces are next delivered to the making department, where they are fitted together on the “lasts” or “trees” in such a way that all the joints and seams are covered and the lines of the shoe kept exactly. Considerable skill is required to do this, as all the joints and seams must be rolled down smooth and firm to ensure a solid boot or shoe. The goods are all inspected before they are loaded on the iron cars to go to the varnishing department, where they receive the gloss which makes them look like patent leather.

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From the varnishing department the shoes are taken to the vulcanizers, which are large ovens heated by innumerable steam pipes. The shoes remain in these vulcanizers from six to seven hours, subjected to extreme heat. This heating or vulcanizing process fixes the elasticity of the rubber, increases its strength enormously and unites the parts in such a way as to make the shoe practically one piece.

The shoes next go to the packing department, where they are taken off the “lasts,” inspected, marked, tied together in pairs, sorted and packed. They are then sent to the shipping department to be shipped immediately or stored in one of the spacious storehouses.

In making tires, the strips of fabric are built together about a steel core to form the body or carcass of the tire. The beads are also added. The side strips, the breaker strip and finally the tread are applied. All of these pieces are sticky, and as they are laid together and rolled down by small hand rollers they adhere to each other, and when the tire is completed it looks very much like the tires you see on automobiles, but it is not yet vulcanized. The rubber is much like tough, heavy dough—there is not much stretch to it and in a cold place it would become hard and brittle.

The tire on its steel core is taken to the mold room and placed in a steel box or mold, shaped to exactly enclose it. It is then placed with many others on a steel frame and lowered into a sort of a well or oven, where it remains for a time under pressure in the heat of live steam, after which it is removed, a finished tire.

Vulcanization is simply the heating of the rubber mixed with sulphur—this causes a chemical change in the substance; it becomes tougher, more elastic and less affected by heat and cold.

This process, discovered in 1839, made rubber the useful substance it is today. The discoverer, Charles Goodyear, to whom we referred before, was never connected in any way except by name with any of the manufacturers of the present day, but his discovery was the real beginning of a great industry.

Jack Robinson was a man in olden days who became well known because of the shortness of his visits when he came to call on his friends, according to Grose, who has looked up the subject very carefully. When the servants at a home where Jack Robinson called went to announce his coming to the host and his assembled guests, it was said that they hardly had time to repeat his name out loud before he would take his departure again. Another man, Halliwell, who has also investigated the development of the expression, thinks that it was derived from the description of a character in an old play, “Jack, Robes on.”

It is also interesting to learn that the sandwiches which we all enjoy so much at picnics are so called because of the fact that an English nobleman, the Earl of Sandwich, always used to eat his meat between two pieces of bread.

Wonderful ingenuity has been shown in contriving a means to enable people to ascend the Wetterhorn Mountain in Switzerland. The sides of the mountain are so irregular and rough in their formation that it was found impossible to build even the incline type of railway, such as is usually resorted to where the ascent to a mountain is particularly steep. So the engineers who studied the problem finally contrived two huge sets of cables, securely fastened at the top, and fixed to a landing place a short distance from the base of the mountain. Cars, holding twenty passengers each, are carried up and down these cables, one car balancing the other, by means of a cable attached to each, which passes around a drum at the top.

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There is probably no railway in all Europe upon which travel affords more wonderful scenery than this trip, suspended in the air, up the side of the Wetterhorn Mountain, the three peaks of which are all considerably more than two and a quarter miles high.

Although something like an official newspaper or government gazette existed in ancient Rome, and Venice in the middle of the sixteenth century also had official news sheets, the first regular newspaper was published at Frankfort in 1615. Seven years later the first regular newspaper appeared in England.

It was customary to print the points of the compass at the top of the early single-sheet papers, to indicate that occurrences from all four parts of the world were recorded. Before very long, the publisher of one of the most progressive papers rearranged the letters symbolic of the points of the compass, into a straight line, and printed the word NEWS, and in a very short time practically every newspaper publisher decided to adopt the idea.

It is interesting to find that American colonies were not far behind England in establishing newspapers, and equally interesting to know that the most remarkable development of the newspaper has been in the United States, where, in proportion to population, its growth and circulation has been much greater than in any other country. Practically a half of all the newspapers published in the world are published in the United States and Canada.

Every trade, organization, profession and science now has its representative journal or journals, besides the actual newspapers and magazines of literary character, and Solomon’s remark might be paraphrased to read: “To the making of newspapers there is no end.”

The great and rapid presses of recent years, the methods of mechanical typesetting and the cheapness and excellence of photographic illustrations, have all been necessary elements of the great sheets and enormous circulations of the present day, and the twentieth century newspaper is one of the greatest achievements in the whole field of human enterprise.

As soon as man found that he could produce fire by friction, as the result of rapidly rubbing two sticks together, he began to have accidents with his fires, just as we do today. And it was probably because of one of these accidents, in which some food was cooked quite unintentionally, that primitive man made the great discovery that most of the meats and fruits and roots that he had been accustomed to eating raw, were far better if they were put in or near the fire for a while first.

Unless you happen to be of the same height as the person standing next to you, the sky-line is a different distance away from each of you, for it is really just a question of the distance the eye can see from different heights above the sea-level. A person five feet tall, standing on the beach at the seaside, is able to see about two and three-quarter miles away, while one a foot taller can see about a quarter of a mile further.

A person on the roof of a house a hundred feet high is able to see more than thirteen miles away, on a clear day, and a forty-two mile view may be enjoyed from the top of a mountain a thousand feet high. The aviator who goes up to a level a mile above the sea is able to see everything within a radius of ninety-six miles and the further up he goes the larger the earth’s circle becomes to him.

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Everybody knows what rope is, but everybody does not know how rope is made or of what kinds of fiber it is manufactured. And very few probably know the history of rope making, or how it developed from the simple thread to the great cable which now holds giant vessels to their wharves or aids to anchor them in ocean storms.

Let us go back and try to trace the history of the rope. It is a long one, going out of sight in the far past. In very early times men must have used some kinds of cords or lines for fishing, for tying animals, at times for tying men. These may have been strips of hide, lengths of tough, flexible wood, fibrous roots, and such gifts of nature, and in time all these were twisted together to make a longer and stronger cord or rope.

We have evidence of this. Tribes of savages still have in use cords made of various materials and some of them very well made. These have been in use among them for long centuries. Take the case of our own Indian tribes. They long made use of cordage twisted from cotton and other fibers, or formed from the inner bark of various trees and the roots of others, and from the hairs, skins and sinews of animals.

Good rope was made also by the old Peruvians, by the South Sea Islanders, and by the natives of many other regions. Those on the seashore made fishing lines and well-formed nets, and certain tribes, among them the Nootka Indians, harpooned the whale, using cords made from the sinews of that animal, these being very strong and highly pliable. The larger ropes used by them, two inches in diameter, were made from the fibrous roots of the spruce.

All the ancient civilized peoples used ropes and cordage, made from such flexible materials as their countries afforded. We have pictures of this from ancient Egypt, in which the process of twisting strips of leather into rope is shown on the walls of their tombs. One workman is seen cutting a long strand from a hide which he turns round as he cuts, while another man walks backward with this, twisting it as he goes. The Egyptians also made ropes from papyrus and palm fibers, of which specimens still exist. Only by the use of large and strong ropes could they have moved the massive stones seen in their pyramids and temples.

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When men began to move boats by sails, ropes of some kind must have been needed, and the early ships no doubt demanded long and strong cordage. We have pictures of these from several centuries before the Christian era, and we are told by Herodotus that Xerxes, when he built his famous bridge of boats across the Hellespont, 480 B. C., fastened them together by enormous cables which stretched from shore to shore, a distance of nearly a mile. Twelve of these ropes were used, about nine inches thick, some of them being made of flax and others of papyrus.

During the medieval and later centuries rope making was an active industry and America was not long settled before the rope maker became active. John Harrison, an English expert in this line, set up a ropewalk in Boston in 1641 or 1642, and for many years had a monopoly of the trade. But after his death the art became common and in 1794 there were fourteen large ropewalks in that city. In 1810 there were 173 of these industries in the United States, and from that time on the business has grown and prospered.

In the period referred to all the work was done by hand, machine spinning being of later date. American hemp was used, this softer fiber being spun by hand long after Manila hemp was spun by machines. The hand-making process, long used, is an interesting one. The first step was to “hackle” the hemp. The hackle was a board with long, sharp steel teeth set in it. This combed out the matted tow of the hemp into clean, straight fiber. The instrument used in spinning was a large wheel, turned by hand, and setting in motion a set of “whirls” or revolving spindles, which twisted the hemp by their motion. The spinner wrapped a quantity of the hackled hemp around his waist and attached some of the fibers to the whirls, which twisted the hemp as he walked backward down the ropewalk, pulling out new fiber from his waist by one hand and pressing it into form and size with the fingers of the other.

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In forming a small rope, two of the yarns thus formed were twisted together in a direction opposite to that of the first twist. Then a second twisting followed, the direction being again reversed. Thus rope making may be seen to consist in a series of twisting processes, each twist opposite to the former, the rope growing in size and strength at each operation. Horse power or water power was used when the ropes became too large to be made by hand.

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The old ropewalk is today largely obsolete, the rope-making machine taking the place of the hand-making process, which was not adapted to produce the large cables which in time were called for. Steam-driven machines were first introduced about 1838. These are now used alike in making fine threads and yarns and in large ropes.

There are two methods in the modern system of rope making. In one the strands are formed on one type of machine and twisted into a rope on another. In the second method both operations are performed on a single machine. The latter saves space, but is not so well fitted for large ropes as the former. A plant for the two-part method comprises two or more horizontal strand-forming machines, several bobbin frames, and a vertical laying-machine. The former twists several strands into a rope, the latter several ropes into a cable.

The yarns, which are wound around bobbins, are drawn from them through perforated plates, these so placed that the yarns converge together and pass into a tube. In this they are compressed and at the same time twisted by the revolution of a long carriage or flyer, which can be made to vary in speed and direction. After being twisted the strands are wound around reels in readiness for the second, or laying process.

