"EVERYTHING WAS BLOWN TO PIECES."
Pondering this remarkable statement, I continued on my way, and presently, not seeing any big building, asked a farmer where the Atlantic Dynamite Works were. He swept the horizon with his arm, and said they were all about us; they covered hundreds of acres—little, low buildings placed far apart, so that if one exploded it wouldn't set off the rest.
"The dynamite-magazines are along the hillside yonder," he said. "If they went up, I guess there wouldn't be much left of the town."
"What town?" said I.
"Why, Kenvil. That's where the dynamite-mixers live. It's over there. Quickest way is across this field and over the fence."
I followed his advice, and presently passed near a number of small brick buildings so very innocent-looking that I found myself saying, "What! this blow up, or that little sputtering shanty wreck a town?" It seemed ridiculous. I learned afterward that I had walked through the most dangerous part of the works; it isn't size here that counts.
I paused at several open doors, and got a whiff of chemicals that made me understand the dynamite-sickness of which I had heard. No man can breathe the strangling fumes of nitric acid and nitrated glycerin without discomfort, and every man here must breathe them. They rise from vats and troughs like brownish-yellow smoke; they are in the mixing-rooms, in the packing-rooms, in the freezing-house, in the separating-house, everywhere; and they take men in the throat, and make their hearts pound strangely, and set their heads splitting with pain. Not a workman escapes the dynamite-headache; new hands are wretched with it for a fortnight, and even the well-seasoned men get a touch of it on Monday mornings after the Sunday rest.
In walking about the works I noticed that the several buildings, representing different steps in the manufacture of explosives, are united by long troughs or pipes sufficiently inclined to allow the nitroglycerin to flow by its own weight from one building to another, so that you watch the first operations in dynamite-making at the top of a slope, and the last ones at the bottom. Of course this transportation by flow is possible for nitroglycerin only while it is a liquid, and not after it has been absorbed by porous earth and given the name of dynamite and the look of moist sawdust. As dynamite it is transported between buildings on little railroads, with horses to haul the cars.