/^^■' i iP!i|:;!;ii:rK;!:ip::: ! Ill ii :■ ■ ^^'ii^.; i}ii\ni' 11 hip )iHSJH^ How the cover was mounted 192 i^ The experimental aerator at the Rye outlet of the Kensico reservoir 193 ^ The big aerator basin at Kensico 193 y^ Laying the aqueduct siphon across the Narrows 204 y Rolling a gas main across the street with four dinkey engines 205 ^ "We reached the exit and raced up the ladder." 218 ^ The chute system of pouring concrete 219 1/ Concrete legs of the viaduct leading to the great arch. ... 219 *^ Sinking rows of cylindrical caissons at Ward's Island for THE FOUNDATION OF ONE OF THE HeLL GaTE BRIDGE TOWERS. 232 V^ Taking down the wall, brick by brick 233 ^ The brick chute discharging into a cart 233 ^ Beginning to wreck the skyscraper 246 '^ The tower of the skyscraper dismantled 246 v^ "How foolish it was for me with my fly's weight to attempt to swing that ponderous see-saw." 247 "^ PICK, SHOVEL AND PLUCK CHAPTER I. A DISASTROUS MORNING. If any one had told me, when Dr. McGreggor so un- expectedly offered to send me to college, that inside of a week I would be begging to be let off, I should have told that person that he had softening of the brain, or something to that effect. A course in college was the one thing above all others that I had longed for, and when I realized that my dream was about to come true, there was not a happier boy in the whole world. All that day, I was *' treading air,'' as the saying goes, and Bill seemed almost as delighted as I was. **By George!'' he kept saying; ^'it's great, Jim. I was sure that Uncle Ed would send me, and I did hate to think of going to college alone after we had been chums so long. I had a feeling all the time that maybe Uncle Ed would foot your expenses too, and, you see, he would have, if Dr. McGreggor hadn't got ahead of him." We stayed up until the small hours of the night, talking over the splendid times ahead of us, and getting ready to leave on the following afternoon. There was one more thing we expected to see before leaving the city. In the aqueduct tunnel, on the Brooklyn side, there was a curious I 2 Picky Shovel and Pluck. shoveling machine that did the work of a whole gang of men in clearing away the broken rock after a blast. Mr.. Jack Patterson, the superintendent at Shaft 21, had promised to take us over and show us this novel machine. We were rather sorry, now, that the trip had been arranged; for, with the opening of college only eight days off, we were impatient to get home. Shaft 21 was just at the brink of the East River, on the New York side, a deep hole, already 550 feet down, and still to be sunk 150 feet or more before turning at right angles to go under the river to Brooklyn. When we arrived at the shaft, we learned that there was trouble on hand. The last blast had uncovered a subterranean stream that came pouring in so fast that, before the pumps could be installed, the water stood fifteen feet deep, and was steadily growing deeper. They were just getting ready to lower a shaft-sinking pump when we came upon the scene. The "sinker," as Mr. Patterson called it, was a big brute of a machine, weighing two tons. At one end was the compressed-air engine, whose piston drove the plungers of the water-pump at the opposite end. A short length of rope-wound hose hung down from the intake end of the machine, while from one side near the middle extended an outlet hose, eight inches in diameter, and between five and six hundred feet long, for it was to reach all the way from the water-level to the top of the shaft. The "sinker" was suspended in slings from a derrick. A Disastrous Morning. 3 "Jump on, boys/' called Mr. Patterson. "You are just in time to have a ride to the bottom of the shaft." We accepted the invitation with alacrity, and clambered aboard the broad back of the machine, holding on to the slings while the derrick lifted us up over the shaft and then down into the yawning hole. When the "sinker" touched the water, Mr. Patterson turned on the compressed air that was led down to the machine through a rubber hose, and the pump began to chug. "My, but there must be an enormous pressure in that hose!" cried Bill. "Look at the way she stiffens out." "A five-hundred-foot column of water must weigh some- thing," I remarked. "Yes, siree; there must be a pressure of at least two hundred pounds to the inch." Bill and I were standing at one side of the hose, while Mr. Patterson and his assistant were on the opposite side. I was just about to turn toward the intake end of the pump, when suddenly, without any warning at all, the hose burst loose with a roar. That huge eight-inch hose lashed around hke the tail of a harpooned whale, and knocked Bill off the pump, while the torrent that poured out of it nearly swept my feet out from under me, and would have carried me over- board too, had I not clung desperately to the cable sling. Bill was hurled clear across the shaft, ricochetting on the water, like a shell from a thirteen-inch gun, until he struck heavily against some timbers, and then sank out of sight. Without a moment's hesitation, Mr. Patterson jumped 4 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. s^^i in after him, not even stopping to take off his coat or shoes (fortunately he was wearing shoes instead of boots). The deluge that gushed out of the squirming hose, Hke a young Niagara, did not simpHfy his task in the least. Bill did not come to the surface, and Mr. Patterson had to dive in search of him. The shaft was fairly well lighted with a cluster of electric-Hght bulbs, but they made little im- pression on the black water below. Nevertheless, I could not stand by idly with my chum drowning, so I slung off my coat and shoes, and plunged in, without giving a thought to submerged timbering or any other obstacles I might strike. It was impossible to see anything under the sur- face. All I could do was to grope blindly. At length, Mr. Patterson came up with Bill's unconscious body. In the meantime, the assistant superintendent had signaled for the bucket. In this my chum was placed, and we were hauled quickly to the surface with him. As Bill was being lifted out of the bucket, I noticed that his leg hung down like a rag, and I pointed it out to the doctor who came running up just then. He looked very grave and shook his head, but he bent his first efforts to restoring his patient to consciousness. Then, as Bill began to breathe, he cut away his clothing and found a compound fracture of his leg. While he administered some sort of an opiate to allay the intense suffering, as Bill was now entirely conscious, Mr. Patterson hurried off to summon an ambulance. '*If he has any folks around here, you had better send A Disastrous Morning. 5 for them/' the doctor said to me in a low voice, so that Bill could not hear him. "The only one in the city that I know of is his uncle," I repHed. "Telephone to him to meet you at the hospital. It is a bad break. He'll be laid up for two months at least, maybe three." "Three months!" I gasped. "'Sh-h!" The doctor held up a warning finger. "There is no use in his knowing it just yet." "But he is going to enter college next week." "Oh, no, he isn't!" the doctor contradicted me. "He will have to forget about college for a while." It was with a sinking heart that I went to the telephone to call up Uncle Ed. As luck would have it, he was out; but the man at the other end of the wire said he would make every effort to find him. At any rate, he would be able to catch him at the club at one o'clock. I had barely changed my wet clothing for some dry togs that belonged to Mr. Patterson, when I heard the bell of the ambulance clanging madly as the vehicle raced through the crowded East Side streets. As it entered the yard, a swarm of people pressed in after it, and it was all I could do to shoulder my way through the press, but I was determined to board the ambulance, and ride with Bill to the hospital. At the hospital I was headed off into a sort of reception- room, while Bill was hurried into the operating-room. There I waited ages before an attendant beckoned to me, 6 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. and conducted me to a room in the private ward where my poor Bill lay motionless on a cot. ''He is just coming out of the ether," a nurse informed me. I sat down beside him. It made me grit my teeth and feel sick all over to hear him moan, now and then, and beg half deliriously for water. But finally, "Jim," came faintly from my helpless chum. ''Yes, old chap. Here I am." "Jim," he faltered again, "how long am I laid up for?" I tried to reassure him. "You'll be out before very long. Your leg is banged up some." He was silent for a while, then, "It's broken .f^" he asked in a weak whisper. I nodded. A sudden twinge in his broken limb forced an involuntary cry of pain from him. "Oh, don't take it so hard. Bill," I remonstrated. "The doctor has fixed it all up, and you'll be well almost before you know it." I was stretching the truth to the limit, and Bill knew it. "It's a bad break, I know, and I'll be laid up for four months, just as my cousin was, and — " "Not more than three months, the doctor says," I inter- posed. "And," he went on, "next week, you will be in college, while I—" "Bill, you old chump, I'm not going to college this year." I made up my mind on the instant just what I was going to do. "It's all settled. I am going to wait over until *THAT EIGHT-INCH HOSE LASHED AROUND LIKE THE TAIL OF A HARPOONED WHALE." — See page 3. A Disastrous Morning. 7 next year. Do you suppose I would go and leave you here all alone? No, siree! We are going through college to- gether, just as we did through prep school." I was talking very bravely, without knowing what Dr. McGreggor would have to say to my plan. "Jim, you're all right," said Bill, "but—" Just then Uncle Ed came in and interrupted Bill's remonstrances. It was with no little trepidation that I rang Dr. McGreg- gor's door-bell that night. I even forgot to say good evening, when I saw him, but burst right in with my ques- tion: "Dr. McGreggor, would it make any difference to you if I should put off college for another year?" "Eh? How's that? Are you afraid you cannot enter?" "No; it isn't that. Bill has broken his leg, you know, and is laid up in the hospital for three months — " I paused. "Yes; very unfortunate indeed. But what has that to do with you ?" "Why, he won't be able to enter this year, and you know we have always been chums in school, and we can- not bear to be separated in college; we want to be class- mates, and — " Dr. McGreggor did not relax his stern look. "Young man, what are you going to do in the meantime? Are you going to hang around on your father's hands, or do you expect me to furnish your keep?" I flushed with anger, and could not help saying, "I am no beggar, Dr. McGreggor; I am going to support myself. i 8 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Surely I can find some sort of a job here in the city, and if I can't, why, Fll go home and work in the paper-mill/* To my surprise Dr. McGreggor's stern face broke out into a kindly smile, and I realized that he had been merely putting me to a test. ''You'll do!" he said, patting me on the shoulder. "Go ahead, and take care of yourself. My offer will keep five years, if necessary.'' CHAPTER 11. OVER THE SEA BY RAIL. Not because I couldn't find a job in New York, but because Mother thought that I had been away quite long enough, I returned home a few days after the events re- j^ counted in the previous chapter. But I stuck to the resolu- ^| tion made before Dr. McGreggor, and found a job in the office of a paper-mill about a mile up the river from our house. Bill's leg mended very slowly. I did not hear from him often, for he never was much of a hand at letter-writing. Time sped by faster than I had an}^ idea it could. When Thanksgiving Day arrived, who should walk in but Bill with his Uncle Ed and Bill walked without the trace of a limp, although he still carried a cane. I was taken com- pletely by surprise. But there was an even greater surprise coming. "What do you suppose, Jim.^" Bill burst in as soon as he saw me. "We're going to Panama to see the canal!" "Are you really.?" I exclaimed. "My, but that's great!" "But I mean we are going, you and I, dl by ourselves," explained Bill. "Yes, it's true," broke in Uncle Ed, laughing at my astonishment. " But don't thank me. It is Dr. McGreggor 9 lo Pick, Shovel and Pluck. again. He has taken a great fancy to your boy/' he con- tinued, turning to Mother and Father. ^'A man came into our office a couple of weeks ago, and said he had just spent a month at Panama, going over the work in detail; and his twelve-year old son, who accompanied him, was almost as enthusiastic as he over the trip. That seemed to set McGreggor thinking, and three or four days later, he asked me how soon Bill would be on his feet again. 'He fis walking around now,' I told him. 'Well,' he said, 'why don't you send him to Panama to recuperate?' 'That's exactly what I decided to do, three days ago,' I replied. 'And Jim will have to go, too,' he said. 'Certainly,' I answered. 'I have already written to his parents about it.' At which he flared up and actually had the nerve to call me down for meddUng in his affairs. 