In this the full reels are lifted by overhead chains and are placed in the vertical flyers of the laying-machine. Here again the strands are made to pass through openings and converge into a central tube, through which they pass to the revolving flyers, which perform the final duty of twisting them into rope. The finished product is delivered to a belt-driven coiling reel on which it is wound.

The most complete rope-making machine yet reached is that in which these two machines are combined into one. It economizes space, machinery and workmen, and also is more rapid in reaching the final result. But there are disadvantages which render it unfit for the larger sizes of rope, and it is therefore used only on a limited range of sizes.

Among the fibers employed in rope making that of the hemp plant long held the supremacy, though in recent years it has been largely supplemented by other and stronger fibers. This plant is a native of Asia, but is now grown largely in other continents, taking its name from the country in which it is raised, as Russian hemp, Italian hemp, and American, or Kentucky, hemp, it having long found a home in the soil of Kentucky. It differs from the Manila fiber, which has now very largely supplanted it, by being much softer, though of less strength. In the old days of the sailing vessel hempen rope was largely used for the rigging of merchant and war ships, but the use of other fibers and of wire for rigging has greatly reduced the market for Kentucky hemp. There are various other fibers known under the name of hemp, the New Zealand, African, Java, etc., but the Manila and Sisal fibers, since the middle of the last century, have largely taken their place.

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Manila hemp, as it is called, is a product of our Philippine dependency, being obtained from a species of the banana plant which grows abundantly in those islands. Its fiber is very long, ranging from six to ten feet, and is noted for its smoothness and pliability, a feature which makes it ideal for rope making. Gloss and brilliancy are also characteristics of good quality Manila.

Manila hemp is obtained from the leaf stalks of the Philippine plant known as the Abacá, the leaf stems of which are compressed together, and constitute the trunk of the plant. It is obtained by scraping the pulp from the long fibers, drying these when thoroughly cleaned, and baling them for market.

The high price of the Manila product, however, has brought a cheaper fiber, of American growth, into the market; this being that known as Sisal, extracted from henequen, a cactus-like plant of Yucatan. As a substitute for or rival of Manila hemp it has come into common use. Its cheapness recommends it despite the fact that it is not of equal strength, and also that its fibers are shorter, being from two to four feet in length. Sisal also lacks the flexibility of Manila, being much more stiff and harsh. The development of the self-binding reaper on our western grain-fields has opened a gold mine for Sisal cordage. Of the annual import of this fiber to the United States, 300,000,000 pounds in quantity, a large proportion finds its way to the wheat fields of the West. It is also used in all other wheat-yielding countries.

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Henequen is now grown on large plantations, the plant being about five years old before the long, sword-like leaves are ready to cut. It continues to yield a supply for ten or twenty years, this lasting until the flower stalk, or “pole,” appears, after which the plant soon dies. As Manila fiber is at times adulterated with Sisal, so has the latter its adulterant in a plant called Istle, which grows in Mexico and has hitherto been chiefly used in brush making.

These are the chief plants used in rope making. To them we may add coir, obtained from the brush of the cocoanut, which has been long used in India, and has come into use in Europe in recent years. It is fairly strong and has the advantage of being considerably lighter than hemp or Manila. And, unlike these, it does not need to be tarred for preservation, as it is not injured by the salt water. Two other rope-making fibers of importance are the Sunn hemp of India and cotton, ropes of the latter being largely used for certain purposes, such as driving parts of textile machinery.

We have not completed the story of rope making. There is the wire rope to consider, a kind of cordage now largely used in many industries, in which it has superseded hemp ropes and chains. These seem to have originated in Germany about 1821. In the bridge at Geneva, built in 1822, ropes of untwisted wire, bound together, were used, and some fifteen years later “stranded” wire ropes were employed in the Harz mines. These at first were made of high-class wire, but only steel is now used in their manufacture. A strand of wire rope generally consists of from six to nine wires and sometimes as many as eighteen, but much larger ropes are made by twisting these strands together. They are generally galvanized to prevent them from rusting.

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The applications of wire ropes are very numerous, an important one being for winding and hauling purposes in mines. For aerial ropeways they are extensively employed, and are of high value in bridge building, the suspension bridge being sustained by them. The strength of the steel wire used for ropes varies from seventy to over one hundred tons per square inch of sectional area, the weight of a hemp rope being about three times that of a wire rope of equal strength.

Who does not know of the tarred rigging that once meant so much to the rope maker? Its very odor seems to cling to the pages of seafaring books. When steam power took the place of wind power in ships the use of tarred rigging naturally declined, yet tarred goods still form an important branch of the rope business. Pine tar is the kind best suited for cordage, the yellow, longleaf, or Georgia pine holding the first rank in the United States for tar making. This tree is found along the coast region from North Carolina to Texas.

In tar-kiln burning only dead wood is used, the green tree yielding less tar and of lower quality. It is a slow process, as a brisk fire would consume the wood without yielding tar. As the tar comes from the kiln it is caught in a hole dug before the outlet and is dipped up and poured into barrels, the average yield being one barrel of tar to the cord of wood. As above said, it is indispensable to protect cordage exposed to the effects of moisture, except in the case of coir ropes. Oiling is also an important process in the manufacture of ropes from hard fibers, as Manila, Sisal and New Zealand. This softens them and makes them more workable, and it also acts as a preservative.

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This is probably due to a degree of roughness in the surface of fibers, often imperceptible to the eye, yet preventing them when in close contact from slipping easily upon each other. This is greatly increased by twisting the fibers together, and is added to by the toughness of the fibers themselves, the whole giving to rope a great resisting power. In the case of wire rope it is the firmness with which the metal holds together that gives it its great resisting strength. It is also not unlikely that the pressure of gravitation takes part in rope making, by holding the fibers in close contact, even if we do not know how this force operates.

This is a question that has already been answered in great part. Its uses, in fact, are innumerable. It serves to hold things together, and also to hold them apart; to lift things into the air and to hold them down to the ground; to pull things forward and pull things back—but not to push things forward. For the latter something less flexible than rope is needed. Animals are tied or tethered by it and led by it, and man, himself, is one of its victims. This is especially the case in the dismal way in which man’s career upon earth has so often been ended by lifting him from the ground by the aid of a rope loop around his neck. It is of some comfort to know that this brutal use of the rope is being replaced by more humane methods of ending the lives of condemned criminals.

We have all become so accustomed to hearing the term “A-1” used to designate a thing as perfect that it does not occur to many of us to wonder how it originally came to be used in that connection. Its first use was as a symbol in the code by which vessels were graded in the register of shipping kept by Lloyd’s, the originators of marine insurance. “A-1” was the best rating given to the highest class vessels, “A” standing for perfect condition of the hull of the ship and “1” meaning that the rigging and whole equipment was complete and in good order.

The original of all the varieties of the cultivated apple is the wild crab, which is a small and extremely sour fruit, and is native of most of the countries of Europe. We use the crab-apple for preserving even now, although man’s ingenuity has succeeded in inducing nature to give us many better tasting kinds.

The amazingly large number of different varieties which we have today have all been brought into existence through the discovery of the process of “grafting.” There are a half a dozen or more different methods of grafting. The method most commonly practiced in working with apple trees is called “bud-grafting,” and consists of transferring a plate of bark, with one or more buds attached, from one tree to another.

The wood of apple trees is hard, close-grained and often richly colored, and is suitable for turning or cabinet work. Apple-growers classify apples into three different kinds, each consisting of a great many separate varieties. The three general divisions are—table apples, which are characterized by a firm, juicy pulp, a sweetish acid flavor, regular form and beautiful coloring; cooking apples, which possess the quality of forming by the aid of heat into a pulpy mass of equal consistency, and also by their large size and keeping properties; and cider apples, which have a considerable astringency and a richness of juice.

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Besides the water-crabs that we are most of us used to seeing and eating, there are several different kinds of land-crabs. Probably the most interesting of them all is the great Robber-crab, which is found on certain islands of the Pacific. He is a creature of immense strength and climbs palm trees in order to pick, and break open, the cocoanuts. He lives in a den which he digs for himself in the ground.

Darwin gives an interesting description of these extraordinary animals: “I have before alluded to a crab which lives on cocoanuts; it is very common on all parts of the dry land, and grows to a monstrous size. The front pair of legs terminate in very strong and heavy pincers, and the last pair are fitted with others weaker and much narrower. It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab to open a strong cocoanut covered with husk, but Mr. Liesk assures me that he has repeatedly seen this effected. The crab begins by tearing the husk, fiber by fiber, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated. When this is completed, the crab commences hammering with its heavy claws on one of the eye-holes till an opening is made. Then turning round its body, it extracts the white albuminous substance with its posterior and narrow pair of pincers.

“Every night it is said to pay a visit to the sea, no doubt for the purpose of moistening its gills. The young are likewise hatched, and live for some time, on the coast. These crabs inhabit deep burrows, which they hollow out beneath the roots of trees, and there they accumulate surprising quantities of the picked fibers of the cocoanut husk, on which they rest as a bed. To show the wonderful strength of the front pair of pincers, I may mention that Captain Moresby confined one in a strong tin box, the lid being secured with wire; but the crab turned down the edges and escaped. In turning down the edges, it actually punched many small holes through the tin!”

A good tool-kit holds a number of files of various shapes. Some are flat, others half-round, three-sided, square and round. They are generally thickest in the middle, while their teeth are of various degrees of fineness and of different forms.

A file whose teeth are in parallel ridges only is called single-cut or float-cut. Such are mostly used for brass and copper. When there are two series of ridges crossing each other the file is double-cut, which is the file best suited for iron and steel.

Rasps are files which have isolated sharp teeth separated by comparatively wide spaces, and are chiefly used for soft materials such as wood and horn.

Each of these three classes of files is made in six different degrees of fineness, the coarsest being called rough, the next middle, followed by bastard, second-cut, smooth and superfine or dead-smooth, each a degree finer than that which precedes it.

