“Mrs. Maxim, have you heard the news about the explosion?”
And he continued: “Mr. Maxim’s laboratory blew up and burned down today. They have found some of his assistant, but they haven’t found any of Mr. Maxim yet.”
Mrs. Maxim immediately rushed to the scene of the accident, where she learned the welcome news that I was in Morristown that day.
It was a matter of another year of hard work before I was again ready to make a new trial of the torpedo apparatus. There were several amusing experiences in connection with that testing.
The apparatus held a charge of one hundred and ten pounds of motorite. Water was pumped continuously through a water jacket over the steel cylinders containing the burning motorite and into the combustion chamber during each run. The apparatus was provided with an exhaust valve so constructed as to control, to a nicety, the pressure in the combustion chamber.
Under three hundred pounds pressure to the square inch, which was what was mainly used, the motorite burned at the rate of a foot in length per minute, and as each foot in length weighed twenty-five pounds, it burned at the rate of twenty-five pounds per minute. Each pound of motorite evaporated a little more than two pounds of water, and the products of combustion, mingling with the steam produced, escaped from the exhaust valve through an inch-and-a-half nozzle.
The roar of the escaping gas and steam was so great that it was impossible to hear one shout at the top of his voice. The loudest shout was less than a whisper. The roar could be heard with great distinctness more than two miles away. A good idea can be had of the violence with which the steam and gases escaped, from the fact that a door, which accidentally swung shut during one of the runs in front of the nozzle, although seven feet distant, was blown from its hinges, broken in two, and the fragments hurled twenty feet away. The noise was so confounding, that it was some time before my assistants and myself could keep our senses about us and note and record the pressures on the various gauges during a run, although the apparatus was separated from us by a barricade so strong and heavy that there was no possibility of our being injured, even should there be an explosion.
One day, just as we were about to make a run, the superintendent of a nearby explosives works called upon us, and I asked him if he would like to see the run, and he said he would.