As I learned later, the explosion took place at one of the packing houses, which carried another packing house with it, together with a nitroglycerin storehouse, so that about ten tons of dynamite, or its equivalent, went up in that column of smoke. I understand that seven men were killed, and about twice as many injured. It was the largest and most destructive explosion that had ever occurred at those works.
WHEN THE WASH VANISHED
I was once invited to speak at a County Fair at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I used to live when in the publishing business. My subject was Explosive Materials and Their Use in Warfare.
The management was especially desirous that I should give my auditors some sort of spectacular demonstration, to show what explosives would do. A platform was erected in an open field, and I had an arena roped off at the rear of the platform about fifty feet wide, and running back several hundred feet. In the rear portion of this arena I buried several sticks of dynamite, and connected them with an exploder and a battery on the platform.
Also, I brought several cotton bosom-shirts, several cotton undershirts, half-a-dozen handkerchiefs, a couple of towels, half-a-dozen pairs of cotton socks, and as many cheap cotton collars and cuffs. These I had immersed in a concentrated mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, converting them all into guncotton. Then I washed and soaked the acid out of them, and dried them.
I stretched a clothes-line from the speaker’s platform to a distance of about thirty feet to my right, and on this I hung my guncotton clothes, only a few feet away from the front of the audience.
There were, perhaps, a thousand people massed in front of me, crowding up close, that nothing should miss them. I made a brief talk on the nature and use of explosives, and burned some smokeless powder under water, and then I touched off the dynamite in the rear of the field, which made a very pretty showing.
The audience was very curious about that wash. That I should have hung my linen out to dry on that occasion they thought was very peculiar taste, to say the least; and some of them did not hesitate to say that they considered it very bad taste.