Files are usually made with the hand, file-cutting machines not having been as yet perfectly successful on account of the delicacy of touch required in the work.

The blanks, as the steel before it has teeth is called, are laid on the anvil and struck with the chisel, which rests obliquely on the blank, each blow raising a ridge or tooth. The strength of the blow depends on the hardness of the metal, and when one part is harder than another the workman alters his blows accordingly. When one side is covered with single cuts if the file is to be double cut he adds in the same manner a second series, crossing the others at a certain angle.

In making fine files a good file-cutter will cut upwards of two hundred teeth within the space of an inch. The files, except those that are used for soft substances, are hardened by heating them to a cherry-red color and then dipping them in water. They are then finished by scouring and rubbing over with olive oil and turpentine.

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The machine gun of the present day, the murderous weapon which has numbered its victims by the hundreds of thousands during the European war, had its origin in the mind of a man whose birth dates back to almost exactly one hundred years before this war began, that of Samuel Colt, born at Hartford, Conn., on July 19, 1814.

The small arm of the previous period, the old “Brown Bess,” used in the British army for 150 years, was a muzzle-loading, flint-lock musket of the crudest make. The only important improvement made in it during that long term of service was the substitution of the percussion cap for the flint lock. This took place in the last period of its use. A breech-loading rifle was also invented about this time. This was the “Needle Gun,” of which 60,000 were issued to the Prussian army in 1841, and which was first used in 1848, in the German war with Denmark.

The Colt pistol had appeared before this date. The idea of it grew in the mind of young Colt when he left his father’s silk mill and shipped as a boy sailor in the ship “Carlo,” bound from Boston to Calcutta. While on this voyage the conception of a revolving pistol came to him, and he whittled out a rude model of one with a penknife from a piece of wood.

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When he returned he sought in vain to interest his father and others in his idea of a pistol with a revolving cylinder containing six chambers to be discharged through a single barrel. This boyish notion won no converts, and at the age of eighteen he went on a lecture tour on chemistry, under the dignified title of Dr. Coult. These lectures met with success, and he used the money made by them in developing his pistol, which was in a shape to patent by 1835. Patents were taken out by him in this and the following year in the United States, Britain and France, and in 1836 he established the “Patent Arms Company” at Paterson, N. J., with a paid-in capital stock of about $150,000. This was a bold move by the young inventor, then just escaped from boyhood.

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Young Colt tried in vain to interest government officials in his new weapon, their principal objection being that he used in it the new percussion caps instead of the time-honored flint-lock. But success came during the Seminole War of 1837, when some of the officers, who had seen the new revolving pistol, decided to give it a trial and sent to the factory for a supply.

Its value was soon proved. The Indians looked on this weapon that could be fired six times after one loading, as something magical. It was too much for their philosophy and the war soon came to an end. At a later date it was used by the Texans in their war against Mexico, and from that time on every Texas ranger wanted a revolver. It has ever since been the favorite weapon of the cowboy and frontiersman.

But wars ran out, the market closed, and the “Patent Arms Company” failed. What put Colt on his feet again was the Mexican war a few years later. General Taylor offered Colt a contract for one thousand revolvers at $24 each, and though the young inventor was looked upon as a ruined man he took the contract, got together the necessary capital, and built a factory on the Connecticut at Hartford. From that time on there was no want of a market. The “Forty-Niners” took revolvers to California, foreign governments sent orders for them, and armories were built in England and in Russia for their manufacture. Colt died in 1862, but the Civil War had previously opened a great market for his pistols, and before the conflict ended the Colt factory at Hartford was in a highly flourishing state. In the following years the revolver became a prime necessity in dealing with the Indians of the West, and a school-book statement of that date was to the effect that: “The greatest civilizer of modern times is the Colt revolver.” Another writer, speaking of the “Peacemaker,” an effective weapon produced after 1870, said: “It has the simplicity, durability, and beauty of a monkey-wrench.”

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The revolving idea was applied to guns about 1861 by Richard J. Gatling, the first Gatling guns fitted for use with metalling ammunition being produced by the Colt Company in 1870. These guns had ten barrels revolving around a central shaft and in their developed form were capable of being fired at the rate of one thousand shots a minute. The first of these to be used prominently in warfare was the French mitrailleuse, used by France in the war of 1870-71. The Gatling soon made its way widely, and its rapidity of fire became a proverb. If anything moved quickly it was said to “go like a Gatling” or “sound like a Gatling.”

Other guns of this type are the Hotchkiss, the Nordenfeldt and the Gardner, and a more recent one is the Maxim, which, after the first shot is fired by hand power, continues to fire shot after shot by means of the power derived from the explosion of each successive cartridge. In the early form of the revolver the empty cartridge cases had to be ejected from the cylinder singly by an ejector rod or handy nail. In 1898 a new type was introduced with a lateral swinging cylinder which permitted the simultaneous ejection of all the empty shells.

Near the time of the Spanish-American War appeared what is known as the Colt automatic gun, operated by the action of the powder gases on a piston and lever near the muzzle of the barrel. This could be fired at the rate of 400 to 500 shots a minute, and by reason of its light weight could be very easily carried. The British used it effectively in the Boer War.

Today the Colt Company manufacture revolvers in which the simultaneous ejection of the cartridge-cases and recharging of the chambers is combined with a strong, jointless frame; automatic magazine pistols in which the pressure of the powder gases, as above said, is utilized after giving the proper velocity to the projectile,[146] it requiring only a slight continued pressure on the trigger for each shot; automatic machine guns firing at will single shots or volleys while requiring only a slight pull upon the trigger; and the improved manually-operated Gatling gun firing the improved modern ammunition. The cartridges are carried on a tape which feeds them with the necessary rapidity into the barrel.

What would be the history of the European War without the machine gun is not easy to state, but as a highly efficient weapon of war its quality has been abundantly proved.

When the National Guardsmen from all over the Union were concentrated along the Mexican border, many reports were sent home of thrilling experiences with tarantulas, to whose bite the natives of Mexico, Italy and many other warmer countries have ascribed a disease called “tarantism.” The Italian peasants believe that this disease can only be cured by a certain kind of music.

The tarantula, like many other members of the spider family, is an expert in the making of burrows. Its burrows are artfully planned. At first there is a sheer descent four or five inches in depth, but at that distance below the surface the tunnel turns aside before dipping straight down again to its termination. It is at the angle or elbow of the tunnel that the tarantula watches for the approach of enemies or prey, like a vigilant sentinel, never for a moment off its guard, lying hidden during the day, if nothing disturbs it, and coming out at nightfall to seek its prey.

Unlike most other spiders, it hunts its game without the aid of webs or snares. It does, however, possess the ability to spin the silk which we have all seen other spiders make, for, in digging its hole, it makes neat little packages of the dirt it has scraped up, bound together with silk and slime from its mouth, and flips them to one side out of the way. When it comes to hunting, it makes sure that it can pounce on its prey, by building the entrance of its hole about two inches in diameter and up from the surface an inch or so, so that it can spread its legs for the leap.

The Indians of the United States are now largely gathered into reservations and their former dress, arms and habits are being gradually changed for those of the whites. Civilization is invading their homes and driving out their older characteristics. This is especially the case with the large numbers now dwelling in the former Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, although those confined in the reservations of Arizona, New Mexico and Montana are clinging more to their old modes, as is shown in the accompanying illustrations.

In ancient times the body was covered with furs and skins according to the seasons, but now the white man’s clothes and blanket have generally superseded the native dress; though the moccasin of deer or moose hide, and, in the wilder tribes, the ornamental leggings and head-dresses are still retained. Their dwellings are made of bark, skins and mattings of their own making, stretched on poles fixed in the ground. The arms of the wilder tribes consist of the bow and arrow, the spear, tomahawk and club, to which have been added the gun and knife of the whites. Canoes are made of logs hollowed out, or of birch bark stretched over a light frame, skilfully fastened with deers’ sinews and rendered water-tight by pitch.

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The American Indian is described as of haughty demeanor, taciturn and stoical; cunning, brave and often ferocious in war; his temperament poetic and imaginative, and his simple eloquence of great dignity and beauty. They have a general belief in Manitous, or spiritual beings, one of them being spoken of as the Great Spirit. They believe in the transmigration of the soul into other men and into animals, and in demons, witchcraft and magic. They believe in life after death, where the spirit is surrounded with the pleasures of the “happy hunting grounds.” They adopt a “totem” or symbol of the family and this is generally some animal, the turtle, bear and wolf being favorites.

The number of Indians in the United States at the taking of the Federal Census in 1910, was 265,683; and there are about 130,000 in the British possessions, 1,500,000 in Central America and 4,000,000 in Mexico. In all North America there are somewhere about 6,000,000 and there are probably 10,000,000 more in South America, many of them being more or less civilized.

Most of the sands which we find on the beaches and in other places are the ruins of rocks which have come apart, usually as the result of the action of water. A large part of the ocean bottom is made up of “sandstone” and the continual washing of the water over this causes particles to break away and float off, whereupon they are swept up upon the beaches by the waves.

Sands differ in color according to the rocks from which they are derived. In addition to the sands on the beaches, they occur very abundantly in many inland locations, which were formerly sea bottoms, and very extensively in the great deserts of the world.

Valuable metallic ores, such as those of gold, platinum, tin, copper and iron, often occur in the form of sand or mixed with that substance. Pure siliceous sands are very valuable for the manufacture of glass, for making mortar, filters, ameliorating dense clay soils, for making molds in founding and for many other purposes.

The silica, which is the principal ingredient of sand, as well as of nearly all the earthy minerals, is known as “rock crystal” in its naturally crystallized form. Colored of a delicate purple, these crystals are what we call “amethysts.” Silica is also met with in the “carnelian” and we find it constituting jasper, agate, cat’s-eye, onyx and opals. In the latter it is combined with water. Many natural waters present us with silica in a dissolved state, although it is not soluble in pure water. The resistance offered by silica to all impressions is exemplified in the case of “flint” which consists essentially of silica colored with some impurity.

