Studies in Thrilling Lives

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 25, 23 June 1909, Page 52

Studies in Thrilling Lives

THE DYNAMITE WORKER

By

William Allan Johnston

©UT in the deep, ragged quarry there’s a scene of noisy, stirring activity. Steam drills are rat-a-tap-ta-pping, steam derricks swinging and creaking, donkey engines pulling back and forth with strings of little flat cars; men are swarming all over the jagged bottom, swinging heavy malls against chunks of flinty rock, loading high the flat cars, straining against great crowbars stuck in fissures and under strata. Tool boys run here and there with sharpened drills; foremen bawl out orders above the din. or else stand cursing monotonously from the bank. Over at one end of the quarry stands a stone-crusher building, half clouded in dust, its heavy screens rolling and rattling, its rotary crusher digesting broken rock at the rate of two tons a minute. 'All the inen in the quarry, two hundred in all. are frantically engaged in feeding its ravenous steel maw. and day by day the quarry widens and deepens and whole trains of railway cars draw away the nut size produet from under the bins. Two hundred men are swinging hammers, picks and crowbars; but in the transformation process that converts a stratified quarry into ballast and concrete pebbles their combined power is as nothing compared with one little brown papered cylinder of soft, pinkish stuff packed in those boxes which Fritz carries as though they were brittle glass. That's dynamite, variously styled “the power untamable.’’ “a coiled spring of terrific power,” “the pink demon of destruction,” etc. It hasn't the building up power of a little red ant. but as a destructive agent its might is incomprehensible. Measured in one instance, its power was computed as equalling sixteen and one-half million horse power, and its pressure as six hundred thousand pounds to a small square inch! Vagaries of Dynamite. That much is known about dynamite, unbelievable as it seems. Its vagaries are not known, or at least are not so well known and observed that handling it is a safe occupation. I suggested this to a “dynamiter,” a big. tawny, moustached Italian who knelt before a box. heaping one arm high with the sticks as though they were so much kindling wood. “Eees dangerous?’’ said he. with a boastful air. "Si. vera mooch! Oh,” he gestured carelessly, "she all right, you treata her right. Sure So I" —he stood up and looked down proudly at his brawnv figure—-“so I —l treats her lain fine. That ees why I am here!" Down b-dow us. in a clear ledge of rock, th? steam drills had bored a series of holes of varying depths, and men were busilv swabbing the moisture out of them with oakum. Into each hole then the “dynamiter" placed a brown stick of the “demon power." first inserting into the stick an exploding cap to which two copper wires were already attached. Each hole was then filled with soft, dry dirt, tamped gently, and the copper wires left protruding at the surface, The drill holes were then united by connecting those wired, all except one from each end hole, which were united with long insulated wires leading to an electric battery in the ledge above, perhaps one hundred feet distant. T’D simple a< t of pressing a button on this battery box completes the current, sparks the caps, and explodes each drill hole at practically the same time. Single holes, very deep and heavily charged, were connected with more battery lioxes. and further away another dynamite gang was busy over big rocks shaken free by a previous explosion. On the top of each rock a part of a stick of dynamite was laid and plastered down with mud. single powder fuses being used hero instead of the continuous electrio tri res. Getting Readv, Now the evening whistle blows. The •"tapping” drills cease in unison, derrick

booms fall for the night, the roaring crusher stops slowly, and men are slipping on coats, snatching dinner pails, and hurrying over the embankment. Only the dynamite gang remains, and the tawny, moustached Italian is in all his boastful glory. “Hoi-oi-oi!” he shouts, pounding his bulging chest. “Geta-ready! rioi-oi-oi! ” A dozen helpers scamper back, some under thick trees with shoulders crouched fearfully, some in the open with faces upturned anxiously to the sky, others to the battery boxes, at a signal from their chief. “Ready!" he yells. “One ” At almost the same moment he touches the button an outer ledge leaps up outward and bursts and splinters into great cracks and little spawls. “Two—a-three —a-four.” “Pop. bing! bang! crash!” The air is filled with dust and sailing stones, and the detonations rattle and echo back and forth from mountain side to river bank, while the earth trembles beneath your feet. One big rock, weighing several tons, is still careening when the air has cleared, rolling as though an invisible giant, were behind it. “Vera good,” said the dynamiter