'If Jim can go,' he de- clared, ' / will send him !' So here, Jim, is a letter to you from him. He couldn't very well deliver his message in person." The letter was very characteristic of Dr. McGreggor, short and to the point, informing me, in very businesslike language, that he had arranged to give me a trip to Panama and such places as I might wish to see on my way there and back, and that he hoped Bill and I would comport ourselves as creditably on this outing as we had during our summer vacation. I was simply overwhelmed with delight. Bill had brought time-tables and guide-books along, and we sat down right then and there to plan our trip. "When can we start?" I asked Uncle Ed, in breathless excitement. Over the Sea by Rail. ii *^To-morrow, if you like/' he laughed; "to-day, if you must." We didn't waste much time getting ready. A week later, you could have found us aboard the "Oversea Limited," racing along the spine of Florida and down the kinky tail of coral reefs that reaches a hundred miles out to sea. We had come overland just to see this "ocean-going railroad." According to schedule, we were to leave the mainland at about four o'clock in the morning, arriving at Key West '| at 8 :30 a. m. Bill and I were determined to see it all even if we had to rise two hours before dawn and view it by star- light. When we did tumble out of our berths at five, in- stead of four, and rush out to the observation platform, we were disappointed to find, instead of a roaring ocean around us, nothing but an endless stretch of marshland, with a wide canal on each side of the road-bed. There was one man evidently as anxious as we were to view the scenery. "Isn't it wonderful!" he exclaimed, as we sat down beside him. "What, this.?" I asked in astonishment. "I don't see anything very wonderful about this swamp. I thought we were to cross the ocean, or, at least, a part of it." "We haven't reached the ocean yet," the man repHed. "Fortunately, the train is two hours late, and we shall have a chance to see the spectacular part in broad daylight. But there is much to admire right here." We thought he must be out of his head, but he went on to explain: "These are the Everglades, you know, the queerest 12 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. kind of country you ever heard of. A man once told me, 'There is not enough water in 'em for swimmin', and dee- cidedly too much for farmin'/" "I shouldn't think they could do much farming in a marsh," commented Bill, ''except to raise salt hay." "But this marsh is not anything Hke the kind we have up North. The water in it is not salt or stagnant, but good, pure, sweet, drinking water that is flowing all the time. Do you see these canals on each side of us? They were dug to furnish the road-bed we are traveling over. The quickest way to dig a canal is to dredge it. But there was not water enough to float a dredge, so what did they do but dig holes in the ground, which immediately filled with water, of course, after which they built dredges in these holes. Then these dredges began a march to the sea, eating their own channel through the mud and sand, and throwing up the material they excavated to build this roadway between them." "Pretty clever," we commented. "Yes, but it was not all as easy as that. Once in a while, they struck a ledge of rock. How do you suppose they got around that diflftculty?" "Couldn't they haul the dredges over.?" I asked. "A dredge is a pretty heavy proposition. No, they did something smarter than that. They built locks over the ledges, regular canal-locks. The dredge would enter the lock, the gate would be closed behind it, water would be pumped into the inclosure until it was deep enough to float the dredge over the rock, and, then, after the rock had been Over the Sea hy Rail. 13 passed, the water in the lock would be lowered again, and the dredge would be let out of the gate at the opposite end." While the method of laying the road through the Ever- glades was interesting, the scenery was monotonous. But our new acquaintance whiled away the time by telHng us about the man who had conceived this wonderful railroad over the sea, about the young engineers who had carried the work through in the face of almost insuperable diffi- culties, and about the surveyors who got lost for days at a time in the maze of reefs. We passed a station just then, and saw on a siding a train of flat-cars, each with a huge wooden tank on it. ^^That is the water train,'' explained our enthusiast. '^They have to transport all the water from the mainland along the line of the railroad, because they cannot get any decent water on the keys. The water and food problem was a pretty serious one when they first started building the line. Sometimes it took the supply-boat half a day to make its way around the reefs from one key to another only a mile ofF." Presently, we left the mainland and crossed over a draw- bridge to the first of the keys; but still there was very little of the ocean to be seen, except for a glimpse now and then. "I suppose it must be pretty shallow along the keys,'' I remarked, "or they would never have dared to build this line." *'That is true enough along here," he informed us; "but farther down, in some places, it is thirty feet deep at low 14 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. tide. Yes, when they first started building along here, they thought that, in such shallow water, fills would do as well as bridges. So they dredged up mud and sand from the bottom and piled it up to make a roadway. Then they dumped riprap, or large rocks, along each side of the fill to protect it from the waves in stormy weather. Then, one day, a hurricane came along and began to amuse itself with the work those industrious men had been at for a year and a half. That was a real hurricane, and it instilled into the workmen, and engineers as wxll, a wholesome respect for West Indian storms. Many of the men were housed in quarter-boats, and it was supposed that they could ride out the storm at anchor in sheltered places offshore. But it was soon found that the flat keys offered no shelter at all. One boat with a hundred and forty-five men on board was torn from its moorings, carried out into the boiHng sea, and wrecked on a reef. There was an engineer aboard, and he was a hero — Bert A. Parlin was his name. Most of the men were in a panic, and huddled, terror-stricken, in the cabin. The wind was tearing the upper structure to pieces, and they were in peril of falling timbers. Those with cooler heads stayed outside on a balcony, to windward, where no flying timbers were likely to hit them. But the young engineer, even though he knew the risk he ran, went below to calm the frightened men and urge them to come out. When the boat broke up he perished, as did every man in the cabin, while the others clung to bits of wreckage. A number of them were picked up by steamers and carried to various Over the Sea by Rail. 15 ports all the way from Liverpool to Buenos Aires. There were many heroes who perished that night. One man was all alone on a barge that carried an electric-light plant. He kept up his courage by stoking up his furnaces and keeping every light burning. People on shore watched the illumina- tion through that dreadful night, until suddenly the lights were quenched, and the watchers knew that the relentless storm had swallowed the barge, and with it a brave man. ** After the storm had cleared, the engineers went over the sad wreck it had left in its wake. All the fills had been washed away. The water had dashed over the riprap, and the receding waves had sucked out the filling of sand. Even in the shallowest places the fills had disappeared. Evidently a different form of construction would have to be devised." **Isn^t this a fill we are going over now?'' asked Bill. We were passing over a narrow lane built right out in the water. It was a most fascinating sight in the light of the dawning sun. **Yes, this is a fill," went on the enthusiast; '^but, you see, there is no riprap at each side." He was right. The side of the fill looked like a smooth white beach. "That is a calcareous marl that they discovered here. It is soft and putty-Uke when fresh, but it hardens on exposure to the air. When it is plastered over the fills, it makes such a smooth finish that the waves can do nothing with it. When first put on, that marl had a terrible odor. The 1 6 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. stench that went up from those fills attracted a host of turkey-buzzards who puzzled for days trying to locate the cause of it. "The next hurricane that struck the keys found the men ready. They scuttled their boats and took to dry land, because they realized that, in that region, the only safe harbor for their boats was under water, where neither wind nor wave could reach them. As for the fills, they stood the ordeal splendidly. The waves wrestled long and vigorously with the smooth marl beaches, but when the ocean finally acknowledged its defeat and calmed down, it had made little impression on them." "But all the gaps between the keys are not closed with fills, are they?" I asked. "Oh, my, no! There are eighteen miles of bridges, mostly heavy concrete arches, tied down with wooden piles driven into the rock." "Wooden piles driven into rock!" I gasped. "Yes, like everything else in this queer place, the rock is very peculiar. It is a sort of coraline limestone that has a hard crust, but underneath is quite soft. What they did was to punch holes through the crust with a steel punch, and then drive the piles through the holes into the soft rock with a steam-hammer." "You mean a pile-driver?" suggested Bill. "No; a steam-hammer which gives quick, sharp blows. If they had used a pile-driver, the piles would have sprung too much. With the steam-hammer they drove those piles A CONCRETE CENTIPEDE REACHING ACROSS THE SEA. LONG KEY VIADUCT, OVER TWO AND A HALF MILES LONG. Over the Sea hy Rail. 17 In, twelve or fifteen feet. But before the piles were driven, they cleared all the sand off the rock at the site of the pier and sunk a cofFer-dam over the spot. The cofFer-dam in this case was a big box without top or bottom. When this had been sunk, the piles were driven. Then a layer of con- crete was laid on the rock to seal the bottom of the cofFer- dam so that they could pump out the water." "Do you mean they laid the concrete under water?" "Why, certainly. Concrete will set under water as well as in air, provided the water does not wash away all the cement before it hardens. They used 'tremies' for the pur- pose." It was unnecessary for him to ask us if we knew the defini- tion of "tremie." The question-mark showed only too plainly in our faces; so he went on to explain that a tremie is a pipe through which concrete is let down under water to the bottom of the cofFer-dam. "The first batch that goes down the tremie, acts as a piston to clear out the water in the pipe. As it spreads out on the bottom, it may lose much of its cement, but that does not matter, because it is to serve merely as a cover for the concrete that follows. The end of the tremie runs almost to the bottom, so that as fresh con- crete comes down the pipe, it pours out under this cover, and is not afFected by the water. "After the cofFer-dams were sealed with a layer of con- crete three to five feet thick, the water was pumped out and the piles were sawed off well below low-water level. Then the cofFer-dams were filled solid with cement up to the 1 8 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. 'springing' line, that is the line from which the arch was to spring, and, after that, they put in the forms for the arches." The first big bridge we struck was the Long Key Viaduct, a noble structure over two and a half miles long, made up of 1 80 semi-circular arches of fifty-foot span, that carried us over the open sea, thirty feet above high-water mark. But, of course, we could see none of the grandeur of this bridge, as it was all underneath us. We were running straight out into the ocean. We might just as well have been on a very steady steamer. To the north was the Gulf of Mexico; south of us the broad Atlantic, as quiet as a mill-pond, giving no hint of the fury it could lash itself into when driven by the winds. By this time, many other passengers had crowded out upon the observation platform, which we were almost selfish enough to resent. The man who had been giving us all our information did not seem to care, though, and went on shouting his story above the roar of the train. Soon he had an interested group around him, even though he addressed all his remarks to us. "It's all wonderful," said our guide, *'but wait until we get to the big Knight's Key Viaduct." And that proved well worth waiting for. Seven miles of practically unbroken water was enough to make any one marvel. The indomit- able engineer had actually mastered the ocean. A turn in the road gave us a chance to see what we were riding over. A large part of the bridge was made up of steel spans. This was a concession to the ocean. The piers for Over the Sea by Rail. 19 the spans could be made narrower and could be spaced farther apart than the piers of the concrete arches, thus offering less resistance to the waves in time of storm. "What if a hurricane should strike a train on this bridge?'' I asked. "If it were a real hurricane, I am afraid it would be *Good-by train.' But such a thing could not happen. This road is in touch with the Weather Bureau, and warnings are sent out well in advance of a serious storm. When such warnings are received, the train service is halted. Then, too, there is a block-signal system automatically controlled by wind gages that show a danger-signal when the wind over any of the bridges reaches or exceeds fifty miles an hour." A few miles farther on, we ran upon another viaduct, only a mile long, but an important one because, at that point, the water was thirty feet deep. From there on, the forma- tion of the keys seemed to change. They ran across our path instead of lying in the line of the railroad. There were many short bridges and fills that took us from key to key, until, finally, we reached Key West, the end of the line. We had traveled 106 miles off the mainland, using thirty keys as stepping-stones to take us to the most southerly city in the United States. Our train took us out to the end of a pier where a boat was waiting to carry us the rest of the way over the sea. Not until then did we realize that we had had no breakfast, and here it was five minutes after ten! CHAPTER III. THE CONQUEST OF THE CHAGRES. Much to our delight, we learned that our enthusiastic friend of the sea-going railroad was to be a fellow-passenger all the way to Panama. We became very well acquainted on the voyage. Mr. Hawkins his name was, and he seemed to have an almost inexhaustible stock of sea tales and other yarns with which he whiled away the long hours aboard the ship. It was early in the morning when our steamer tied up at Colon, the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, and most of the passengers were up and ready to put in a long day of sight-seeing, because they were to sail again on the morrow. Near the wharf there was a train waiting to take visitors across the isthmus, and a crowd of excursionists flocked over to it. We were about to follow them when Mr. Hawkins detained us. ^*You are going to stay here a few days, aren't you?" he asked. ''Well, then, why don't you see the canal right?" "If you will show us how, we'll be only too glad to follow." ''Come along with me, then," he said, leading the way to a wharf where there were several launches. He picked one out that was manned by a Portuguese named Joe. 20 The Conquest of the Chagres. 