Like a multitude of other things, the signs which we give by the movements of our heads to indicate “yes” and “no” were copied from animal life.

When the mother animal brought her young a choice morsel of food she would hold it up temptingly before its mouth and the quick forward movement of the head, with mouth open, showed the young animal’s desire and acceptance of the offer. Even today when we make a forward movement of our heads to indicate “yes” it is observed that the lips are usually quite unconsciously opened a little.

In much the same manner, when the young had been well fed and were no longer hungry, a tightly closed mouth and a shaking of the head from side to side were resorted to, to keep the mother from putting the food into their mouths. Our natural impulse now is to slightly clinch our teeth when we shake our heads to mean “no.”

We call men “benedicts” when they become married because that was the name of a humorous gentleman in Shakespeare’s play, “Love’s Labor Lost,” who was finally married to a character named “Beatrice.”

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The blaze and noise, indispensable to patriotic celebrations among all peoples, was produced a century ago in America by simple agencies. Washington’s Birthday was ushered in by cannon salutes in every garrisoned place in the United States, and boys the country over built bonfires as they still do in old New England towns to celebrate the day. But the Fourth of July was the great hurrah time of the year, when every youth who owned a gun or could borrow one, brought it into use as a contribution to the general noise. He might lack shoes and be short of shot and bullets for hunting, but for this occasion no young man was so poor as to have failed to lay in a hornful of powder, and at the stroke of twelve midnight, which began the day, he and his companions blazed away with guns loaded to the danger point, and kept up their fusillade as long as ammunition lasted. For demonstrations on a larger scale, a small cannon was secured if possible, but lacking this, two blacksmith’s anvils were made to do the same service, the hole in the top of one being filled with powder, a fuse laid into it and the second anvil placed as a stopper upon the first before the charge was exploded.

A favorite firearm for celebration purposes was one of the old “Queens Arm” muskets which were common in country communities, being trophies captured from the British during the Revolutionary War. One of these cumbersome flint-lock pieces might be loaded halfway to the muzzle and fired without bursting, and would roar in the discharge in a way highly pleasing to patriotic ears.

It was near the close of the eighteenth century that Chinese firecrackers first came into use in celebrating the American Independence Day. For many years they were used sparingly and only in large cities. They had been known in the New England coast cities ever since the year 1787, when Elias Haskett Derby’s ship of Salem, the first American vessel to engage in deep-water commerce, returned from her voyage to Calcutta, China and Isle of France. Among the things she brought back—more as a curiosity than as an article of cargo—was a consignment of Chinese firecrackers. Their capabilities in aiding the uproar on the Fourth of July were quickly recognized, and thereafter every ship that made the voyage from Massachusetts Bay to India or China brought back firecrackers with the tea, silks and rice. In time, rockets, squibs and torpedoes were included in the consignment, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that their use became general in America.

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The time when the more complicated fireworks, which we owe both to Europe and the Orient, came into vogue in this country, no one perhaps could now definitely tell. Their use was known to our seafaring men in the “forties,” for it was in that decade that Capt. Decimus Forthridge, of the American brig “Independence,” showed his Yankee pluck and resource in defeating an attack of Malay pirates with no other armament than fancy fireworks. During his voyage in the East Indies he had laid in a supply of fireworks with which to celebrate the Fourth of July in a manner worthy an American captain. For some reason no ammunition was available for swivels or muskets, when, in the mid-watch of the night, two war proas, deeply laden with armed Malays, were seen coming quickly up on the vessel’s quarter as she lay becalmed off Firabader Point in the Island of Sumatra. The cry of “All hands on deck to repel pirates” brought the crew on deck in haste, but without ammunition the chance that they would beat the enemy off was a long shot compared with the probability that the throat of every man on board would be cut as a preliminary to plundering and scuttling the vessel. Even in their extremity the crew laughed and jeered when the captain ranged them along the quarter rail with boarding pikes and empty muskets in hand to give the enemy the idea that they were ready for business, and then, opening the box of fireworks, he began to shoot rockets and roman candles at the pirates. If the crew laughed, the Malays did not, and when the captain of one of the proas was struck by a rocket, both crafts rested oars and came no nearer. But while Captain Forthridge was attending to these, a third proa came up unobserved under the port quarter, and the first that was known of its presence was the attempt of its occupants to board the vessel by the chains. To make matters worse it was discovered that the paper wrappings of the fireworks in the box were on fire. While the crew with clubbed muskets and boarding pikes kept the Malays outside the rails, Captain Forthridge picked up the blazing box, carried it to the chains, and while the mate and sailors warded the spears and krises from him, dropped it into the proa. The box was blown to pieces the minute it struck, scattering the fireworks through the proa, and with firecrackers snapping and jumping and fiery serpents running round among their bare legs, the Malays chose to take their chances with the sharks, and all hands went overboard into the water at double-quick. A little breeze came up and the brig drew away from the pirates, leaving the two proas to pick up those Malays from the water that the sharks had missed.

In the days of the China clippers, those famous ships sailed many a race from Hong Kong and Canton, with New York as the goal, to get there with “first tea” and to forestall the Fourth of July market with a cargo of firecrackers.

In China and the East Indies, fireworks, like “the fume of the incense, the clash of the cymbal, the clang and the blaze of the gong,” are a part of the worship of the gods, as well as a feature of coronations and weddings. China is the birthplace of fireworks. From China the knowledge of them spread to India, and in both these lands rockets were used as missiles of war as early as the ninth century. The Chinese war rocket was a long, heavy affair, fitted at the end with a barb-like arrow, and to a foe unacquainted with firearms, it must have seemed a formidable missile. After gunpowder was introduced in Europe, fireworks came into use on the continent, and the use of both explosives undoubtedly was learned from the Chinese.

Fireworks were manufactured in Italy as early as 1540, and in France we have accounts of their employment in great celebrations between the years 1606 and 1739. Long before this time, some form of rocket, now unknown, that would burn in water, constituted the famous Greek fire which struck terror to the hearts of invaders from Northern Europe in medieval times when the Saracens launched it against their ships. Early in the present century during the Napoleonic Wars, the rocket perfected by Sir William Congreve was used in the siege of Boulogne and in the battle of Leipsic. The conditions of modern warfare have so changed that the rocket is no longer of practical use in fighting except as a signal. In case of shipwreck it is often employed to carry a line from the shore to a stranded vessel. It is noteworthy that while almost every kind of fireworks is manufactured in Europe and the United States, the small firecrackers are still imported from China. But larger quantities are now manufactured in the United States, and it is only a matter of time when the “Young American” salute will take the place of the Chinese firecrackers.

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It was about ten years before the Civil War that “set pieces” began to form a part of fireworks celebrations. In those days the most famous pyrotechnic display in the whole country was given on Boston Common on the Fourth of July, and the country boy who was so lucky as to see that display, with the miracle of George Washington’s benign face illuminated amid spouting flames and a shower of fireballs and rockets, had something to talk about for the rest of the year.

The American Civil War which did so much toward the modern development of firearms and munitions of war, brought also a great advance in pyrotechny, and soon after the close of the struggle, extensive manufacture of fireworks began in this country, with New York as the headquarters of the principal firms engaged in the business.

In 1865 the first displays of fireworks in the United States, illustrating historical events, were made by a company in New York City. They were the pioneers in this line of displays. Their success was immediate, and from these displays has grown the successes of today in pyrotechnics.

Fireworks now enter into the celebration of every important event in our national, political and business life. The celebrations at Washington, D. C., at the inaugurations of our Presidents, the coronations of emperors and kings in lands beyond our borders, are all brought to a close by brilliant displays of fireworks.

The writer, in visiting the plant of a large fireworks manufacturer, found that they were turning out large quantities of time fuses and primers for shrapnel shells for the foreign powers, and are working night and day on orders for the United States government on aeroplane bombs and signals. They have also worked out a searchlight projectile which is arranged to burst in the air, throwing out a number of luminous bodies that light up the surrounding country and reveal the movements of the enemy.

All large displays of fireworks are now fired by electricity and every known color and effect is produced by the pyrotechnist of the present day.

The water displays are scarcely less varied, consisting of flying fish, diving devils, prismatic fountains, floating batteries, fiery geysers and submarine torpedoes, all of which, being ignited and thrown into the water, go through their stunts as readily as other kinds do on land and in the air.

From every part of the civilized world, from Mexico, Central and South America and Europe, orders for fireworks come in increasing numbers to American firms, who now lead the world in this art. The Philippines will soon be a customer for them, and with the general opening up of China to modern civilization, from causes now in operation, it will not be strange if some day we should supply fireworks to the land of their origin.

Smoky chimneys are usually caused either by the presence of other buildings obstructing the wind and giving rise to irregular currents of air, or by improper construction of the fireplace and adjacent parts of the chimney.

The first may generally be cured by fixing a chimney-pot of a particular construction, or a revolving cowl, on the chimney top, in order to prevent the wind blowing down; in the second case the narrowing of the chimney throat will generally create a better draft.

The longer a chimney is, the more perfect is its draft, provided the fire is great enough to heat the column of air in it, because the tendency of the smoke to draw upwards is in proportion to the difference of weight between the heated air in a chimney and an equal column of external air.

The first we hear of chimneys, for the escape of the smoke from a fire or furnace, is in the middle ages.

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Although divers are able to go down under the water to examine the bottom of a ship while it is afloat, it is usually necessary to have it up on dry land when thorough inspections or repairs have to be made. So a berth something like a huge box stall in a stable is built, with the part where a horse would stand in the stall full of water, and a door, either made like swinging gates opening in the middle, or a caisson which is operated up and down like a window, at the end. The ship is floated into the dock and then after the door is shut to prevent any more coming in, all of the water is pumped out until the vessel rests on a lot of great big wooden blocks and supporting props with which the bottom and sides of the dock are lined. Supports are also placed between the vessel and each side of the dock. Then, when the work has been finished, and the ship is ready to go to sea, water is let back either by pumping it in or else by gradually opening the door at the end, and the vessel is able to float out into the river or harbor again.