pompously, ‘"eighteen pounds dida all that!” And then I thought of Fritz and his thousand pounds. “Well, it’s funny stuff," said the general manager after the gang left. “11l show you.” Picking up a stick of dynamite, he led the way to a ledge where the quarry floor was deepest beneath us. With his knife he cut- the stick in two and hurled a half of it down upon the rocks two hundred feet below. There "was no explosion. We saw the stick break into pink dust. “You see!” said he. “You could drop a five hundred pound chunk of iron on fifty pounds of that dynamite and it wouldn't explode. It takes a sharp detonation to do it—a cap. Well, naturally, that would do it. It’s fulminate of mercury and has an explosive pressure of over three hundred tons to the square inch. A red spark too will do the work. A white spark won’t, they say. “You saw me cut that stick in two. Well, I know of a dynamite agent —an old, experienced man—who was blown into shreds doing the same thing.” "Then why did you?” “Well, the stick I cut was fresh. The makers guarantee it so. We cut ’em up here every day. But the stick Jim Martin cut had been frozen. He didn’t know that. "Fully eighty per cent of tlje accidents are due to frozen dynamite. You see, when the stuff freezes—and I’ve yet to see "a kind that won’t freeze —the nitroglycerine collects in streaks and lumps. When you thaw out the stick the nitro doesn't redifl'use, and if your knife cut into a fat streak —away you go! “We have a rule here never to cut a frozen stick. For thawing we use a double compartment tin pail with boiling water for heat, and we’ve yet to have an accident from that cause. “Funny thing happened this fall,

though. One of the old thawing pafls was thrown down here by some fool workman. It rolled against a pile of ties and might be there to-day had we not run a sidetrack along there. One day a gang was unloading rails from a flat car. The first one struck this pail, and the next second the air was full of flying ties and splinter's. “You see, a good deal of nitro had leaked out of the dynamite while it was thawing and had gradually lodged in the crevices of the pail. Explosive Water. “Out West in a mining camp they tell of. a miner who thawed out some sticks in a pan of water and let the pan standing in the cabin. His partner came in just in time to see the dog stealing some meat, picked up the pan of water, hurled it at the dog, and was astonished to see the animal disappear with a loud explosion. There was nitro in the water. "They were terribly icareless, those miners, and every now and then the landscape was minus a cabin. Why, I’ve seen them place sticks of dynamite on the front of the stove, within five inches of red hot embers, while they cooked breakfast. Mebbe they would just catch fire and burn, but sometimes they exploded. “That’s another curious thing about it. See?” The manager dumped out a handful of the pink powder and applied a match to it. It burned slowly with a bluish flame. “Out West,” he explained, “we made rough assays of lead rock by pulverising a sample, mixing it with dynamite in the form of a cone and touching it off. “So that makes it seem harmless, too. But if you did that with frozen dynamite you’d have a different story to tell—or, rather, you Wouldn't be left to tell a story. “Out there they had a habit of biting

fTipir eaps on to the ftise. That’s bad. One day in a tunnel I heard a sharp crack, and then, outlined in the mouth of the tun net, stood a swaying, headless man. Here at the quarry last year an inquisitive tool boy struck one with a hammer. He’s that one armed boy working a forge in the blacksmith shop. Did you notice him?” Blown to Atoms. The bulk of the dynamite used in this quarry is stored in a dirt eellar house back in the woods, and is under the sole guardianship of Red Joe, the Italian. For convenience sake a smaller quantity, perhaps one hundred pounds, is kept in a shanty near the ledge. One night this exploded, no one knows how or why. Next morning the shanty was gone and the spot where it had stood was covered with pine bushes tom up by the roots in a more or less exact circumference and piled up neatly in the centre of a circle where the shanty was. Every window in the office was broken, and the glass on the side toward the explosion was blown outward. Papers from within were also swept out toward the shanty, quite a distance. These strange phenomena were due to the fact that exploded dynamite creates a vacuum all about it, and its surrounding destructive force is created by inrushing air. The exact extent of this circular vacuum for a given amount of dynamite was shown one time by a strange and deplorable accident involving four workmen. One man, working over the dynamite when it exploded, disappeared altogether. The bodies of two other men, working fifty and one hundred feet away were swept in with the debris, one terribly shattered the other stripped of all his clothing, but still alive. The fourth man, about one hundred and fifty feet away, was seen walking off in a dazed, aimless way and climbing a fence. He was just beyond the circumference of the death circle. The complete disappearance of a body directly in contact with exploding dynamite is not due, it is now thought, to its utter disruption, but rather to the terrific heat which is suddenly and briefly generated. It is difficult almost to imagine the degree of that heat. Generates Terrific Heat. A copper eent placed under an exploding stick of dynamite disappeared so completely that’ a chemical analysis of the surface of the steel block upon which it rested failed to give a traee of it. Evidently then it was resolved by heat into its elements, which in turn were passed off in a gaseous state.