Careers of Danger and Daring Part 28

"No more than others. Why should they? They work along for years, and nothing happens. They might as well be shoveling coal. And if anything does happen, it's over so quick that courage isn't much use."

Having said this, he hesitated a moment, and then, as if in a spirit of fairness, told of a certain man at the head of a nitroglycerin-mill who on one occasion _did_ do a little thing that some people called brave.

He wouldn't give the name of this "certain man," but I fancied I could guess it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE WENT TO WORK THROWING WATER ON THE BURNING BOXES."]

This nitroglycerin-mill, it seems, was on the Pacific coast, whence they used to s.h.i.+p the dynamite on vessels that loaded right alongside the yards. One day a mixing-house exploded, and hurled burning timbers over a vessel lying near that had just received a fresh cargo. Her decks were piled with boxes of explosives--wooden boxes, which at once took fire.

When this "certain man" rushed down to the dock, the situation was as bad as could be. There were tons of dynamite ready to explode, and a hot fire was eating deeper into the wood with every second. And all the workmen had run for their lives!

"Well," said the superintendent, "what this man did was to grab a bucket and line, and jump on the deck. Yes, it was burning; everything was burning. But he went to work lowering the bucket overside and throwing water on the flaming boxes. After a while he put 'em out, and the dynamite didn't explode at all; but it would have exploded in a mighty short time if he had kept away, for the wood was about burned through in several places. I know that's a true story, because, well--because I _know_ it."

"Don't you call that man brave?" I asked.

The superintendent shook his head. "He was brave in that particular instance, but he might not have been brave at another time. You never can tell what a man will do in danger. It depends on how he feels or on how a thing happens to strike him. A man might act like a hero one day and like a coward another day, with exactly the same danger in both cases. There's a lot of chance in it. If that man I'm telling you about had been up late the night before, or had eaten a tough piece of steak for breakfast, the chances are he would have run like the rest."

III

HOW JOSHUA PLUMSTEAD STUCK TO HIS NITROGLYCERIN-VAT IN AN EXPLOSION AND SAVED THE WORKS

I DROVE over from the works to Kenvil under the escort of a red-nosed man who discoursed on local matters, particularly on the prospects of his youngest son, who was eighteen years old and earned three dollars a day.

"What does he do?" I asked.

"He's a packer," said the red-nosed man.

"What does he pack?"

"Dynamite. Guess there ain't no other stuff he c'd pack an' get them wages. Jest the same, I wish he'd quit, specially sence the big blow-up t' other day."

"Why, what blew up?" I inquired.

"Freezing-house did with an all-fired big lot of nitroglycerin. n.o.body knows what set her off. Reg'lar miracle there wa'n't a lot killed. Man in charge, feller named Ball, he went out to look at a water-pipe.

Hadn't been out the door a minute when off she went. Say, you'd oughter seen the boys run! They tell me some of 'em jumped clean through the winders, sashes an' all. If ye want to know more about it, there's my boy now; he was right near the house when it happened."

We drew up at the Kenvil hotel, where a young man was sitting. Here was the modern dynamite-worker, and not at all as I had pictured him. He looked like a summer boarder who liked to take things easy and wear good clothes. Wondering much, I sat down and talked to this young man, a skilful dynamite-packer, it appears, who happened at the time to be taking a day off.

"They put me at machine-packing a few days ago," he said, "and it's made my wrist lame. Going to rest until Monday."

After some preliminaries I asked him about the process of packing dynamite, and he explained how the freshly mixed explosive is delivered at the various packing-houses in little tubs, a hundred pounds to a tub, and how they dig into it with shovels, and mold it into shape on the benches like so much b.u.t.ter, and ram it into funnels, and finally, with the busy tamping of rubber-shod sticks, squeeze it down into the paper sh.e.l.ls that form the cartridges. One would say they play with concentrated death as children play with sawdust dolls, but he declared it safe enough.

"How large are the cartridges?" I asked.

"Oh, different sizes. The smallest are about eight inches long, and the largest thirty. And they vary from one inch thick up to two and a half.