Although all of the navy yards and some private corporations in this country have docks of this kind, they are not of as much importance here as in England, where they are used, without pumping out the water, for the loading and unloading of vessels, because of the very great rise and fall of the tides there straining and otherwise damaging ships tied up to ordinary docks.

There are nine important navy yards in the United States, located at Brooklyn, N. Y.; Boston, Mass.; Portsmouth, N. H.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Portsmouth, Va.; Mare Island, Cal.; New London, Conn.; Pensacola, Fla.; Washington, D. C., and Port Orchard, Wash.

There is another kind of dry dock, called “floating docks,” which float on the surface of the water and may be sunk sufficiently to allow of a vessel being floated into them, and then raised again by pumping the water out of the tanks around the sides. They are usually built of iron, with water-tight compartments, and not closed in at either end. They are sunk to the required depth by the admission of water into so many of the compartments, till the vessel to be docked can float easily above the bottom of the dock, and then they are raised by pumping out the water until the ship can be propped up as in the land dry dock.

The lightning bugs or fireflies which are seen so often on summer evenings in the country and among the trees in the parks of the city, are similar to the species of beetle called the glowworm in Great Britain, although the glowworm there does not give as much light as the firefly in America.

In reality it is only the female which is the lightning bug, for the male is not equipped with any lighting power. He has the bad habit of going out nights, and so the female has had to make use of her ability to make part of her body shine with a sort of a phosphorus green light in order to show him the way home, very much as a dweller in a poorly-lighted street keeps a light in the window or on the porch to guide visitors or the late home-comer to the proper house. She seems to possess the power of moderating or increasing the light at will.

The most brilliant fireflies are found only in the warmer regions of the world. The ordinary firefly to which we are accustomed gives off a very much brighter light if placed in warm water. Fine print may be read by the light of one kind which is found in the West Indies; in Cuba the ladies have a fashion of imprisoning them in bits of netting or lace of a fine texture and wearing them as dress ornaments, and in Hayti they are used to give light for domestic purposes, eight or ten confined in a vial emitting sufficient light to enable a person to write.

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Let us suppose, for the purposes of explanation, that as far as seeing goes, any object is made up of countless infinitesimal points of light, and that the business of the eye is to gather them in and spread them out at the back of the eye in exactly the same relation they bore to each other on the object. The points of light, so duplicated, would thus form the image of the object.

The camera works very much the same way. The lens at the front of the camera is the eye, and the plate or film at the back of the camera corresponds to the back of the eye. The lens collects all the points of light of the object we wish to photograph, and directs them to the plate or film in such fashion that they occupy exactly the same relative position that they did before. An image of the object is formed.

Now if we could look inside the camera and the image were visible, we would see that it was upside down. The reason for this is very simple, as the accompanying diagram shows. The ray of light from “A” at the bottom of the object passes through the lens at an angle, and continues in a straight line until interrupted by the film or plate. It started at the bottom of the object and ended at the top of the image. The position of all the points of light is just reversed, although their relative position remains the same.

“Then here,” you say, “is where your analogy between the camera and the eye falls down.”

Not at all. It is true that we do not see things upside down, but this is because of mental readjustment during the passage of the impressions from the eye to the brain.

Now let us suppose that we have our camera loaded with film, and that mother has succeeded in keeping the baby quiet long enough for us to uncover the lens for an instant and let the points of light through to the film. The next question is, how are we going to make the resulting image permanent. We know that it is there, but in its present state it is not going to do us a great deal of good. In fact, if we should peek in the back of the camera, and to do so would ruin the exposure, we could not even see it.

But let us go back a bit. We ought to know a little something about the composition of this film on which the image has been projected.

In brief, film is a cellulose base coated with silver bromide and gelatine. If we were using a plate the only difference would be that instead of cellulose as a base we would have a sheet of glass. The gelatine is there to afford lodgment to this sensitized silver. The silver, being sensitive to the action of light, is there to record the image. As soon as one of these silver particles has been touched by light, it becomes imbued with the power of holding whatever the lens has transmitted to it. The image was formed, we remember, by points of light grouped in the same relative positions as the points of light of the object we were photographing. Consequently[163] it is only those silver particles within the image-forming area that are affected, because that is where the light struck.

The lens, then, gathered in the points of light and dispersed them on the film so as to form an image. The silver particles held this image, but not visibly—it is a latent image, and it is the purpose of development to bring it out.

It is the particular business of a chemical called “pyro” to release this latent image. When attacked by pyro, those silver bromide particles which have been affected by light—and only those—change to black metallic silver. After all the silver bromide particles, the ones that held the image, have been transformed into metallic silver, another chemical called “hypo” effectively disposes of all the silver bromide that was not affected by light. Now only the image-forming silver bromide particles remain, and these have been transformed to metallic silver. The result is a permanent image—a negative.

But it is a negative, so called because everything in it is reversed—not only from left to right, but in the details of the image. Mother’s dark blue gown looks light, for example, and baby’s white dress, dark.

To get our picture as it should be, we must place the negative in contact with a sheet of paper coated with a gelatine containing silver. This emulsion, as the coating is called, is, as we might readily infer from the presence of the silver, sensitive to the action of light in much the same manner as was the original film. We place the negative and paper in contact, then, in what is called a printing frame, so that light may shine through the negative and impress the image on the sensitive paper. It is obvious that the light parts of the negative will let through the most light, and that consequently the silver emulsion on the paper underneath will be most blackened, while the dark parts will hold back the light and the emulsion on the paper underneath will be less affected. In other words, the very faults that we noted in the negative, from a picture point of view, automatically right themselves. Mother’s dress looks dark and baby’s dress white—just as the lens saw it.

We then have the picture in its finished form.

The story of the making of the camera is as interesting as that of the making of the pictures by the camera.

Back in 1732, J. H. Schulze discovered that chloride of silver was darkened by light and all unwittingly became the father of photography. In 1737, Hellot, of Paris, stumbled on the fact that characters written with a pen dipped in a solution of silver nitrate would be invisible, until exposure to light, when they would blacken and become perfectly legible. However, it was not until early in the nineteenth century that these two discoveries were put to any practical use, as far as photography was concerned.

People of an artistic turn of mind had been in the habit of making what were called “silhouettes.” The sitter was so posed that the light from a lamp threw the profile of his face in sharp shadow against a white screen. It was then easy enough to obtain a fairly accurate silhouette, by either outlining the profile or cutting it out from the screen.

It occurred to a man by the name of Wedgwood that this profile might be printed on the screen by using paper treated with silver nitrate, and he not only succeeded in accomplishing this, but also in perfecting what was then called the “camera obscura,” the forerunner of the kodak of today. The camera obscura consisted of a box with a lens at one end and a ground glass at the other, just like a modern camera. It was used by artists who found that by observing the picture on the ground glass they could draw it more easily. Wedgwood tried to make pictures by substituting his prepared paper for the ground glass, but the paper was too insensitive to obtain any result. Sir Humphrey Davy, continuing Wedgwood’s experiments, and using chloride of silver instead of nitrate, succeeded in making[164] photographs through a microscope, by using sunlight. These were the first pictures made by means of a lens on a photographic material. But none of these pictures were permanent, and it was not until 1839 that Sir John Herschel found that “hypo,” which he had himself discovered in 1819, would enable him to “fix” the picture and make it permanent.

At about this time, Daguerre announced discoveries that gave photography at least a momentary impetus, but the Daguerre process did not long survive, as it was slow, costly and troublesome. The daguerreotype was made on a thin sheet of copper, silver plated on one side, polished to a high degree of brilliancy, and made sensitive by exposing it to the fumes of iodine. The first daguerreotype made in America, that of Miss Catherine Draper, was exposed for six minutes in strong sunlight, and the face of the sitter thickly powdered, to facilitate the exposure. An exposure today with a modern camera, under similar conditions, could be made in ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ of a second.

It was impossible, of course, to find many sitters as patient as Miss Draper—try keeping perfectly quiet for even a minute if you would know why Miss Draper should be ranked as a photographic martyr—and many experiments were made in an attempt to materially shorten the time of exposure. The only real solution, of course, was to find some method where the light had to do only a little of the work, leaving the production of the image itself to chemical action.

The first great step in this direction was taken by Fox Talbot in 1841. He found, that if he prepared a sheet of paper with silver iodide and exposed it in the camera, he got only a very faint image, but if, after exposure, he washed over the paper with a solution of silver nitrate and gallic acid, the faint image was built up into a strong picture. And not only was Fox Talbot the first to[165] develop a faint or invisible image; he was also the first to make a negative and use it for printing.

In spite of all these advances, photography was almost exclusively a studio proposition, when, in 1880, experiments were begun which were to result in photography that could be universally enjoyed—photography as we know it today. Of course there were amateurs even in those early photographic days, but they were few and far between. There was something about the bulk and weight of the old-time photographic outfit that failed to beget general enthusiasm.

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To lighten the camera burden, and to simplify the various photographic processes, were the problems that confronted the American inventor. The first step toward film photography—and it was film photography that relegated camera bulk to the scrap heap—was a roll film made of coated paper to which a sensitive emulsion was applied, but the real goal was reached when cellulose was substituted as a film base. This made practicable the present flexible, transparent film with its attendant convenience and dependability.

The kodak was the natural outcome of the roll film system. The first one appeared in 1888, and its development, which proceeded simultaneously with the film discoveries, soon reached the point where the loading and unloading could be done in daylight. Daylight developing soon followed, and the dark room, as far as the kodaker was concerned, took its proper place as a relic of the dark ages.

With 1914 came autographic photography, so that now with a kodak in one pocket and a handful of film in the other, the amateur is equipped for a picture-making tour of the world—not simply a pictorial record, but a written record as well, for autographic photography permits the dating and titling of each negative directly after exposure.