21 *' We'll get a much more impressive view of the work if we go up by water/' remarked Mr. Hawkins. It took us the better part of an hour to make the four-mile run up the old French canal, which brought us into the American canal within half a mile of the locks leading up to the great Gatun Lake. We were in luck to have a guide Hke Mr. Hawkins, who had been over the canal half a dozen times at least. He told us that Gatun Lake when finished would be eighty-five feet above sea-level, and would cover about 170 square miles. ^'What puzzles me," put in Bill, "is why they had to make a lake. Was it just because they were in a hurry to open the canal, and couldn't wait to dig all the way down to sea-level?" "Oh, I know," I interrupted, eager to show off my knowl- edge. "They say there is only a two-foot tide at the Atlantic end, while at the Pacific end there is a rise and fall of twenty feet. If the canal were cut down to sea-level, the water would rush back and forth through it twice a day, in such a torrent that it would tear out the banks and wreck all the shipping." "But they could have a lock at the Pacific end to keep out the tide, couldn't they, Mr. Hawkins?" asked Bill. "Certainly they could," he answered; "but it isn't the tide they fear so much as the Chagres River. You have no idea how it rains here during the rainy season. Why, I've seen that river rise twenty-five feet in a night! There would be no keeping such a flood out of the canal if it were 22 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. cut down to sea-level. So, instead of trying to keep the river out, the engineers decided to let it in and make use of it, only turning it into a lake instead, so that it can be kept under control. Accordingly, they have dammed up the whole Chagres valley at a place where it is about a mile and a half wide; and the reason they picked out that place was because there is a knob of rock in the middle of the valley where they could put the spillway, or overflow, and another mass of rock at one side to support the locks." ''But," I protested, ''do you mean to tell us that that big dam is not founded on rock?" "It isn't Hke any dam you ever saw. Why, it's a hill of dirt half a mile thick at the base and tapering to a hundred feet at the top. And the funny part of it is that they built that dam with water!" "With water!" I exclaimed. "Yes; muddy water. First they dumped a lot of rock across the valley to make two walls half a mile apart. Then dredges sucked up mud from the sea and pumped it up a long pipe-line to the dam, where it poured out in a muddy stream between the two walls. The fine mud settled to the bottom, and in time filled the space between the walls, while the water flowed over them, or trickled out between the stones, or was sucked up by the torrid sun. In that way a plug, or core of clay, was built across the valley, and on it earth was piled and more mud was pumped in, until at last the top rose 105 feet above sea-level. "While they were building the dam, they had to provide The Conquest of the Chagres. 23 a new and higher course for the Chagres River. The wicked old stream made a desperate struggle before they finally conquered it. The rock for the two walls was dumped from trestles built across the valley. They tried to run the rock wall right across the river, but before the last gap was closed, the current became so powerful that it swept away like chafF the huge rocks dumped into it. The river was putting up a better fight than they had anticipated. But finally they dropped a tangle of crooked railroad rails against the up-stream side of the trestles, which choked up the channel so that the current could not sweep the rock away. That was the last frantic struggle of the Chagres before it surrendered to the indomitable engineer. It is perfectly docile now. To be sure, it may fret and fuss a lot as it runs out of the lake over the spillway during the rainy season, but it cannot do any harm, because it is confined within a concrete channel. *'0h, hello! here we are in sight of the locks," exclaimed Mr. Hawkins as we swung out of the stream excavated by the French into the broad new canal dug by our own country- men. When I was here last, there was a dike across the canal, just below the locks to keep the water out. Do you see that guide wall there between the locks .^ It is to separate incoming from outgoing vessels. The construction of that wall called for some very interesting work. They could not find bed rock there without going seventy feet below sea-level. The material was too soft to support a steam shovel so they cut a gap in the dike and let in a suction 24 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. dredge; then they closed up the gap behind the dredge, leaving it in a small pond. The dredge went to work digging out the bottom of the pond, and of course, as the bottom was lowered the water level in the pond was lowered and so the dredge worked its way downward. When I saw it it was floating about thirty-five feet below the level of the water outside and its suction pipe had about reached down to rock. After that I suppose they filled the pond again to sea-level, cut the dike, let the dredge out, closed the dike again, pumped out the water in the pond until the bare rock was exposed and then proceeded to build the foundations of the guide wall 'in the dry."' *^Say, what are all those boats doing?" interrupted Bill. ''Aren't they going through the locks.?" ''I beheve they are. By jiminy! here's our chance! Shake it up, Joe. See if we can't get in there behind that ladder-dredge." Joe grunted some sort of a protest, to which Mr. Hawkins replied with a piece of money that had an inspiring eflPect upon the Portuguese. We were all excited now as the little launch responded to our coaxing and raced for the lock. ''Will they let us through?" I asked dubiously. "I don't know. But it won't hurt us to try, will it?" retorted Mr. Hawkins. "Here, Joe, creep in between the dredge and that tug. I don't believe they will ever notice a little toy boat like this." Whether they noticed it or not I cannot say, but we did succeed in slipping in with a crowd of about a dozen boats The Conquest of the Chagres. 25 of all descriptions. We were no sooner in than two pairs of enormous steel doors began to swing on their hinges behind us. " Hurrah !'' cried Mr. Hawkins, slapping me on the back. ^^Now here is an experience that you would have missed if you had followed the crowd aboard the excursion train.'' *^It's great!" I exclaimed. The lock we were in was about as long as four New York City blocks, and half again as wide as Broadway. There was something uncanny about the way those gates were closing behind us. They towered fully thirty-five feet above us. We had felt small enough, sandwiched in be- tween the other boats, but now, as we gazed at those pon- derous gates, we were dwarfed into insignificance. "What makes them move?" asked Bill, in an awed voice. Mr. Hawkins laughed. ''It does look mysterious, doesn't it? See those arms up there at the top of the gates? They run back through slots in the lock wall. Each arm is at- tached to a big gear-wheel, five feet in diameter. They call it a 'bull-wheel.' When the bull-wheel turns, it pushes the arm out and forces the gate shut. It takes a lot of gearing and a twenty-seven horse-power motor buzzing at high speed to make that bull-wheel turn." "I should think it would," said Bill. "How much do the gates weigh?" "Seven hundred and thirty tons each. They are eighty- two feet high and sixty-two feet wide, you know, and they are seven feet thick, but they are hollow, so that the water will buoy them up and relieve the hinges of undue strain." 26 Pickj Shovel and Pluck. Slowly the massive gates swung to, until they met at a rather flat angle. Then we saw them squeeze tightly shut. "The mitering motors did that/' said Mr. Hawkins. ''There is a seven and a half horse-power motor on each gate to lock them shut after the big bull-wheel has done most of the job." "Now what.^" I asked, as we turned from the fast-closed gates and looked forward. " Don't you see the water boiling around us ? It is pour- ing in from scores of openings in the floor of the lock. These walls are honeycombed with passages, some as big as a railroad tunnel, to let the water in. Just watch the mark on that wall over there, and you will see that we are rising." Sure enough, after watching a minute or two, the mark disappeared. The sensation was a curious one. It seemed as if those walls and the gates behind us were slowly sinking, while we stood still. It took nearly half an hour to fill that lock and raise us twenty-eight and one-third feet to the level of the next lock. From our humble deck we could not see over the walls around us. After we had entered the second lock, we stopped again while another double pair of gates was closed behind us. "But why do they have a double pair of them.?" asked Bill. "Just as a precaution," answered Mr. Hawkins. "What do you suppose would happen if one of those gates should give way? Why, the whole Gatun Lake would come pour- The Conquest of the Chagres. 27 ing through the locks. The water would tear everything to pieces and wash out the whole works, like as not. Some- thing Hke that happened on the Soo Canal once. That is the canal that connects Lake Superior with Lake Huron. Two boats were in the lock about to go down, when along oame a third one that wanted to go up. The captain of the last boat gave the engineer the signal to stop, but for some reason the engineer failed to respond, and while the captain frantically clanged the gong and shouted down the speaking- tube until he nearly cracked his throat, the boat sailed steadily on until it crashed into the lock-gates, smashed them open, and let loose such a deluge of water that all of the boats were wrecked. They are not going to run the risk of such an accident here. Chains are stretched across the entrance to the locks to stop runaway ships; then there are double pairs of gates, so that, if one gives way, the other will hold, and, in addition to that, there is an emergency gate that can be swung across the entrance to the highest lock of each flight; but, as if these were not precautions enough, the ships will not be permitted to enter the locks under their own steam. Little electric locomotives will run along the tow-paths or tracks at each side of the locks and tow the ships through." I had noticed that the ^^ tow-path,'' as Mr. Hawkins called it, made an abrupt rise from one lock-level to the other, and I remarked that the slant looked too steep for a locomotive to climb. *'But this is a rack-railroad," explained Mn Hawkins. 28 Pick, Shovel and Pluck ''What do you mean by that?" "Why, in the middle of the track there is a rail formed with teeth in it, and on the locomotive are toothed wheels that mesh with the teeth of the rail so that they can't slip, and they drive the locomotive steadily up the steep inclines, and, when descending, keep it from running down too fast. The racks will enable the locomotives to haul enormous loads without slipping. It will be a great sight to see a giant, fifty- thousand-ton ocean liner towed through these locks by two baby electric locomotives with two more locomotives trailing along behind to check the boat and keep it from smashing through the gates." As we were passing out of the third lock, we went by one of the emergency gates. It was an enormous structure, like a railroad bridge. ''In case of trouble," said Mr. Hawkins, "they would swing the bridge around across the lock, and let down a lot of brackets or * wicket girders' into the water to the bottom of the lock; and then they would let down a lot of plates against the girders to cut off the flow of water." As soon as we had passed out of the locks, we made for shore and began a survey of our surroundings. To the south of us stretched the great Gatun Lake, and the dam really did look more like a hill than anything else. We walked along the dam to the spillway, but the gates were closed, because thewater was still filhng the lake. At one side was the power station, where part of the river was even then manufacturing electricity to pull the towing locomotives The Conquest of the Chagres. 