I know a man who carried a thirty-inch cartridge all the way to Morristown in an ordinary pa.s.senger-car. He had it wrapped in a newspaper, under his arm like a big loaf of bread. But say, he took chances, all right."

At this another man informed us that people often carry nitroglycerin about with them, and take no risk, by simply pouring it into a big bottle of alcohol. Then it can do no harm; and when they want to use the explosive, they have only to evaporate the alcohol.

The talk turned to precautions taken against accidents. In all powder-mills the workmen are required to change their clothes before entering the buildings, and to put on rubber-soled shoes. There must be no bit of metal about a man's person, no iron nail or buckle, nothing that could strike fire; and of course the workman who would bring a match on the premises would be counted worse than an a.s.sa.s.sin.

"Just the same, though, matches get into the works once in a while,"

remarked the young packer. "I found a piece of a match one day in a tub of dynamite; it had the head on, too. Say, it's bad enough to find b.u.t.tons and pebbles, but when I saw that match-head--well, it made me weak in the knees."

This brought back the old question, When does dynamite explode, and when does it not explode? I mentioned the red-spark theory.

"I think that's correct," agreed the packer. "I've watched 'em burn old dynamite-boxes, and if there are iron nails in the boxes they explode as soon as the nails get red-hot; if there are no nails, they don't explode."

"You mean empty boxes?" I asked.

"Certainly; but there's nitroglycerin in the wood, lots of it. It oozes out of the dynamite, especially on a hot day, and soaks into everything.

Why, I suppose there's enough nitroglycerin in the overalls I wear to blow a man into--well, I wouldn't want to lay 'em on an anvil and give 'em a whack with a sledge."

There was a certain novelty to me in the thought of a pair of old overalls exploding; but I was soon to hear of stranger things. By this time other workmen had drawn up chairs, and were ready now with modest contributions from their own experience.

"Tell ye a queer thing," said one man. "In that explosion the other day,--I mean the freezing-house,--a car loaded with powder [dynamite]

had just pa.s.sed, not a minute before the explosion. Lucky for the three men with the car, wasn't it? But what gets me is how the blast, when it came, blew the harness off the horse. Yes, sir; that's what it did--clean off; and away he went galloping after the men as hard as he could leg it. n.o.body touched a buckle or a strap. It was dynamite unhitched that animal."

"Dynamite did another trick that day," put in a tall man. "It caught a bird on the wing. Dunno whether 'twas a robin or a swaller, but 'twas a bird, all right. Caught it in a sheet of tin blowed off the roof, an'

jest twisted that little bird all up as it sailed along, and when it struck the ground, there was the bird fast in a cage made in the air out of a tin roof. Alive? Yes, sir, alive; and that shows how fast dynamite does business."

So the talk ran on, with many little details of explosions. The expert explained that the air waves of a great concussion move along with crests and troughs like water waves, and the shattering effect comes only at the crests, so that all the windows might be broken in a house, say, half a mile from an explosion, and no windows be broken in a house two hundred yards nearer. The first house would have been smitten by a destructive wave crest, the second pa.s.sed over by a harmless wave trough. And, by the way, when windows are broken by these blasts of concussion, it appears that they are usually broken _outward_, not inward, and that the fragments are found on the ground outside the house, not on the floors inside. The reason of this is that the concussion waves leave behind them a partial vacuum, and windows are broken by the air _inside_ houses rus.h.i.+ng out.

"How about thunder-storms?" I asked.

"There is always danger," said the expert, "and all hands hurry out of the works as soon as the lightning begins to play. If a bolt struck a lot of dynamite it would set it off."

Then he explained that the policy of dynamite manufacturers is to handle explosives in small quant.i.ties, say a ton at a time, each lot being finished and hauled away in wagons before another lot is started. This is possible because of the short time occupied in making dynamite. He a.s.sured me, for instance, that if there were only raw materials at the works on a certain morning when the seven-o'clock whistle blew, it would be perfectly possible to have a ton of dynamite-cartridges finished, packed in boxes, and loaded on freight-cars by nine o'clock.

