EDISON'S NEW MOVE.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 2203, 11 July 1910, Page 7

EDISON'S NEW MOVE.

HOUSES "BY THE MILE” MADE IN MOULD'S. There is nothing very new about houses built of cement, but Mr. Edison seems to have a new scheme for doing the thing cheaply and well. He calls his method “poured cement.’ He is convinced by building his poured cement houses in the country, that after the working man has paid his fare to the town oe city, he will bring the cost of living down to & fraction of what it is now. “Perhaps,” he said to an interviewer, “I am giving them too much. Maybe the houses are too big, too roomy. The poor fellows who have been used to being cooped up in tenaraent house rooms won’t know what to do with themselves in ft house such as I’ll give 'em to live in. Well, time will show that. If they're too big, it won’t be hard to cut ’em down, will it ? In the middle of the great library on a table stood a model of the poured cement house Edison is working on. It did not look a working man’s house. It looked more like a rich man’s villa. Pure white, with a red tiled roof ; with a roomy porch, wide, overhanging eaves ; with a suggestion of Moorish in its architecture, it was a thing of beauty. And the house is to cost a few shillings a week to live in. A PERFECT HOUSE BUILT IN NINE DAYS. “That house is going to be twentyfive by thirty feet,” explained Mr. Edison, “It will have a cellar, two floors and a roomy attic. There will be a large living room, fourteen by twenty-three feet, and a large kitchen, on ( the first floor ; two good-sized bed-rooms and a large bath room on on the second floor and two big rooms in the attic. I wonder whether that won’t be too much for the dollar-a-day man (dollar equals 4/3.) Come along with me and I’ll show you the moulds as far as they are completed. I’ve got ’em up to the first floor now, and I’m going to pour in a few weeks. Before the winter is out I’ll pour a complete house. Gome along.” Mr. Edison set ont at a great pace to the distant building where the moulds for the poured cement house were being made and put together. He passed through one machine shop after another, and out into the open, where great cement buildings rose on every side. “We built those right here with our own cement,” he said. *“They were cast in wooden moulds. See there, you can see the grain of the wood on the walls, if you look closely. Well, those buildings didn’t begin to cost what brick buildings would, and they are ever so much handsomer and better.” In the building devoted to making the moulds for; the cement house many men were at work. In the middle of a large room they had bolted the sections of the iron moulds together for the house as far as the windows of the first floor. A complete set of moulds for a house will cost about £5,000. It will cost for interest and breakage about £24 for the moulds in putting up a house. It will take a day, or two days, to put up the moulds, eight hours to pour the cement, four days for it to set, and, say, two days to take down the moulds. Tue moulds will be bolted together so as to form a steel house with hollow walls from the roof to the cellar floor. There will be openings in the top into which the liquid cement will bo poured, just as lead used to be poured into an old-fash-ioned bullet mould. The concrete, after being mixed, will be dumped into large tanks from which it will be conveyed to a distributing tank on the roof or top of the forms. A large number of open troughs or pipes will lead the mixture to the openings on the roof, whence it will flow down and fill all parts of the moulds to the footings in the basement till it overflows at the roof. STONE IN SUSPENSION. The most wonderful part of Mr. Edison’s invention is the character of the liquid cement. It has been demonstrated and proved by exhaustive tests at the laboratory that he has produced a mixture that has all the characteristics of a liquid, flows readily and fills all interstices and openings, and that during this flow the heavier ingredients can be held in suspension so that they are distributed evenly throughout the mass. This seems almost incredible, but it is a fact. Pieces of stone — crushed granite of the size that will pass a half-inch mesh sieve are held is suspension in the liquid, and when it hardens they are evenly distributed throughout from top to bottom. The poured cement bouses will be fireproof and will need no repairs, so that fire insurance and cost of repairing will be eliminated. They will take tens of thousands of men, women and children out into the country, away from the tenements, improve their health, give them mere happiness and contentment, and will count for much in the next' generation. That is what Edison, “the Wizard, ’’ .has been working for during the past year, and that is what he has nearly accomplished. That his efforts will be crowned with complete success in the end no one can doubt who knows the man.—“ Popular Science Siftings.”