29 and work the valves and gates of the locks, not only at Gatun, but at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel on the Pacific end, as well. *'0h, hello!" cried Mr. Hawkins, suddenly. "There is Colonel Goethals. Come on, boys; Til introduce you to him." *'Does he know you?" asked Bill, in an awed voice. "We'll see. They say he remembers every one he meets. I walked around with him for an hour, last year, and it was wonderful the way he seemed to know every man on the job by name." I had expected that the big chief of the Panama Canal would be dressed in gaudy uniform, as befitted a high military personage, but the man that Mr. Hawkins went up to was clothed in plain white tropical garb, and wore a wide- brimmed straw hat. "Oh, how do you do, Hawkins?" he said, as if he had always known him. "Back again, are you?" "Yes, Colonel." Mr. Hawkins beamed with pleasure. "Fve brought some friends with me, a couple of waifs I picked up on the way down here." "Glad to know you," said the colonel, giving us each a hearty grasp of the hand. "I suppose you have come down here to see us blow up Gamboa, to-morrow?" "Yes," I stammered, utterly overwhelmed at the honor of shaking hands with so great a man. That was all there was to the interview, yet we couldn't have felt more tickled had he spent an hour with us. 30 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''You see, he did remember me!" exclaimed Mr. Hawkins, triumphantly, after Colonel Goethals had moved on. ''He is a wonderful man. He is a big father to all the men down here. Every Sunday morning, his house is open to any man on the job. If any one has a grievance, he goes and tells it to the colonel. If any one wants a word of encouragement, he stops in to see the chief. If you are here next Sunday, you must go and see the reception. It is a wonderful sight. And yet he is not the one to stand for any fooling. When I was here last time, the colonel was showing around a party of congressmen. One of the younger members of the party was acting very smart, asking foolish questions, and pro- posing idiotic stunts. They were putting up the lock-gates at Gatun just then. This young man proposed that the party climb up the framework of the gates, just as a lark. When nobody paid any attention to the proposal, he started to climb up himself. It was a rather perilous undertaking because of the concrete buckets that were swinging by his head, threatening to knock him off. He realized the fact after he had climbed up about twenty-five feet, and started down again. When he reached the ground, he strutted up to Colonel Goethals and asked, 'What degree are you going to confer on me for performing this daring feat.?' 'I shall confer on you the degree of "C.F. " ' said the colonel. *And what does that stand for?' asked the congressman. 'For "Champion Fool,"' quietly answered the colonel, while the whole party broke out into roars of laughter." We had hoped to take a trip on the lake in the afternoon, The Conquest of the Chagres. 3 1 but Joe found a chance to take his launch down through the locks, which upset our plans. We spent all that day follow- ing Mr. Hawkins as he wandered about the work at Gatun, studying the minutest details. Finally, as it grew dark, we took the train for Panama, where we arrived too tired to do any more sight-seeing that night. The following day we were to witness one of the most im- portant events in the history of the Panama Canal. The slice of ground that had been left to keep the Chagres River out of Culebra cut, during the work of excavation, was to be blown up with a giant blast of dynamite, and then the waters of Gatun Lake would reach all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific locks, and the canal would be all but completed. CHAPTER IV. SEVERING THE ISTHMUS. When I awoke the following day, the first thing I did was to jump out of bed and run to the window for my first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. What I saw puzzled me at first, and then filled me with consternation. "Hey, Bill!" I shouted. "Wake up!" Bill turned lazily in bed and settled down for another nap. But I laid hold of him and began to haul him out of bed. "Wha's matter?" he muttered, without opening his eyes. "What time is it?" "That is what I can't make out," I cried excitedly. "It seems as though it must be morning, but the sun is just setting in the west. We've been Moped' to make us sleep so long, and here we've missed the blowing up of the dike. Somebody's going to suffer for this." "What do you mean?" "Look out of the window there," I directed. Bill rubbed his eyes and blinked at the red ball of the sun that seemed about ready to plunge into the ocean. "Well?" I remarked, after he had gazed at it for a full minute. "It's rising, Jim," he said quietly. "But how can it be. Bill? That's the Pacific Ocean, isn't it?" 32 1 pf^y.„ , ii H ^ m i 1 ! i i Trar flj ^^^^^BBBwl|lt '^ ^1 m iw] 'V' i:.^-l: o PQ > u w Pi w X H o o J Ok X - - ^ f^sM i r ^^^^^S^SbS^i w SUBMARINE GARDEN SEEN FROM THE HOLE IN THE SEA. NATIVE DIVER IN A DUEL WITH A SHARK. A Hole in the Sea. 63 Mr. Wallace, the man whom Tim called "captain," showed up a little later and proved to be fully as "reasonable" as our friend said he was. He declared it would be a pleasure to take Tim's "personal friends" along, so we jumped into the motor boat that was waiting for him, and were soon on our way to the barge. "How do you make the photographs, Mr. Wallace?" I asked. " Have you a glass pane in the bottom of the barge ?'' "Oh no; we do much better than that," repHed Mr. Wallace, with a smile. "We make a hole in the sea and set our motion picture apparatus in that." "A hole in the sea!" I exclaimed. "You're fooling." "Oh no, Vm not. That's exactly what we do. We lower a chamber through a well in the bottom of the barge with a big tube connected to it, and then we go down inside the tube and take photographs from a window in the cham- ber. You just wait until you see it. I will take you down and you can watch Tim at work on a wreck. There is an old blockade runner under the barge that was wrecked during the Civil War. Tim's going to go down and pick up some cannon balls and any other treasures he can find while we kinematograph him at his work." As we came up to the barge, we noticed that it was named very appropriately "Jules Verne." When we got aboard, while Tim was donning his diving suit, Mr. Wallace ex- plained to us how the tube was constructed. It was built up of " units " as they called them, each unit consisting of two steel rings three feet in diameter, connected by little steel 64 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. A Hole in the Sea. 65 plates, cleverly hinged so that they could fold inward like an accordion or a Japanese lantern. The units were a foot deep when extended, but only three inches deep when col- lapsed. Ten units bolted together formed a ''section," and over each section there was a sleeve of heavy rubberized canvas to keep the water out. Some men were putting together a section as we went aboard, which gave us a chance to see just how the tube was constructed. ''You might just as well go on down, boys," said Mr. Wallace, "and have a look around while we are waiting for Tim." "But how do you get down," I asked. "I don't see any ladder." "Why, step on the rings of course." said Mr. Wallace. "But isn't there an air-lock?" "No, we don't need any," was the reply. "Don't you remember what I told you? This is a hole in the sea, and it's an open hole all the way down to the chamber forty feet below us. It wouldn't matter if it were four hundred feet. That's the beauty of this system. If we want to go deeper, all we need to do is to bolt more tube sections on top. We have no bother with air pressure and the caisson disease, no matter how deep we go. As you climb down you will notice how the pressure of the water collapses the tube. You see it adjusts itself to the pressure." "But I don't understand why you need this Japanese lantern construction," remarked Bill. "So as to have a very flexible tube," answered Mr. 66 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Wallace, ''that won't smash, but will bend if it strikes any- thing. That's very important, you know, because we often let the barge drift with the tide, and if we had a rigid tube we would surely crush it, or the photographing chamber, if we struck anything.'^ Mr. Wallace led the way down the shaft. It did not look very inviting to crawl down such a tight hole — it was only twenty inches in diameter — but curiosity overcame our misgivings and we made our way down cautiously after him. At the bottom of the long shaft, we dropped into a spherical steel chamber, five feet in diameter. It was pretty close quarters for three persons. The motion picture apparatus was not there, but Mr. Wallace showed us the three-inch glass covered port-hole, through which the pictures were taken and a second larger port light above it through which the operator could see. From this port-hole we could look out through a big funnel that projected six feet from the chamber and had at its outer end a pane of French plate glass five feet in diameter and one and one-half inches thick. To keep the glass from being crushed in by the pressure of the water, air was pumped into the funnel with a hand pump until a gauge showed that the pressure on the inside of the pane was equal to the water pressure outside. The view from that chamber was wonderful. The water was as clear as glass, and there was no difficulty in making out objects at the bottom for a considerable distance. Sea growths, such as we had seen with our water telescope at Bird Rock had looked rather flat and uninteresting. Now A Hole in the Sea. 67 from our position at the bottom of the sea, they took on an entirely new aspect. Tall sea ferns waved gently in the current and were outlined with iridescent colors, while brilHantly colored fish darted about among them. Directly before us was the rotted hulk of the old blockade runner, resting on a bed of coral. There was not much left of the old ship, but I did see a rusted cannon and a few cannon balls; also an old bell and a small iron-bound oak chest, that im- mediately suggested treasure to our romantic eyes. "FU bet it's filled with gold," cried Bill. ''We'll soon find out,'' declared Mr. Wallace. "Tim has orders to bring it up." Presently Tim was ready to pose for his picture and the motion picture camera was lowered into the chamber. A few moments later Tim was lowered to the bottom before us and immediately began investigating the wreck. The first thing he did was to send up the treasure box, but alas it proved to be empty. Although we had both been down in diving suits and knew that air must be constantly bubbling out of the air valves, we were astonished to note what a big stream of bubbles poured forth as Tim walked around. We reahzed then why sharks never attack a diver. "Sharks!" sniffed Mr. Wallace, contemptuously. "They are big cowards. They are afraid of anything unusual. They give our boat a wide berth just because of this strange apparatus hanging down from it. Why, we haven't had a chance yet to snap any of the big fellows with our camera; 68 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. but we are going to try to get some to-morrow. You'll have to come and see the fun. I succeeded in purchasing a sick horse to-day and we are going to have him shot and used for shark bait. That ought to bring them around. Then, I have found a native who has a reputation for fighting sharks and he is going to furnish us with a real battle under water." With such an interesting program set before us, it is needless to say that the invitation was not refused. The next day with the carcass of a horse in tow, the barge was moved out to the harbor entrance on the edge of the ocean, where sharks were apt to be found. The horse was anchored near the photographing chamber and then the native diver stabbed him in several places, so that his blood would attract the big fish. Then we sat down and awaited de- velopments. For a long time nothing was to be seen. Then I made out a great sea monster gliding stealthily by the boat and peering at the bait. He kept rolling his eyes at our photographing chamber, however, and seemed very suspicious of it. In a moment he disappeared. After a considerable wait, we saw the fellow again; but this time he came up with two com- rades. All three reconnoitered, but although the bait was tempting, they dared not attack it. The same maneuvers were repeated. The three sharks swam away and after a time came back with further reinforcement, until there was quite a school of the big fish hanging around the bait, but not one of them dared to approach it very closely. All day Copyright, Byron Co. A CROWD OF BOATS GOING THROUGH THE LOCKS. Copyright, Brown b* Dawson VIEW OF THE LOCKS, SHOWING ONE OF THE TOWING LOCOMOTIVES. A Hole in the Sea. 69 long we waited for the sharks to attack the horse, and at night, a large Hght was lowered over the side of the barge, so that we could continue our vigil. That light, by the way, was very interesting. It was made up of nine mercury vapor lamps, of 2400 candle power each, and each had a head light reflector, so that a very brilliant light was shed, furnishing plenty of illumination for taking pictures at night. As the night wore on, with nothing happening, we took turns watching from the photographing chamber. The next morning the horse was still there, untouched. We were growing very impatient. Mr. Wallace consulted the native diver. He bade us wait a little longer as the sharks were merely getting up their courage and might begin their attack at any time. Along towards noon, he told us that the sharks were growing very restive and were surely getting ready for business. All of a sudden one big fellow made a rush for the horse and tore off a large chunk of meat. In a moment another monster appeared, then another, and almost before we realized what was up, there was a perfect swarm of the big brutes tearing at the bait and fighting each other for a chance to get at the carcass. One of our men baited an enormous hook with a large chunk of fresh meat and succeeded in hooking one of the biggest of the lot. Then came a desperate struggle as the men tried to haul the fish towards the barge. The shark had not swallowed the bait, and part of it protruded from his 70 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. mouth. Quick as a flash another big brute came along and snatched away the protruding bait. Gulping the meat down the ugly fellow turned about and attacked the shark he had just robbed. But although the hook was still caught firmly in the first shark's jaw, he was by no means helpless and he fought back savagely. A dreadful battle ensued which was most exciting to watch. Of course, our sym- pathies were with the poor fellow with the hook in his mouth, and when despite his handicap he overcame his cowardly adversary and gobbled up portions of him, we cheered with delight. His fight earned him his freedom. The cable that held him was hauled up until the fish was nearly out of water; then it was chopped off. Like a flash the shark dis- appeared. We were sorry we could not relieve him of the hook and piece of chain that dangled from it, but after the game fight he had put up, we were sure he could take good care of himself. Jn the meantime the other sharks were making short work of the