Photography, not so many years ago an exclusive pleasure for the few, is now easy fun for millions.

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Man has not been able to tell definitely just what the greatest depth of the ocean is, because it would be a practically unending task to go over every bit of it to take measurements. A great many exploring expeditions have been sent out to determine that interesting information so far as possible, however, and one of these, the Murray-Challenger expedition, has reported that the greatest depth that could be found in the Atlantic Ocean is 27,366 feet, in the Pacific Ocean 30,000 feet, in the Indian Ocean 18,582 feet, in the Southern Ocean 25,200 feet and in the Arctic Ocean 9,000 feet. They also stated that the Atlantic Ocean has an area in square miles, of 24,536,000; the Pacific Ocean, 50,309,000; the Indian Ocean, 17,084,000; the Southern Ocean, 30,592,000 and the Arctic Ocean, 4,781,000.

The use of the expression “get the sack,” when we mean “to be discharged,” originated through the impression made upon people in this country when stories were brought to them of the way the Sultan of Turkey disposed of members of his harem of whom he had tired. When he wanted to get rid of one of his harem he was said to have had her put into a sack and thrown into the Bosporus. People who heard of this report repeated it to others and they became so used to telling the tale that they slipped quite naturally into the habit of saying “to get the sack” when they meant that they expected to be put out of a position suddenly.

In very much the same way the phrase “Hobson’s choice” is supposed to have resulted from the story told here of a livery-stable keeper at Cambridge, England, called Hobson, who obliged each customer to take the horse nearest the stable door, when a wish to hire one was expressed, even though he might permit customers to make the rounds of all the stalls, examining and perhaps selecting other horses. Since the interest inspired by that report, “Hobson’s choice” has come to mean a choice without any alternative, or the chance to take the thing which is offered or nothing.

At the time the discovery of X-rays was announced by Prof. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen of the University of Würzburg, Germany, he was not sure of their exact nature, and so he named them “X-Rays,” because “X” has always been understood to be the symbol for an “unknown quantity.”

They are invisible rays transmitted through the air in a manner similar to light. They are produced by passing unidirectional electric current of from twenty to one hundred thousand volts pressure through a specially constructed high vacuum tube, within which rays radiating from the surface of a concave cathode (the negative electrode of a galvanic battery), are focused upon and bombard a target of refractory material such as tungsten, iridium, platinum, from which focus spot the X-rays radiate in all directions.

They are used in medicine and surgery, to photograph the skeleton and all the internal organs of the human body, as an aid in diagnosis; also to destroy diseased tissue without the aid of surgery. Cancers and tumors of certain kinds and a number of skin diseases are said to be made to disappear by their use. When the apparatus is used, the subject is placed on a long table and the X-ray tube, in its lead glass shield container, is brought over the part of the body to which the rays are to be applied.

The most up-to-date apparatus consists of a high-tension transformer and rectifier, driven by a rotary converter, which derives power from direct-current electric service and delivers alternating current to the high-tension transformer.

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Although some people maintain that the word “Yankee” originated with the way white men interpreted the Indians’ name for the early settlers, most of those who have wondered about it have decided that it came to be used as a nickname for persons born in the United States, because of a farmer, named Jonathan Hastings and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, using it to describe some good, home-made cider of his making, as “Yankee cider.” The word was taken up by the students of Harvard University, and gradually spread throughout the whole country.

A great many years ago a man called Bolsover became crazed by some unhappy experiences and decided to kill himself by fastening a rope around his neck and hanging from a cross-beam overhead. In selecting a place to tie the rope high enough to accomplish his purpose he found that he would have to stand on something in order to reach it, and so he reached for the nearest thing, which happened to be a bucket; after the rope was firmly adjusted he kicked the bucket out from under his feet and his full weight hung suspended from the rope about his neck. The publicity given his act resulted in the adoption of the phrase “to kick the bucket” as meaning “to die,” and that is the explanation which most people who have tried to look up the origination of the term give as its first use.

Tortoises lay their eggs in underground nests, where they remain for almost a year, and, strange to say, they have a very curious way of drilling holes for these nests with their tails. A tortoise picks a spot where the earth is bare, and then stiffens its tail by contracting the muscles strongly, placing the tip firmly against the ground and boring a hole by moving it round and round in a circle, until a cone-shaped cavity is produced, wide at the top but tapering to a point below. When this operation is completed, it immediately sets to work to enlarge the hole with the help of its hind legs. It does this by scooping out “shovelfuls” of dirt, first with one of its hind feet and then with the other, and heaping it up like the wall of a fortress around the pit. Tortoises use their feet like hands when they do this, very carefully placing the dirt in a circle at some little distance from the edge of the cavity, and the work is continued until the hole is dug down as deep as the hind legs will reach. When it finds that no more soil can be removed, that is, at the end of an hour or more of steady digging, the tortoise accepts the job as completed and proceeds to deposit its eggs inside very carefully, just as you would put hen’s eggs into a basket. While all this is going on the body is scarcely moved and the head is kept inside the shell.

There are usually nine eggs and they just about fill the bottom of the nest, which measures approximately five inches across and is itself shaped more or less like an egg, being wider inside than at the top. After about half an hour’s rest, the hardest part of the work is begun—that of filling up the hole and leveling the ground. The dirt is placed carefully over the eggs, a “handful” at a time, the hind legs being used alternately again for that purpose. As the cavity is gradually filled up the tortoise presses the earth down with the outer edge of its foot. It takes another half hour’s rest after all the dirt has been carried back again, and then commences the part of the operation where the tortoise moves quickly enough to merit another racing title. It beats down the dirt-mound and stamps it firm and flat with the under side of its hard shell, raising the hind end of its body and then hurriedly letting it drop to the ground again, turning round and round in a circle very briskly in the meantime, at the same time doing all it can to remove any traces which might lead to the discovery of its nest.

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Among the marvels of machinery of the present day there are none more complicated and bewildering in appearance than that by which the news of the world is sent adrift within the daily newspaper and none more marvelously effective in its operation. If we go back to the days when the seeds of the modern press were planted, we find them in the hand-printing done by the Chinese with their engraved blocks, and with the simple press used by Gutenberg about 1450, when he printed the first book from movable types.

His press consisted of two upright timbers held together by cross pieces at top and bottom. The flat bed on which the types rested was held up by other cross timbers, while through another passed a wooden screw, by the aid of which the wooden “platen” was forced down upon the types. The “form” of type was inked by a ball of leather stuffed with wool, the printer then spread the paper over it, laying a piece of blanket upon the paper to soften the impression, after which the screw forced the platen down on the paper and this on the type. This press was not original, since similar cheese and linen presses were then in use.

For 150 years this crude method of printing continued in operation, the first known improvement being made by an Amsterdam printer about 1620, he adding a few parts to render the work more effective. Such was the simple press still employed when Benjamin Franklin began his work as a printer a century later. In 1798 the Earl of Stanhope had a cast-iron frame made to replace the wooden one and added levers to give more power to the pressman. Woodcuts were then being printed and needed a stronger press.

We must go on with the old Gutenberg method and its tardy improvements, for another century, or until about 1816, when George Clymer, a printer of Philadelphia,[173] did away with the screw and employed a long and heavy cast-iron lever, by the aid of which the platen was forced down upon the type, the operation being assisted by accompanying devices.

As will be seen, the growth of improvements had until then been very slow. From this time forward it became far more rapid, some useful addition to the press being made at frequent intervals. The “Washington” press, used at this time by R. H. Hoe & Co., of New York, embodied these improvements, and became one of the best hand-printing presses so far made. The first steam-power press was introduced by Daniel Treadwell, of Boston, in 1822, the bed and platen, or its successor, the cylinder, being used in these and in the improved forms that followed until after the middle of the century.

The idea of replacing the platen by a cylinder was not a new one. It was employed in printing copper-plate engravings in the fifteenth century, a stationary wooden roller being employed, beneath which the bed, with its form and paper, was moved backward and forward, a sheet being printed at each movement. With this idea began a new era in the evolution of the printing press. A vast number of patents have since been issued for printing machines in which the cylinder is connected with the bed and later for the operation of two cylinders together, one holding the form of type and the other making the impression. But all these were for improvements, the underlying principle remaining the same. The conception of a press of this character in which the paper was to be fed into the press in an endless roll or “web” goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, though it was not made available until a later date.

Meanwhile, however, patent after patent for the improvement of the cylinder press were taken out and the art of printing improved rapidly, the firm of Hoe & Co. being one of the most active engaged in this business, the United States continuing in advance of Europe in the development of the art. The single small cylinder and double small cylinder introduced by this firm proved highly efficient, the output of the[174] former reaching 2,000 impressions per hour, while the double type, used where more rapid work was needed, yielded 4,000 per hour.

But the demands of the newspaper world steadily grew and in 1846 a press known as the Hoe Type Revolving Machine was completed and placed in the office of the Public Ledger, of Philadelphia. By increasing the number of cylinders the product was rapidly added to, each cylinder printing on one side 2,000 sheets per hour.

In 1835 Sir Rowland Hill suggested that a machine might be made that would print both sides of the sheet from a roll of paper in one operation. A similar double process had been performed for many years in the printing of cotton cloth. This remained, however, a mere suggestion until many years later, and the one-side printing continued. But, by adding to the number of cylinders, a speed of 20,000 papers thus printed was in time reached.

To prevent the possible fall of types from a horizontal cylinder, the vertical cylinder was introduced by the London Times, but this danger was overcome in the Hoe presses, and by the subsequent invention of casting stereotype[175] plates in a curve the final stage of perfection in design was reached. In 1865 William Bullock, of Philadelphia, constructed the first printing press capable of printing from a web or continuous roll of paper, knives being added to cut the sheets, which were then carried through the press by tapes or fingers and delivered by the aid of metal nippers. There were difficulties in this series of operations, but these were overcome in the later Hoe press, in which the sheets were merely perforated by the cutter, and were afterward fully separated by the pull of accelerating tapes.