After this some one told of a thrilling happening in the mixing-house, by the great vat, wherein nitroglycerin is mixed with porous earth, called dope, and becomes dynamite. Over this vat four men work continually, two with rakes, two with hoes, kneading half a ton or more of explosive dough to the proper consistency.

One day a powder-car loaded with heavy stone got loose on its track a quarter of a mile up the slope, and started down the steep grade. The tracks ran straight into the mixing-house. The switch was open, and the first thing these men knew, there was an angry clang at the switch, and then a swift, heavy car was plunging toward the open door, with every chance that it would set off twelve hundred pounds of dynamite there.

Workmen outside shouted, and then stared in horror. Not a man in the mixing-house moved. All four kept their places around the vat, held tight to their rakes and hoes, while the car, just missing the dynamite, hurled its ma.s.s of two tons through the back wall of the building, and spent its force against a tree-trunk. There was no explosion, and nothing happened, which was something of a miracle; but what impressed me was that these four men stood still, not from courage, but because they were frozen with fear!

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A SWIFT, HEAVY CAR WAS PLUNGING TOWARD THE OPEN DOOR."]

While there is danger in every step of dynamite manufacture, it appears that the center of peril is in the nitrating-house, where the fresh glycerin is mixed with nitric acid, or, more correctly, is nitrated by it. This operation takes place in a great covered vat about which are many pipes and stop-c.o.c.ks. A man stands here like an engineer at the throttle, watching his thermometer and letting in fresh glycerin. These are his two duties, and upon the right performance of them depends the safety of the works. Every hour he must let in some seven hundred pounds of glycerin upon the deadly acid, and every hour he must draw off some fifteen hundred pounds of nitroglycerin and let it go splas.h.i.+ng away in a yellowish stream down the long, uncovered trough that leads to the separating-house yonder. From this separating-house runs another trough to the freezing-house, and a third to the distant mixing-house. These three troughs inclose an oblong s.p.a.ce, at the corners of which stand the nitrating-house, the separating-house, and the freezing-house. In each one of these, at any hour of the day, is a wagon-load of pure nitroglycerin, while in the three troughs are little rivers of nitroglycerin always flowing.

The arrangement of buildings in this part of the works makes clearer what was done at the nitrating-house by a certain Joshua Plumstead in the recent explosion. Joshua is a veteran at dynamite-making. He has worked at the nitrating-vat for twenty-five years, and has probably made more nitroglycerin than any one man in the world. He has been through all the great explosions; he has seen many men killed; he has stood by time and again when his own nitrating-vat has taken fire; and yet he always comes through safely. They say there is no man like Joshua for nerve and judgment when the demons of gas and fire begin to play.

This explosion took place at the freezing-house, which is the one place in all the works where dynamite is never expected to explode. Yet it _did_ explode now, with a smas.h.i.+ng of air and a horrible grinding underfoot that stifled all things in men but a mad desire to flee.

Joshua Plumstead was in the nitrating-house alone. His helper had fled.

The roof timbers were cras.h.i.+ng down about him. He heard the hiss of fire and the shouts of workmen running. He knew that a second explosion might come at any moment. There was danger from fire-brands and flying ma.s.ses of stone and iron, danger from the open troughs, danger from the near-by houses. A shock, a spark anywhere here might mean the end.

Plumstead kept his eyes on the long thermometer that reached up from the furious smoking ma.s.s of oil and acid. The mercury had crept up from eighty-five to ninety, and was rising still. At ninety-five he knew the nitroglycerin would take fire, probably explode, and nothing could save it. The vat was seething with a full charge. Ninety-one! He shut off the inflow of glycerin. Ninety-two! Something might be wrong with the coils of ice-cold water that chill the vat down to safety. He opened the c.o.c.ks full. Cras.h.!.+ came a beam from overhead, and narrowly missed the gearing of the agitating-blades. Were they to stop but for a single second, the nitroglycerin would explode. He eased the bearings, turned on compressed air, watched the thermometer--and waited.