horse. By throwing baited hooks among them, several were captured. We, down below in the photograph- ing chamber, did not realize what a struggle the men were having, above, trying to land their fish. Presently all the sharks disappeared almost as suddenly as they had come, except one big fellow who hung around, eyeing the tube and photographing chamber. Mr. Wallace went up on deck and called the native diver. ''There is a fellow out there," he said, ''who hasn't had enough. I guess he is waiting for you/' A Hole in the Sea. 71 "Oh, ah ain't afraid of him/' replied the negro. ''Ah'U fight him fo' you." After the sight we had just seen about the carcass of the horse, it seemed Hke murder to send a man down in those waters. It didn't look as if he had a ghost of a show, but the fellow insisted that there was no danger. The motion picture camera was loaded with a fresh film, and when every- thing was ready the negro dived into the water armed with a short dagger. We expected a lively tussle, but it was all over in an instant. The shark saw him and turned over, as sharks always do when attacking their prey, but the diver dodged under the big fish, drove the steel blade into a vital spot and rose to the surface triumphant. He had done a very clever job, but unfortunately it was entirely out of the range of the motion picture camera, although Bill did succeed in getting a "still" picture of It with a fast camera of Mr. Wallace's. I learned then for the first time that a motion picture camera has a very much smaller range than an ordinary camera. Mr. Wallace tried to explain to the man that he would have to kill another shark, but this time perform the work squarely in front of the funnel of the photographing chamber. After a long wait another shark appeared, possibly at- tracted by the one that the diver had just killed. It was getting late and Mr. Wallace was so anxious to obtain a good motion picture of a shark battle that he declared he would undertake the job himself. We all protested, of course. "I don't know why I couldn't do it," he said, "I used to 72 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. live in the water when I was a boy. Fm sure I can dive as well as that native, and I think I have as much brains as he has." ''But you haven't the skill/' we remonstrated. "I have watched these shark fighters, often," declared Mr. Wallace, "and I don't believe there is anything to it. All you need to do is to dive under the shark quickly and stab him while he is deliberately turning over." Despite all our objections he insisted on undertaking the perilous attack, declaring that he would stage the fight so that it came directly in the view of the motion picture camera. Seeing that he would have his way, the operator of the camera descended, while Mr. Wallace prepared for the dive. He could see very clearly through the water and watched the big fish moving slowly by the barge. Suddenly, when the shark was almost directly in front of the photo- graphing chamber, he made a quick, clean dive, came up under the fish and drove the knife into it. In another mo- ment he appeared on the surface again, swimming for the barge. We all gave a cheer as we pulled him out of the water; but much to Mr. Wallace's disappointment, the shark was not killed, but merely wounded. We could see the big brute swimming away. He described a great circle that brought him back again opposite the photographing chamber, a few minutes later. Just as he got in range, there was a sudden splash, and we realized that Mr. Wallace had dived to make a second attack. This time he succeeded in striking a vital spot. Mr. Wallace swam back, glowing A Hole in the Sea. 73 with triumph as he saw the carcass of the fish slowly sinking to the bottom and drifting away. "Shark fighting is great sport/' he declared. **I think ril have to try some more of it.'' "We are going to take some motion pictures of sponge fishing to-morrow, boys," he continued, "to show just how they haul up the sponges here with a pole hook, instead of sending divers down. I am sorry you can't wait over another boat to see it all." "You aren't half as sorry as we are," we replied. CHAPTER VIII. BARING THE MYSTERY OF THE "MAINE." Darkness overtook us before our steamer crept past the grim old Morro Castle and entered the harbor of Havana. We did not warp up to a dock, but anchored out in the middle of the^bay while the Cuban health authorities boarded the vessel to see that we brought no disease with us. '*We have come to anchor just over the spot where the Maine was sunk/' I heard a man say to a companion, as he peered over the rail into the water below. "There must be reHcs of that disaster directly under us/' "Why, I thought they had carried it all away and sunk it!" the other fellow said. "It was only a small part of the battle-ship that they buried at sea,'' answered the first speaker. "Most of it was such a tangle of junk that all they could do was to haul out the bigger pieces and cut off those that projected above a thirty-seven and one-half foot depth. The rest they left buried in the mud of the harbor bottom." "It is too bad they buried the old hull. It should have been towed back to the United States; or, if that was im- possible, the Cubans should have found a place for her — to commemorate their independence." 74 Pi Q g u w w H O U H o Q W Q a H Baring the Mystery of the ''Maine,'' 75 *'They have a piece of the Maine now. The after-turret of the old ship was presented to the Cuban Government, but it is still waiting to be set up in a place of honor." Bill's sharp elbow suddenly dug me in the ribs. "We'll have to hunt up that relic to-morrow and see if we can't get some one to tell us how the ship was raised. The work must have been very interesting." I might write a whole chapter about our queer experiences in Havana: How after the officials had satisfied themselves that we were fit persons to enter their country, they gave us each a little ticket of admission; how we were ferried over to the custom-house, where our baggage was thoroughly examined; about the funny hotel with its yard inside, in- stead of outside, of the building; about the lizard I found in my bed, and the centipede Bill found in his shoe, the next morning. But this is not a travel story, and I must stick to engineering facts. Early the next day we were astir. Our first quest after breakfast was the relic of the Maine. We found it at last, lying neglected on a dock, covered with rust and en- crusted with the barnacles and oyster shells that had anchored themselves to it during the fourteen years it had lain under tropical waters. As we gazed upon the noble old turret that had once stood so proudly on one of the finest ships of our navy, a couple of men came up whom we recognized immediately as the two we had overheard talking about the Maine the evening before. *'It is too bad," the taller one was saying, ''that you 76 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. couldn't get do\(^n here last year, when they had the coffer- dam around her." **It must have been a pretty big coffer-dam to go around a whole ship/' remarked Bill to me, having in mind the box- like coffer-dams that were used for the piers of the sea-going railroad. "'Why don't you ask him about it?" said I. ''Why don't you?" he retorted. "Oh, I don't mind speaking to him." But all the same I hesitated. ''You know," continued the stranger, "some of our sheet- piling was bought by the Cuban Government." "Excuse me, sir," I ventured, "did you have anything to do with the raising of the Maine? ^' The man looked surprised at the interruption, but his answer was cordial enough: "Why, bless you, boy, I was here from the very start, to represent the company that furnished the sheet-piling for the coffer-dam!" "But I thought a coffer-dam was a wooden thing, like a box without any top or bottom," broke in Bill. "That is what a man on the Key West Railroad said it was," "That is true enough, but a coffer-dam is a general name for any kind of a wall used to dam off the water from what is normally submerged. In this case the dam went all the way around the ship. And it was no small job building that wall. Nothing Hke it was ever done before. You see, the Maine was so deep in the mud that we had to get down about fifty feet before we could uncover her completely. That Baring the Mystery of the ''Maine.'' 77 meant enormous pressure on the coffer-dam, and it had to be made very strong, particularly as the bed of the harbor is nothing but deep clay/* "But why didn't they pass chains under the wreck and haul it up without building a coffer-dam?'" asked Bill, calling to mind the vessel that had been raised that way in New York Bay, during the summer. "That was suggested, but it was not carried out, for two very good reasons: If chains were passed under the hull — and that would have been an awful job in itself — it was feared that they would crush through the sides of the ship, weakened as it was by years of exposure under water. But the principal reason was that the Maine was going to be raised not only for the purpose of giving it an honorable burial, but also to settle, once for all, the mysterious cause of the catastrophe. You know, some people claimed that it was blown up by the spontaneous explosion of its own magazines, while others held that the disaster had been caused by a mine. In order to settle the matter, it was necessary to lay bare the whole wreck before disturbing it.'' "How big was the ship.^'' I queried. "Three hundred and twenty-four feet long, with a beam of fifty-seven feet; but we made our coffer-dam in the shape of an oval about four hundred feet long, and nearly two hundred and twenty feet wide; like this — '' and with his cane he scratched out a plan of the coffer-dam. (See Fig. 3.) "These circles are cylinders of sheet-piling.'' "But what do you mean by sheet-piling?" I interrupted. 78 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''Why, don't you know? They are long sheets of steel about a foot wide, with hooked grooves along each edge, like this,'' showing us a watch-charm that was a miniature sec- tion of the type of steel pile put out by the company he represented. (See Fig. 4.) *' You see, when we drive these piles, the hooked edges of each pile interlock with the hooked FIG. 3. THE BIG OVAL COFFER-DAM MADE UP OF CYLINDERS WITH SMALL ARCS CLOSING THE JOINTS BETWEEN THEM. edges of the piles at each side of it. We set the piles out in big circles fifty feet in diameter/' The man pulled out of his pocket a picture showing a number of completed cylinders. ''How in the world did you get such perfect cylinders, Perkins?" exclaimed the man's friend. "Why, we used a templet, or skeleton frame-work. Baring the Mystery of the ''Maine.'' 79 First we drove a wooden pile for a center, and then floated a wooden, circular frame over it, pivoting it on this center." ''What did you pack the joints with, between the piles, to keep out the water?'' Bill inquired. "We didn't pack them. You see, we filled the cylinders with clay sucked up from the bed of the harbor by a suction dredge, and the weight of the clay made the cylinders swell out, drawing the joints tight. Then there was another thing that helped: No sooner was the piling down than barnacles and other marine growths got busy and incrusted the piles so FIG. 4. TOP VIEW OF A SHEET-PILE SHOWING BY DOTTED LINES HOW IT INTERLOCKS WITH PILES AT EACH SIDE. thickly that no water could get in. Besides, the clay filling itself was an excellent seal. Between the cylinders we placed these arcs (see Fig. 5), and filled them up with clay. "After the wall had been built all the way around the wreck and the cylinders had all been filled with clay, we started to pump out the cofFer-dam. But our troubles were not over yet. We soon had to stop pumping because it was found that the tremendous pressure of the mud and water outside was forcing the cyhnders inward. You see, there was nothing but clay to drive them into, and there was nothing but clay to fill them with. It would have been much better to have used stone for the fillings but stone 8o Pick, Shovel and Pluck. could not be found readily, near by. We found it necessary at length to dump some broken rock inside, aginst the walls of the cofFf-dam; then, later, when the Maine had been uncovered, we ran braces across from one side to the other." ''What did the wreck look Hke.^'' I asked eagerly. ''The wreck? Oh, it was a horrible sight! The worst conglomeration of tangled and twisted steel I ever saw. You know a commission examined it, and they found a plate that was bent in such a way as to show without a shadow of a doubt that there had been an explosion of a mine against the outside of the ship. That plate came from under one of the magazines which must have been set ofF by the concussion, or _j|j. . even by the flame from the explosion of that mine. From the way the plate was stretched they knew that a peculiarly slow explosive must have been used, which puzzled them until they learned of a powder that the natives used to manufacture. Experi- ments with this powder proved it to have just the qualities that would account for the condition of the plate. The after-part of the ship was in a pretty good state of preservation, but everything was covered with thick, black mud, and what wasn't buried in mud was thickly incrusted FIG. 5. THE ARC CONSTRUCTION BETWEEN THE CYLINDERS. THE AFTER DECK OF THE "MAINE." AFTER PORTION OF THE " MAINE " FLOATED OUT OF THE COFFER-DAM AND READY TO BE BURIED AT SEA WITH HONORS. Baring the Mystery of the '^ Maine.'' 8i with barnacles and oyster shells. They had to cut up the wreckage with the oxy-acetylene torch; but I suppose you don't know what that is." "Indeed we do!'