The old-time rag-paper had disappeared for newspaper work, being superseded by wood-pulp paper, the cheapness of which added to the desire to produce presses of greater speed and efficiency. It was also desirable that papers should be delivered folded for the carrier, and this led to the invention of folding machines, one of the earliest of which, produced in 1875, folded 15,000 per hour.

We have in the foregoing pages told the main story of the evolution of the printing press from the crude machine used by Gutenberg in 1450 to the rapid cylinder press of four centuries later. There is little more to be said. Later changes were largely in the matter of increase of activity, by duplication and superduplication of presses until sextuple and octuple presses were produced, and by adding to the rapidity and perfection of their operation, and the extraordinary ingenuity and quickness with which the printed sheets were folded and made ready for the convenience of the reader. Sir Rowland Hill’s dream of a press which would print both sides of the paper at one operation in due time became a realized fact, while vast improvements in the matter of inking the forms, and even the addition of colored ink by which printing in color could be done, were among the new devices.

What we have further to say is a question of progress in rapidity of action rather than of invention. The 20,000 papers printed per hour, above stated, has since been seen passed to a degree that seems fairly miraculous. The quadruple press of 1887 turned out eight-page papers at a running speed of 18,000 per hour, these being cut, pasted and folded ready for the carrier or the mails. Four years later came the sextuple press (the single press six times duplicated) with an output of 72,000 eight-page papers per hour, and in a few years more the octuple press, its output 96,000 eight-page papers per hour. Larger papers were of course smaller, but its capacity for a twenty-page paper was 24,000 per hour.

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As may well be conjectured, the twentieth century has had its share in this career of progress, the perfected press of 1916 being credited with the astounding output of 216,000 eight-page papers in an hour, all folded, cut and counted in lots. Where part of the pages are printed in three colors this press has still a running speed of 72,000 per hour. This machine is composed of 27,100 separate pieces, it being 47 feet long, 8 feet wide and 13 feet high, while such a mighty complication of whirling wheels and oscillating parts nowhere else exists.

A word more and we are done. To feed such giant presses the old hand method of setting and distributing type has grown much too slow. The linotype machine has added greatly to the rapidity of this centuries-old process. To this has been added the later monotype, of similar rapidity, while type distributing has become in large measure obsolete, the types, once used, going to the melting pot instead of to the fingers of the distributors.

The Flying Dutchman is a phantom ship said to be seen in stormy weather off the Cape of Good Hope, and thought to forbode ill luck. One form of the legend has it that the ship is doomed never to enter a port on account of a horrible murder committed on board; another, that the captain, a Dutchman, swore a profane oath that he would weather the Cape though he should beat there till the last day. He was taken at his word, and there he still beats, but never succeeds in rounding the point. He sometimes hails vessels and requests them to take letters home from him. The legend is supposed to have originated in the sight of some ship reflected from the clouds. It has been made the ground-work of one or two novels and an opera by Wagner.

Nature has provided the duck with a protection against water just as she has so wisely protected all animals against such elements as they have to live in.

The feathers on a duck are very heavy and close together, and at the bottom of each feather is a little oil gland that supplies a certain amount of oil to each feather. This oil sheds the water from the back of a duck as soon as it strikes the feathers.

Canvasback ducks are considered the finest of the water-fowls for the table. The canvasback duck is so called from the appearance of the feathers on the back. They arrive in the United States from the north about the middle of October, sometimes assembling in immense numbers. The waters of Chesapeake Bay are a favorite locality for them. Here the wild celery, their favorite food, is abundant, and they escape the unpleasant fishy flavor of the fish-eating ducks.

The sky never falls down because there is nothing to fall. What we see and call the sky is the reflection of the sun’s rays on the belt of air that surrounds the earth. That beautiful blue dome that we sometimes hear spoken of as the roof of the earth is just the reflected light of the sun on the air.

The atmosphere of the earth consists of a mass of gas extending to a height which has been variously estimated at from forty-five to several hundred miles, possibly five hundred, and bearing on every part of the earth’s surface with a pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch.

Sand-dunes are composed of drift sand thrown up by the waves of the sea, and blown, when dry, to some distance inland, until it is stopped by large stones, tree roots or other obstacles. It gradually accumulates around these, until the heaps become very large, often forming dunes or sand-hills.

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Any good dictionary will tell us that an eclipse is an interception or obscuration of the light of the sun, moon or other heavenly body by the intervention of another and non-luminous heavenly body. Stars and planets may suffer eclipse, but the principal eclipses are those of the sun and the moon.

An eclipse of the moon is an obscuration of the light of the moon occasioned by the interposition of the earth between the sun and the moon; consequently all eclipses of the moon happen at full moon; for it is only when the moon is on that side of the earth which is turned away from the sun, and directly opposite, that it can come within the earth’s shadow. Further, the moon must at that time be in the same plane as the earth’s shadow; that is, the plane of the ecliptic in which the latter always moves. But as the moon’s orbit makes an angle of more than five degrees with the plane of the ecliptic, it frequently happens that though the moon is in opposition it does not come within the shadow of the earth.

The theory of lunar eclipses will be understood from Fig. 1, where S represents the sun, E the earth, and M the moon. If the sun were a point of light there would be a sharply outlined shadow or umbra only, but since the luminous surface is so large, there is always a region in which the light of the sun is only partially cut off by the earth, which region is known as the penumbra (P P). Hence during a lunar eclipse the moon first enters the penumbra, then is totally eclipsed by the umbra, then emerges through the penumbra again.

An eclipse of the sun is an occultation of the whole or part of the face of the sun occasioned by an interposition of the moon between the earth and the sun; thus all eclipses of the sun happen at the time of new moon.

Fig. 2 is a diagram showing the principle of a solar eclipse. The dark or central part of the moon’s shadow, where the sun’s rays are wholly intercepted, is here the umbra, and the light part, where only a part of them are intercepted, is the penumbra; and it is evident that if a spectator be situated on that part of the earth where the umbra falls there will be a total eclipse of the sun at that place; in the penumbra there will be a partial eclipse, and beyond the penumbra there will be no eclipse.

As the earth is not always at the same distance from the moon, and as the moon[182] is a comparatively small body, if an eclipse should happen when the earth is so far from the moon that the moon’s shadow falls short of the earth, a spectator situated on the earth in a direct line between the centers of the sun and moon would see a ring of light around the dark body of the moon; such an eclipse is called annular, as shown in Fig. 3; when this happens there can be no total eclipse anywhere, because the moon’s umbra does not reach the earth.

An eclipse can never be annular longer than twelve minutes twenty-four seconds, nor total longer than seven minutes fifty-eight seconds; nor can the entire duration of an eclipse of the sun ever exceed two hours.

An eclipse of the sun begins on the western side of his disc and ends on the eastern; and an eclipse of the moon begins on the eastern side of her disc and ends on the western.

The average number of eclipses in a year is four, two of the sun and two of the moon; and as the sun and moon are as long below the horizon of any particular place as they are above it, the average number of visible eclipses in a year is two, one of the sun and one of the moon.

The dictionary tells us that a dream is a train of vagrant ideas which present themselves to the mind while we are asleep.

We know that the principal feature, when we are dreaming, is the absence of our control over the current of thought, so that the principal of suggestion has an unlimited sway. There is usually a complete want of coherency in the images that appear in dreams, but when we are dreaming this does not seem to cause any surprise.

Occasionally, however, intellectual efforts are made during sleep which would be difficult to surpass when awake.

It is said that Condillac often brought to a conclusion in his dreams, reasonings on which he had been employed during the day; and that Franklin believed that he had been often instructed in his dreams concerning the issue of events which at that time occupied his mind. Coleridge composed from two to three hundred lines during a dream; the beautiful fragment of “Kubla Khan,” which was all he had committed to paper when he awoke, remaining as a specimen of that dream poem.

The best thought points to the fact that dreams depend on natural causes. They generally take their rise and character from internal bodily impressions or from something in the preceding state of body or mind. They are, therefore, retrospective and resultant, instead of being prospective or prophetic. The latter opinion has, however, prevailed in all ages and among all nations, and hence the common practice of divination or prophesying by dreams, that is, interpreting them as indications of coming events.

When one is cold there is apt to be a spasm of shivering over which the brain does not seem to have any control. The spasm causes the muscles of the jaw to contract very quickly and as soon as they are contracted, they let the jaw fall again of its own weight. This occurring many times in rapid succession is what causes the teeth to chatter.

There are two kinds of spasms, “clonic” and “tonic.” In the former, the muscles contract and relax alternately in very quick succession, producing an appearance of agitation. In the latter, the muscles contract in a steady and uniform manner, and remain contracted for a comparatively long time.

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When one thinks of honey one instinctively closes the eyes and a mental picture of fruit trees laden with snowy bloom, of beautiful clover fields, of green forests in a setting quiet and peaceful, comes before the mind so realistic that the delicate perfume of the fragrant blossoms is almost perceptible and the memory of the musical hum of the little honeybee as she industriously flits from blossom to blossom, or wings her homeward way heavily laden with the delicious nectar, rests one’s jaded nerves. Into this picture fits closely the old bee master among his old-fashioned skeps, with the atmosphere of mystery that has so long been associated with the master and his bees that one is almost reluctant to think of the production of honey as a great commercial industry, employing great factories in the manufacture of beehives and other equipment necessary for the modern beekeeper that he may take full advantage of the wonderful and almost inconceivable industry of the honeybee in storing the golden nectar of the blossoms.

The development of the industry has been very slow; only during the past fifty years has real progress been made, although honey formed one of the principal foods of the ancients, which was secured by robbing the wild bees. During the early history of the United States, beekeeping was engaged in only as a farmer’s side line, a few bees being kept in any kind of a box sitting out in the backyard, boarding themselves and working for nothing. Even under such conditions amazing results were often obtained. Lovers of nature and the out-of-doors were attracted by the study of bee life, and early beekeepers were invariably bee lovers. The mysteries of the hive as revealed in the story of the family life of the bee—typical in many ways of our modern city life—is as fascinating as a fairy tale.