* I assured him. "We saw one at work this summer. It's a flame of oxygen and acetylene that is so hot that it cuts right through iron." "Then I suppose you know that that intensely hot flame, although it cuts iron, does not readily cut through wood?" "Doesn't it? Why, how is that?" "It seems the torch is not quite hot enough to melt the iron, but it raises it to a white heat. Then a fine stream of pure oxygen is played on the metal, and it burns instead of melting. You know rust is oxidized iron, and the torch will not burn through rusty metal very well, because the coat of rust has already consumed all the oxygen it can take up. The rust had to be scraped away before the torch could be used, and yet that jet of flame that would only char wood, would cut through armored steel eight inches thick without any trouble, only we had to be careful to run the cut so that the slag from the burning steel would flow out. "Well, they cleaned up most of the wreckage, and fastened chains to the larger pieces so that they could be hauled out after the water was let back into the coff'er-dam again. Then they cleaned up the after-end of the ship, cut it loose from the wreckage, and closed up the end with a bulkhead. The men had to be very careful when working in that black mud, because a slight cut or a scratch on the barnacles meant blood-poisoning, sure. It is a wonder that no one 82 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. was seriously hurt. About the queerest experience was one that I had myself. I was crawling into the hold of the vessel one night, when my back came in contact with the bare wires of an electric motor that was running at one end of the wreck. The heavy current contracted my muscles so that I couldn't move. And there I was held in the dark, yelling for help. I thought they would never hear me. It seemed hours before any one came to my rescue, but I suppose it was only about ten or fifteen minutes. Anyway, I wasn't seriously hurt.'* *'Did they work there at night .f^" I asked. "Oh, yes, part of the time. We had electric light from Havana. When the after-part of the vessel had been pre- pared for floating, it was feared that the suction of the mud would hold it down, so holes were drilled through the bottom of the hull so that water could be forced through to wash away the mud from the bottom. But this proved unneces- sary. The braces that were run from the coflFer-dam to the ship to keep the coflFer-dam from caving in, were slanted upward slightly, and before we knew it, they were actually pushing the ship up out of the mud. When water was let into the cofFer-dam the vessel, or rather piece of a vessel, floated nicely. Of course the holes in the bottom were plugged up, but they were used afterward to help sink the ship at sea. '*To let the ship out of the coff'er-dam we had to remove two of the cylinders. Then we reahzed what the barnacles had done to the piling. We had to batter the piles with a steam-hammer before they would budge. Baring the Mystery of the '' Maine ^ 83 "I need not tell you about how the Maine was buried at sea with honors. You must have read about that. But a rather interesting job was done after the Maine was buried. At the time of the explosion, the top of one of the turrets was blown so far that it lay outside of the cofFer-dam, and it was found to lie just above the depth to which the harbor was to be cleared. It was a pretty heavy piece to raise, so what did they do but bury it. A trench was dredged around it, undermining it as much as possible, so that it must have looked like an enormous submarine mushroom. Then a charge of dynamite was exploded on the head of that mush- room, and drove it down to the prescribed depth. *^Good gracious! look at the time,'' he said suddenly, looking at his watch. '^I wouldn't mind talking all day, but I have lots to attend to before taking the night train for Santiago.'* CHAPTER IX. MINING WITH HOT WATER. *' Another adventure! I never heard the beat!*' ex- claimed Uncle Ed. We were in New Orleans, at Hotel Imperial, and had just finished telling him of our experiences at Crooked Island. *^That accounts for the telegram I received.'^ "A telegram?'^ I cried, apprehensively. *'I suppose you wrote home about your adventure, Jim.'' *^Yes, I wrote mother a letter from Nassau." "Well, here is the answer, then," he said drawing a telegram out of his pocket. It read: "Send Jim home; he has too many adventures." My heart sank. "Can't you persuade them to let me stay a little longer?" I asked. "Fm astonished," teased Uncle Ed, "to hear you pleading to stay away from your home." "Oh, you know what I mean," I repHed testily. "I'll be glad enough to get back home when the time comes, but I hate to miss anything good, and I suspect you have some- thing in view or you would never have asked us to meet you in New Orleans, when we were nearer New York, where we started from." 84 Mining with Hot Water. 85 ''You are a regular Sherlock Holmes," laughed Uncle Ed. "As a matter of fact, I was planning a bit of sight-seeing on my own hook, and had been anticipating the pleasure of taking you both with me; but I must say it looks as though you would have to trot right home, young man, and that will leave me only Bill for a companion/' "No, thanks," my chum spoke up, "I don't care to stay. Jim stuck by me when I broke my leg, and I'm going to stick by him now. If he has to go home, why, I go, too." "Now, what do you think of that," wailed Uncle Ed, "and I had planned six weeks of good times! I shall cer- tainly have to make a strong appeal to your parents, Jim, or my vacation will be spoiled. Let me see, the first thing to do is to wire your mother that you are here, safe and sound, under my personal care, and no more liable to sudden harm or injury than you would be in your own little village. Then I'll write a long letter, and we shall see what comes of it." I don't know what Uncle Ed said, but he wrote and rewrote that letter, until it was past supper time before he was satisfied with it. "It's a pretty strong appeal," he said, "if I do say it my- self. I promised to be your daddy, guardian, chaperon, nurse and private detective all in one, if they will only let you stay with me a few weeks. You'll have to do your part to keep out of all danger." We both gave him a solemn promise to be good, and then came the tedious wait for the verdict from home. The suspense was awful. It took three days for that letter to 86 Picky Shovel and Pluck. go from New Orleans to New York. Uncle Ed had insisted upon having an answer by telegraph, and we literally haunted the telegraph office on the third day. Of course you all know what was the answer, because you can see that this story is not half ended, but we had no such clue. When the permit finally arrived we shouted for joy, but Uncle Ed said: ^^I'm almost sorry that they are going to let you stay. IVe taken an awful re- sponsibility upon my hands. '^ It wasn't until after the telegram arrived, that Uncle Ed told us of his plans. '^ First of all I want to visit a curious sulphur mine, over near the Texas border of this state; then I must return and study the methods that are being used for fighting floods along the Mississippi. That is my chief mission here. You know, I've been detailed by the govern- ment to make the investigation. After that, I want to go up to Keokuk and see the dam that is being built across the Mississippi. Finally, on our way back to New York, we might take in the steel works at Chicago, or Gary, or Pitts- burgh, whichever is most convenient. How is that for a program?" ''Great," we both cried. ''Very well, let us set out for the sulphur mine to-morrow. It is one of the queerest mines in the world." "I thought sulphur was only to be found round about volcanoes," remarked Bill. "But there can't be any vol- canoes in a flat country like Louisiana." "No, there are no volcanoes there, nor any mountains, but Mining with Hot Water. 87 there is plenty of sulphur buried under about four hundred feet of clay and quicksand. How it came there no one knows. Some people imagine that ages ago an enormous geyser deposited the sulphur in its crater. The sulphur was found many years ago when they were boring for oil. Then the problem arose how were they to get at the sulphur. Your experiences last summer will tell you that it is no simple matter to sink a shaft even a hundred feet through quick- sand, but here was four hundred feet to go through. They did actually try to sink a shaft with a special shield, and then had to give it up after going down to a considerable depth. Just then, along came a man with a scheme for getting at that mineral without using any mining methods that had ever been employed before. Everybody thought he was crazy, but he went right ahead, and his scheme proved a perfect success. As long as he couldn't get down to the sulphur he declared he would make the sulphur come up to him. So he drilled a hole down through the clay and quicksand and far into the sulphur deposit, then he pumped into the hole water heated to 335 degrees Fahrenheit." ^' Water!" ejaculated Bill, ''as hot as that.^ You mean steam, don't you?" "Now look here Bill," protested Uncle Ed, "are you trying to trip me up? I said water, and I mean water, heated to 335 degrees Fahrenheit." " But how can you get it as hot as that without turning it into steam." "Don't you know, Bill, that the boihng point of water 88 Picky Shovel and Pluck. depends upon the pressure it is under? Why, in a partial vacuum you can boil water with the heat of your hand. If you want to heat water above the ordinary boiUng point without turning it into steam, all you need to do is to keep it under pressure. Surely Professor Clark taught you that at the academy." Bill looked rather crestfallen; but Uncle Ed only laughed. *' Never mind! It is easy enough to forget things, I know, and I would much rather you asked questions than get wrong ideas.'' ''What did the water do?'* I asked, ''Dissolve the sulphur?'' "No; water and sulphur won't mix, but the heat of the water melted the sulphur and then he pumped up the liquid mineral through another pipe inside his hot water pipe. I saw that man several days ago and he told me all about those experiences, and how happy he was when the first stream of molten sulphur began to pour out of the pump. In fifteen minutes it filled the forty barrels they had ready for it, and then they had to throw up an embankment and line it with boards to receive the surplus. Then, when night fell, and the pump was stopped and the stuff cleared away and piled up to make ready for the next day's supply, this triumphant engineer climbed on top of the warm heap and sat there after the men had all gone away. Alone, under the stars, he remained for a long time, exulting over his wonderful success. The next morning the mail-boy who drove into the station said, 'Well, you all pumped sulphur^ GENERAL VIEW OF THE SULPHUR MINES. MASSES OF SULPHUR WAITING FOR SHIPMENT. Pi o w H s o H O g H W H b O o Mining with Hot Water. 89 sure, but nobody believed you would, except the old car- penter, and they say as how he's half crazy/" '*But," protested Bill, "I can't quite understand about that hot water. Why doesn't it turn into steam as soon as they let it out of the boiler into the well?" *' Because they keep up the same pressure in the well," **Then why doesn't the water shoot out through the pipe that they pump the sulphur through?" *'The outlet for the steam is higher than the inlet for the sulphur. The water shoots upward and melts out a little chamber in the mass of sulphur, but the molten sulphur, being heavier than water, sinks to the bottom of the chamber. The intake pipe reaches down far enough to be always submerged in the sulphur." ** But, then, if there is such a pressure on the water, why isn't there enough to force up the sulphur without pumping it up?" "Now you are talking like an engineer," said Uncle Ed, delighted. "The sulphur is too heavy in its natural state to be forced up in that way, and yet they soon found that pumping would not do because they couldn't get a pump that would stand the corrosive effect of hot sulphur, so they used the very scheme you suggested, except that they diluted the molten sulphur with compressed air. That meant a triple pipe in the well, the outside one for the hot water, the next one inside for the diluted sulphur, and the innermost one for the air supply. The air bubbhng up through the liquid makes it light and frothy, so that it 90 Picky Shovel and Pluck. weighs only half as much as the clear sulphur and is easily carried to the surface without any suction pumping, by the pressure of the water.'^ The next day we visited that curious mine. Of course we couldn't see what was going on below, but it was interesting to watch the stream of bright yellow fluid pouring out of the pipes and filling the huge cooHng vats. All about were the towers for sinking the wells. *^I wish we could go down into the mine and see just what is going on there. It seems as though there must be some way of sinking a shaft to it.'* "If it had to be done,'' replied Uncle Ed, "it could be done. But what would be the use?" "How could it be done?" For answer Uncle Ed told us about some peculiar mining operations that had been carried out in Holland. "You know that most of that country lies actually below the sea level. Some excellent coal deposits were found there, but they were far underground and covered with such a deep layer of quicksand that there was no chance of sinking a shaft down to the coal by the ordinary caisson method. What do you suppose they did? There's a problem for you to solve. Bill." "But did they actually build a shaft down to the coal or did they use some trick like this of getting the coal up to them without going down to it?" "You would hardly expect them to pump a liquid down there hot enough to melt coal?" Mining with Hot Water. 