The average population of the modern beehive varies from forty to sixty thousand, with a well organized system of government. Intense loyalty to the queen mother is apparent in all their activities and arrangements. The close observer will discover a well-defined division of labor, different groups of bees performing certain operations. The housekeeping operations seem to be delegated to the young bees under sixteen days old, while the policemen are the older ones whose dispositions are not so mild and who would be more likely to detect a stealthy robber. It was this intensely interesting side of bee life that attracted the attention of a clergyman in failing health, forced to seek out-of-door occupation, in the early forties. He began to investigate bee life from a commercial standpoint, and about 1852 devised the movable hanging frame, which entirely revolutionized the bee business, making modern commercial beekeeping possible. Up to this time the box hive and straw skep were the only ones known, the combs being fastened to sticks, or the roof of the box, making it impossible to have any control over the activities of the hive. The new device or frame to which the bees fastened their combs in which brood was reared could be removed, one or all, at any time desired. This opened up undreamed-of possibilities in the bee business, which up to this time could hardly be called an industry.

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The man who has been most active in developing practical bee culture and who has contributed more to the growth of the industry in the United States than any other person, lives in Medina, Ohio. In 1865 this man was a successful manufacturer of jewelry in the village of Medina. One day his attention was attracted to a swarm of bees flying over. One of his clerks noticing his interest asked what he would give for the bees. He replied that he would give a dollar, not expecting that by any means the bees could be brought down. Shortly after, he was much astonished to have the workman bring the bees safely stored inside a box and demand his dollar, which he promptly received, while his employer had the bees and soon developed a lot of bee enthusiasm. The returns from that swarm of bees convinced him that there were possibilities in the bee business, and very soon he gave up the jewelry business to engage in the bee business and manufacture of beehives. In this new move he encountered the opposition of his family and friends, for the general impression was that any man who would spend money or time on bees was either lazy or a fool. Knowing that this particular man wasn’t lazy he was called a fool to risk so much on an uncertain enterprise. In his defense he remarked that he expected to live to see the time when honey would be sold in every corner grocery; but we doubt if he expected to see his prophecy fulfilled to the extent it has been, for not only is honey sold over every grocer’s counter, his own private brand is sold in all the principal markets of the United States.

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Shortly after securing his first swarm of bees he commenced the manufacture of beehives in the same room where he had his jewelry business, using a large windmill for power. Soon the business outgrew the small quarters and was moved to the present location of the plant. Hardly a year has passed that additions or new buildings have not been added, and the mammoth plant as it stands today covers sixteen acres of floor space, giving steady employment to several hundred people, and for many years modern agricultural appliances have gone from this factory to all parts of the world.

The old method of straining honey has long since been replaced by the centrifugal honey extractor, which simply empties the cells of honey, not injuring the combs. The combs are then replaced in the hive to be refilled by the bees, thus saving them the labor of rebuilding the costly structure, increasing the quantity of extracted honey which a single colony can produce, while comb honey is produced so perfect in appearance as to cause some to believe it to be manufactured by machinery; but comb honey, nature’s most exquisite product, comes in its dewy freshness untouched by the hand of man, from the beehive to the table, a food prepared in nature’s laboratory fit for the Gods.

As beekeeping developed as an industry, the close relationship to fruit growing and horticulture became apparent, as bees were discovered to be the greatest pollen carrying agents known. The government then began to spend more money on the development of the various branches of agriculture; a Department of Apiculture was established and through the work of this department beekeeping is recognized as one of the most profitable branches of agriculture.

The intense enthusiasm of this pioneer beekeeper was contagious and resulted in many taking up beekeeping. As no attention had been given to developing a market for honey and production increased, older beekeepers became alarmed and raised the cry that he was making too many beekeepers. Seeing the need for some means of increasing the demand for honey, a small honey business was started to dispose of the product of customers who had no market. Soon a definite educational campaign on the value of honey as a food was started, enlisting the co-operation of beekeepers wherever possible. Immediately the necessity for more care in selecting and marketing honey was apparent.

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The introduction of Italian bees into the United States in the early sixties marked an epoch in beekeeping, as they soon demonstrated their superiority as honey gatherers, their gentleness and other traits proving them more adaptable to domestication and to modern methods of beekeeping. The marked superiority of some colonies over others attracted the attention of beekeepers to the possibility of race improvement by careful breeding, which gradually developed a new branch of beekeeping aside from honey production—that of queen rearing—as it was discovered that improvement of stock must come through the queen mother. The average production of honey per colony has been materially increased, due not alone to improved methods, but to improvement in stock by careful breeders; and there are many beekeepers engaged exclusively in this branch of the industry who enjoy international reputation as breeders of superior strains of queens, and many thousands are annually sent through the mails to all parts of the world. Live bees are shipped by express as easily as poultry or other live stock.

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The honey industry is unique in this respect, that there is hardly a part of the United States where one cannot engage in it with profit. Locality has much to do with the flavor and quality of honey, owing to the different sources from which it is produced. Honey is simply blossom nectar gathered by the bees, distilled or evaporated in the beehive with the same distinctive flavor as the perfume of the blossoms from which it was gathered; consequently we have as many different flavors of honey as plants that bloom in sufficient profusion to produce honey. For this reason it is easy to recognize the distinct flavors of honey produced in different localities. In California orange honey we get the delicate aroma of the orange blossoms, and the water-white honey from the mountain sage has its characteristic flavor. Throughout the states east of the mountains and west of the Mississippi, are produced the well-known varieties of honey—alfalfa, sweet clover and other honeys from fall flowers. From the Middle West and Eastern states comes the matchless white clover honey, basswood and the dark aromatic buckwheat. The Southern states produce a multitude of different honeys, the sweet clover, tupelo, and the palmetto being the most common. The total annual production of honey in the United States as given by the best authorities is approximately 55,000,000 pounds. This, compared with other crop reports, may appear very small, but when considered from the standpoint of the enormous amount of bee labor represented, it is stupendous. Undoubtedly present reports will greatly exceed those given.

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The fig tree, which is of the mulberry family, belonged originally in Asia Minor, but it has been naturalized in all the countries around the Mediterranean. It grows from fifteen to twenty, or even thirty, feet high.

In good climates it bears two crops in a season; one in the early summer, from the buds of the last year; the other, which is the chief harvest, in the autumn, from those on the spring growth.

Figs, particularly dried figs, form an important article of food in the countries of the Levant, and are exported in large quantities to America and Europe. The best come from Turkey.

Fighting fish are a small fish and belong to the climbing perch family. They are natives of the southeast of Asia and are remarkable for their pugnacious propensities.

In Siam these fish are kept in glass globes, as we keep goldfish, for the purpose of fighting, and an extravagant amount of gambling takes place about the result of the fights.

When the fish is quiet its colors are dull, but when it is irritated it glows with metallic splendor.

An instrument called a “cyanometer,” meaning “measurer of blue,” is used for ascertaining the intensity of color in the sky.

It consists of a circular piece of metal or pasteboard, with a band divided by radii into fifty-one portions, each of which is painted with a shade of blue, beginning with the deepest, not distinguishable from black, and decreasing gradually to the lightest, not distinguishable from white. The observer holds this up between himself and the sky, turning it gradually round till he finds the tint of the instrument exactly corresponding to the tint of the sky.

A divining rod is a wand or twig of hazel or willow used especially for discovering metallic deposits or water beneath the earth’s surface.

It is described in a book written in 1546 and it has also a modern interest, which is set forth by Prof. W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., the chief modern investigator. The use of the divining rod at the present day is almost wholly confined to water finding, and in the hands of certain persons it undoubtedly has produced results along this line that are remarkable, to say the least. The professional water-finder provides himself with a forked twig, of hazel, for instance, which twig, held in balanced equilibrium in his hands, moves with a sudden and often violent motion, giving to the onlooker the impression of life within the twig itself. This apparent vitality of the twig is the means whereby the water-finder is led to the place where he claims underground water to exist, though its presence at that particular spot was hitherto wholly unsuspected. While failure is sometimes the outcome of the water-finder’s attempts, success as often and, indeed, according to the testimony of Professor Barrett, more often crowns his efforts. Various explanations, scientific and other, of the phenomenon have been advanced. Professor Barrett ascribes it to “motor-automatism” on the part of the manipulator of the divining rod, that is, a reflex action excited by some stimulus upon his mind, which may be either a sub-conscious suggestion or an actual impression. He asserts that the function of the forked twig in the hands of the water-finder may be to act as an indicator of some material or other mental disturbance within him. While a hazel or willow twig seems to be preferred by the professional water-finders, twigs from the beech, holly or any other tree are employed; sometimes even a piece of wire or watch spring is used, with apparently as good results.

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How wonderful to youth always has been the magical story of Aladdin and the wonderful lamp which, through its supernatural powers, he could gently stroke and thereby make genii of the unknown world his slaves.

In the rush of modern affairs there is that which is even more fascinating, even more wonderful, than the story of Aladdin and the magical power exerted through his lamp, but which is given but a passing thought because of the rapid changes through which we are passing.

Mythical as it may sound, yet nevertheless it is true, that man has harnessed for his use every snowflake that falls in the mountain tops and settles itself in the banks of perpetual ice and snow. How man has tapped the mountain fastnesses and converted the melting snows into a servant more powerful, more magical, more easily controlled, than Aladdin’s genii, should be known to everyone. This servant is electricity.

This silent, invisible servant is ever present, always ready at the touch of a button or the snap of a switch, without hesitation, without grumbling, to do silently, swiftly, without dirt, without discomfort, without asking for a day off or for higher wages, the work which is laid out for it.

The use of electricity is so common today that the average person does not stop to think of it as a magical power wielding a tremendous influence for betterment in every-day affairs.

Electricity has rapidly found its way into the home for domestic purposes, eliminating at its entrance a host of cares of the household.