91 "Might they not set the coal on fire and use the gas?" "'By George! that's not a bad idea, but it's old; it was proposed by an eminent British scientist. He figured that it would be cheaper to burn and bake the coal in the mine, use the gases to run gas engines, let them in turn run dynamos to convert the energy into electricity, and then transmit electric power all over the country. But that isn't what the Dutchmen did. Have you given it up yet? Well, now, think a minute. The reason quicksand is so hard to manage is because it is liquid; but suppose we should solidify the quicksand?'' "How?'' "How is water solidified?" "Do you mean by freezing it?" "Why, certainly. Why not freeze the quicksand? Eh, see the idea ? They simply sank tubes into the quicksand and pumped a freezing mixture through them as they do in making artificial ice, and then it was easy enough to hack a shaft through the soHdified sand and line it with concrete to keep the water out after the ice thawed. " CHAPTER X. KEEPING THE MISSISSIPPI IN CHECK. I NEVER knew, until Uncle Ed told us about it, that the Mississippi floods present a serious engineering problem. Of course, I knew that they had to build levees along the banks of the river to keep it to its course, when it was swollen by floods, and that sometimes it burst through the levees or flowed over the top of them, and caused havoc in the surrounding country. But I supposed that was due to carelessness in building, or too much economizing, and that to keep the Mississippi in bounds, it was merely necessary to build the levees higher and wider. When I expressed some such sentiment to Uncle Ed, he replied, "Ah, my boy, you have no idea how vast a river system this is. Why, it is the longest in the world.'' *'But I thought the Nile was longer?'' interrupted Bill. "Yes, longer than the Mississippi River alone. But that's because geographers have given the name, Mississippi, to the shorter branch, while calling the longer and main branch, the Missouri. It is 4,200 miles from the source of the Missouri to its real mouth in the gulf, or 530 miles longer than the Nile. Why, fully two-fifths of the United States drains into the Missouri-Mississippi river system. It reminds me of a big, playful giant that upsets our plans by a knock of 92 Keeping the Mississippi in Check. 93 the elbow or a stub of the toe. It is always playing practical jokes on us. We build our towns along its edge, expecting to ply our trade on its waters. The first thing we know the wicked old river is tearing down our levees and making us fight for dear life to keep the town from being overwhelmed; then, the next thing we know, the mischievous river has suddenly changed its course and left that town stranded several miles inland. That's what happened to Vicksburg, Miss. It used to be on the river. Now it is five miles inland on Centennial Lake. The old river loves to mix up our maps and make geography to suit itself. The town of Delta used to be above Vicksburg, now it is three miles below it.'' "You don't mean it was carried down by a flood.'"' gasped Bill "Well, hardly. I mean the river has shifted its course, so that now it runs by Vicksburg before it reaches Delta. You know the river is all twists and turns, and it is constantly breaking through from one curve into another. This some- times reverses the flow through the channel for a mile or two. In some places you need not be at all surprised to find the river, which has been running east past your door, now running west." "I don't quite understand," I said. "Well, there is one place near Greenville, Tenn., where you can actually sail forty miles upstream by drifting down stream and hauling your boat or canoe across three narrow tongues of land. Here is a rough map of the spot," and 94 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Uncle Ed drew a diagram like Fig. 6. *'You put your canoe in the river at Greenville and let it drift downstream for about ten miles. Then you climb out and carry the boat across a narrow neck of land and launch it in the river at a point which you will find is several miles above Greenville. Again you drift with the current until you are close to Greenville, when a short portage carries you over to another big bend in the river, and after sailing down this a ways you come to a third portage that leads you across a narrow ^^7'eenviiie FIG. 6. TRAVELING UP THE MISSISSIPPI BY DRIFTING DOWN STREAM. isthmus to a point forty miles upstream from where you started. You can readily see that if the river broke across the first two narrow necks of land, it would cut out two big curves, and run down in what was before an upstream direction." *'I don't see," put in Bill, *^why they don't straighten the whole channel. It would save lots of time to navigation." Keeping the Mississippi in Check. 95 O H H !z; w iz; w w n w > K en o Q O m Q <; ^ :: O en Ph en W ^ O W O 96 Picky Shovel and Pluck. **Yes/' I added, "and the levees would not have to be so long if they ran straight, and it would be easier to keep them in shape." "And yet, answered Uncle Ed, "when the Mississippi does try to straighten its channel, we do our best to prevent it.'* He pulled a map out of his pocket and turned to a section of the Mississippi at the boundary of Kentucky and Tennessee. It showed how the river took a big sweep around a tongue of land. Uncle Ed pointed to a dotted line marked "1902'' to show the shore line at that date. "You see how the water has been cutting into that penin- sula. Now it is less than a mile across at one place, and it is almost certain that if nothing were done to prevent it, that neck would be cut through at the next high water and the course of the river would be shortened and straightened. But some thing is being done. Uncle Sam is putting in half a million dollars worth of work at that one spot to keep the Mississippi to its crooked course.'* "But why?" we chorused. "There's your chance to do some guessing," teased Uncle Ed. "Oh, I know," said Bill, "it would leave the town of New Madrid stranded far inland." "Yes," admitted Uncle Ed, "that's one reason, but it wouldn't matter if there were no town there. The work would have to be done just the same." "I have it," I cried, as a brilliant idea struck me; "it would change the state boundaries. It would cut GRADING A BANK WITH A HYDRAULIC JET. , i:^ \ v;j,^;-^^4s^par;^ GROUND SILLS TO PREVENT EROSION IN TIME OF FLOOD. Keeping the Mississippi in Check, 97 off a big slice of Kentucky and Tennessee and give it to Missouri." ''That's another good reason, but by no means the main one." We thought hard for some time, but finally had to give it up. ''There is a difference in level of six feet between the river at one side of that isthmus and the other," explained Uncle Ed. "If the Mississippi should cut across the barrier, there, it would sweep through in such a torrent that the bank and levee on the opposite side might not be able to restrain it, and it would make a serious break that would flood the country all around. You see, the difficulty with the Missis- sippi is, that its banks are nothing but sand carried down by its own waters. The river has built its own banks and it feels that it may tear them down and rebuild them at will. You know it carries down an enormous amount of sand, particularly the Missouri branch. At times you can get nearly a tumblerful of clear sand out of every pail of Missouri River water. Why, the Missouri carries down every year, nearly twice as much sediment as all the rock and earth that will have been excavated from the Panama Canal when it is finished. Careful testshave shown that it brings down a carload of sand every second. In other words, if the sedi- ment were carried by rail it would take a train running con- tinuously day and night, all the year round at the rate of seventeen miles per hour to deliver the sand in the same volume as it is delivered by the Missouri River. That 98 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. furnishes the Mississippi River with plenty of material for its geographical whims and experiments. Wherever the current slackens, the sediment is deposited, building a sand bar, and where the current is swift and particularly where the river shoots around a bend it eats into the confining banks and carries off the sand, only to deposit it elsewhere. What we are trying to do is to protect those banks that are exposed to severe attacks; we don't care how winding the river is so long as we can keep it to a fixed course. We dare not straighten the course or the river would get beyond control/' We had a chance before long to see just how they keep the soft sand banks from caving, when attacked by the current. Barges loaded with willow saplings were towed to the spot that was to be protected. Then scores of negroes were set to work weaving an enormous mat out of the saplings. The mat would float on the water as it was woven and then they would keep adding to it until it was fully a thousand feet long, by say 250 feet wide. After it was completed they dumped rock on it to weight it down. In some places the banks were armored with stone paving and even with con- crete. To cut the banks down to a gentle slope before laying the paving they used powerful streams of water. It was astonishing to see how easily the hydraulic jets ate into the earth. One of the things that struck me as very odd was that the levees were not built on the banks of the Mississippi, but any- where from half a mile to a mile back. Keeping the Mississippi in Check. 99 ^^Why, my dear boy," exclaimed Uncle Ed, "you have no idea what an enormous amount of water comes down this river when it is in flood. We have to let it spread, some.'^ "I don't see," said Bill, "why they can't have reservoirs here and there, along the river to store the water until the flood is passed and then let it out again." "Good idea! But there are two objections. First, the size of the river, and then, again, the sand it carries. If you ran the river at full flood into a reservoir as big as the whole state of New Jersey, it would fill up at the rate of a foot every ten hours. In a few days even so big a reservoir as that would overflow its banks. Every time it was used, sand would be deposited out of the quiet water, because there would be no violent motion of the water to keep the sand ia suspension. You know how it is when you put more sugar in your iced tea than it will dissolve. If you stir the tea the sugar will float, but as the tea quiets down, the sugar settles to the bottom of the glass. So with nothing to stir the water in the reservoir, there is nothing to keep the sedi- ment from settling to the bottom. We would have to dredge the reservoir after every flood to keep it from filling with sand. Altogether the levee system seems best, pro- vided the levees are built high enough and strong enough. By having them far apart, we provide a flowing reservoir along the entire length of the Mississippi, for they let the river spread well beyond its normal width and depth, while the current keeps the sand from settling and filling the reservoir/^ 100 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. *^ Couldn't the floods be stopped before they started? Professor Clark, at boarding school, had a couple of models of a hillside, to show that the reason we have floods is because our forests are all cut down. One model was covered with moss and the other with dirt and pebbles. Then he had a shower-bath arrangement over them, and he'd let the water rain down on them, and .'' *'Yes,'' interrupted Uncle Ed, "and the water would pour in a torrent down the bare model, but would soak into the moss and ooze out of it slowly. I know the experiment. But if he had kept up the shower until the moss was thor- oughly saturated, you would have seen torrents pouring down the moss as well. Of course, the dried leaves that collect in the forest make a reservoir that retains rainwater, but there is a limit to the amount it will hold and, in a rainy spell such as will cause a flood, the water may be seen pouring freely out of the forests." ''But they do check it some,'' I insisted. "Oh, yes, they help. But somebody has figured how much of a forest we would need to have reduced the floods of last year by only 500,000 second-feet, and he ." "What do you mean by second-feet?" interrupted Bill. "Why, cubic feet per second. On the average, the Mississippi River discharges about 610,000 cubic feet of water per second, at the mouth of the Red River, but last year, during the flood, the discharge was 2,300,000 cubic feet per second. A cubic foot of water would fill about two HAULING A SNAG OUT OF THE MISSISSIPPI AND CUTTING IT INTO CONVENIENT LENGTHS TO HANDLE. WEAVING A MAT TO PROTECT A CAVING BANK, SINKING AN ENORMOUS WILLOW MAT. Keeping the Mississippi in Check. loi good-sized pails, which means that every second over five milHon pails of water flow past the mouth of the Red River. "Now, this man I was telling you about," continued Uncle Ed, "was figuring how much of a forest would be needed to reduce the discharge by about a miUion pails per second. That would still leave a good-sized flood of four million second-pails. And he found he would have to turn into a forest a territory equal to one-sixth of the whole United States, and then it would take a hundred years for the forest to grow and shed enough leaves to retain that much moisture. "I guess forests won't help us much, then,*' I remarked. "Not much," declared Uncle Ed. "Many suggestions have been off'ered, but, after all, the levees seem to furnish the most practical solution of the problem. Of course, the better the levee system above here, the more perfectly will the waters be confined and the more water will come down past New Orleans." "Couldn't they tap off some of the water before it got here?" Bill inquired. "That's another suggestion," said Uncle Ed. "But the same trouble arises. The Mississippi is a river of sand flowing through a land of sand. Give it a chance and it might scour out a new main channel, shutting off* the present channel with a deposit of sand and cutting off" New Orleans completely. When the river is high, we let some of it flow down the Atchafalaya River, but 'ground-sills' or belts of willow mattresses, weighted with rock, have been laid across the bottom of the Atchafalaya to keep the bed from 102 Pick, Shovel a7td Pluck. being scoured too deeply. You see we dare not give the river any liberty. It is almost too big for us to manage, and if we do not keep a tight rein upon it, it will take the bit in its teeth and get beyond control." CHAPTER XL BUILDING A QUAY WITH A DIVING BELL. One day before we left New Orleans, we were sauntering along the river front, when we were astonished to see on a barge the name of the foundation company in whose caisson we had had our first experience under pneumatic pressure. '' Bill '' ; I exclaimed, "' Look ! Isn't that the company that Mr. Squires worked for?'' "You're right, Jim. I wonder what in the world they are doing down here. They can't be building foundations for a skyscraper in this place." "Well, hardly; but what would they be doing out in the water, anyway." We walked along the levee to get a nearer view of the barge. "Say, Jim," exclaimed Bill, "there are two barges with a big float or something between them." "Yes, and I beheve the barges are put there to guide the float and keep it from toppHng over. That's why they have those big wooden trusses on the barges." Just then there was a hiss of escaping air. "It's a cais- son," we both shouted. Sure enough, there was an air-lock sticking out of the top of the caisson, and presently a man began to climb out of it, 103 104 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Immediately our curiosity was aroused. What could they be going to do out there in the mud. "Probably it is some sort of a pier/' I suggested. "Maybe; but what gets me/' declared Bill, "is why they should use a caisson. Uncle Ed told me that you could go down through sand and clay for a thousand feet without striking rock anywhere in this vicinity.'' Then another thing caught our attention. On the side of the big float there was some sort of a chain conveyor. Two chains ran over a pair of sprocket wheels and disappeared in the water. Fingers projected from each chain. Some big planks were floating in the water, and men' were pushing these planks up against the chains one at a time, while a couple of men were turning the sprocket-wheel shaft, and as a pair of fingers caught a plank, it would be carried down into the water. That aroused further speculation, but we could not arrive at any adequate explanation of the curious incidents we had witnessed. While we were considering ways and means of satisfying our curiosity, the man who had come out of the air-lock entered a boat and was rowed to shore. "Here's our chance, Bill," I cried. "We'll attack him with a rapid-fire of questions." We waited with batteries masked until he stepped ashore, and then Bill, who was always the leader when it came to a matter of questions, opened fire. "Say, mister, it looks like a very interesting job you are THE CAISSON SUPPORTED BETWEEN TWO BARGES. INSIDE THE CAISSON, SHOWING THE TROLLEY CONVEYOR. Building a Quay with a Diving Bell. 105 doing over there. Jim and I have been trying to make out just what it is." "'Good land!'" was his reply. ''I thought everyone in this town knew we were building a quay." "'We are strangers here, you know," explained Bill. "We have figured that it must be a quay or a dock or some- thing, but we couldn't make out why you are using a caisson. That is a caisson out there between the barges, isn't it?" "Yes," answered the man, "and its afloat. That's the reason we have the barges at each side, so as to keep it from upsetting." "But aren't you going to sink it?" *'0h, no. We are using it as a sort of diving bell. You see our quay is to be built on piles driven into the river- bottom. The piles have already been driven fifteen feet below water level." "How do you drive piles below water level?" interrupted Bill. "We use a pile-driver down to the water line, and then we put a follower (a short piece of a pile) on it and drive it down to the required depth. The piles have all been driven and now we are capping them and laying a grillage (flooring) of planks on them. When that is done we are going to build a concrete wall on the grillage, high enough to come well above the water at flood level. You see we have to use air pressure to get down to the top of the piles. So we are using this big caisson as a sort of a diving bell." "Say, couldn't we go into the caisson?" pleaded Bill. io6 Picky Shovel and Pluck. Just as I had anticipated, we met with a flat refusal. "'But," I protested, ^'we are not the novices you take us to be. We have been in lots of caissons. In fact the first caisson we were ever in was one that your company was putting down for the foundation of a skyscraper in New York." "Is that so?" he inquired rather doubtfully. "Yes, Mr. Squires took us down." "What, Jim Squires?" "Yes, that's the man. He showed us all about caisson work." "So you know Jim Squires, do you? He's a fine fellow. We were classmates at college. My name is Donald Ken- nedy." We introduced ourselves and shook hands with him. "What foundation was Squires on," asked Mr. Kennedy. "I don't know as I can tell you the street number," I replied, but it was on Broadway, near Wall street. There was an accident down there. A bunch of oakum took fire, and one of the men, Danny Roach, probably you know him, saved our lives by emptying a bucket of sand on the fire." "Is that so!" exclaimed Mr. Kennedy again. "And you were there in the caisson when it happened?" "Yes," and I gave him a glowing account of what hap- pened. Then Bill told him of some of our other adventures under pneumatic pressure, which interested him greatly. Finally he declared that he must hurry ofF on an errand downtown, but if we would return in the afternoon he would Building a Quay with a Diving Bell. 107 be only too glad to show us what there was to see in his float- ing caisson. A few hours later we were ferried across to the barges. The caisson was an enormous box measuring thirty by fifty feet, the fifty-foot length being necessary to cover the great width of the quay. At each corner and at the middle of the longer sides were big tanks filled with water. ''We use that for ballast/' Mr. Kennedy explained. ''You know, of course, how a caisson is built with a deck across it, so as to form a chamber below in which the men can work. Water is kept out of that chamber by pumping air into it, but that makes^^the caisson so Hght and buoyant that we have to pump water into these tanks above the^deck so as to weight it down. Of course, some of the weight of the caisson is supported by the barges. But most of it rests on the cushion of air trapped in the working chamber, and we have to keep a close watch on the pressure of that air cushion, for if it should drop, the caisson would sink correspondingly, bringing the deck down upon the heads of the workmen. On the other hand, if there should be any material leakage of water ballast, the caisson would float higher and the water would follow it up and come up over the tops of the piles. You see, in one case the ceiling would fall down upon them, and in the other the floor of water would rise and swamp them.'* "But having the water ballast so high,'' remarked Bill, " makes the caisson a top-heavy proposition. I should think it would turn turtle," io8 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''It certainly would, as quick as a wink, if it were not for the barges at each side, and that, too, is why we put the ballast in separate tanks. You can readily see that if we flooded the whole top of the caisson the least tilt would set up a wave that would sweep across the caisson and upset it." ''But why couldn't you put the weight lower down, say around the working chamber?" "We could, but that would make a much more bulky and expensive caisson. You see, this is a standard type of caisson, and therefore much simpler to build. You know all caissons are top-heavy, but they depend upon the dirt and sand to keep them upright. Here the barges serve that purpose just as well." "You haven't told us about the chain conveyor yet," remarked Bill. "Oh, that's a scheme for carrying lumber down to the men," answered Mr. Kennedy. You see our air-lock is not big enough to admit lumber in the length needed down there, so we carry the planks down under the edge of the caisson, and let them pop up inside." When Mr. Kennedy took us down into the caisson we found conditions there quite different from any other pneu- matic chamber we had ever been in. The pressure was less than ten pounds per square inch, and not at all disagreeable, but it was disturbing to realize that there was nothing but open water beneath us. Here we were in a pocket of air fifteen feet below water level, with wooden planking to keep the water from pouring in on us through the ceiling and side Building a Quay with a Diving Bell. 109 walls, but only the invisible hand of pneumatic pressure to stay it from rushing in from below and overwhelming us. It gave us an uncanny feeling. What chance would there be for us if the water ballast should suddenly leak out? The black water beneath us would rise up over such poor footing as we had and leave us floundering about helplessly, or worse still, if the air pressure should give out we would be smashed between the deck and the piHng. It was ticklish work, too, climbing around on the slippery piles and timbers laid across them. But we did not let our minds dwell on such disagreeable possibilities. There was too much of interest in the work that the men were doing. The way in which the lumber was delivered to them struck us as very ingenious. Every once in a while a big stick that had been carried down by the conveyor chains under the cutting edge of the caisson, would bob up out of the water inside the working chamber. Along the deck overhead there was a pneumatic trolley system provided with a chain hoist. The lumber would be seized by this and hoisted up, and then it would be trans- ported to the place where it was needed, while we scrambled to get out of the way of the swaying timber. It seemed very odd to see no excavating — nothing but carpenter work, sawing off piles, notching cap pieces, boring holes, etc. *^We are working on stretches of about thirty feet each,'* explained Mr. Kennedy, ^^and leaving a gap of a little less than thirty feet between each finished section. Afterwards we will go back and finish up the gaps. That will do away no Pick J Shovel and Pluck. with the delicate equilibrium between air and water ballast that we have to maintain now, because we can rest the caisson on the grillage of the finished sections at each side of the gap and weight it sufficiently to keep it down under all conditions. Then we can keep the pressure up as high as we please; for any excess of air will merely pour out under the edges of the caisson.'^ "But/' interposed Bill, *Sf the caisson rests on the grillage at each end, won't the piles in the gap be covered with water?" "Certainly, but only a foot or so and the men won't mind working in a little water/' "Well, they are welcome to the job," I declared. CHAPTER XII. SETTING THE RIVER TO WORK. Uncle Ed^s study of the levees along the Mississippi took much longer than he had anticipated, and by the time he had worked his way up the river as far as Keokuk, winter was beginning to give way to spring. Uncle Ed was well acquainted with the chief engineer of the work there, and sought him out at once. He proved to be a very jolly, big-hearted man. ^^I am always interested in boys,'' he said to us. "In fact, Fm not sure but that I am still pretty much of a boy myself. You know, I was made an honorary member of the Boy Scout organization on the Illinois side of the river the other day." "You'll find these boys intensely interested in engineer- ing," put in Uncle Ed, with almost paternal pride. "They are going to college next year, and I expect them to prove a credit to the profession." "That's fine!" declared the chief engineer. "When I graduated from high school, I walked into the office of a bridge engineer, took off* my coat, hung it on a peg, and told him I was going to work there; I didn't care what he paid me. That was my start in engineering work. You are going to have a better start, and I shall expect you to HI 112 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. perform work that will put this little job of mine all in the shade. I hope you intend to spend more than a day with us. I shall be mortally offended if you do not find more than a day's worth of interest here.'* "I am sure we could spend a month here with profit," replied Uncle Ed; ''but we are behind our schedule, and will have to hurry. However, if you treat us well, you may find us hanging around a whole week." "A week it shall be then," was the immediate response. ''That will give you a chance to see not only how the work looks, but how it grows; and you must be my guests while you are here." Of course we were delighted to accept the hospitality of such a jolly host. After we had moved our things from the hotel to his abode, he called one of his assistant engineers, named Johnson, and put Bill and myself in his charge to give us a general survey of the work, while he himself took Uncle Ed in tow. Mr. Johnson took us across the river to the IlHnois side of the Mississippi, so that we could see how the dam was being constructed. "I should think," I remarked to our guide, "that the steamboat lines would object seriously to having this ob- struction built across the river." "Object? Why this is no obstruction. It is a help to navigation — a real blessing to the Mississippi boats." "Why, how is that? You'll have to have a lock to pass the boats from one level to the other, won't you?" "Yes, but heretofore they have had to go through a long HOW THE COFFER-DAMS WERE BUILT, ONE IN ADVANCE OF THE OTHER. A MOUNTAIN OF ICE THREATENED TO OVERWHELM THE COFFER-DAM. PROTECTING THE COFFER-DAM AGAINST FLOOD WITH ROCK AND SAND BAGS. THE FINAL STRUGGLE OF THE RIVER AS THE LAST GAP WAS BEING CLOSED. Setting the River to Work. 113 canal, with three locks in it, to get by the rapids that extend for miles back of this point. When our work is done, a single lock will raise them to the lake above the dam, and then they can run full speed on up the river without any further interruption. And, by the way, that lock will be bigger than any you ever saw." ''Oh, I guess not,'' said Bill, somewhat disdainfully; "we've just been down to see the Panama Canal." "Well, the locks down there are pretty large," admitted Mr. Johnson. "This lock is to be only six hundred feet long, but it will be just as wide as the Panama locks, and it will raise the boats forty feet, while the highest lift in any one lock in Panama is only thirty-two feet." As we were crossing the bridge to the IlHnois side, we had a chance to get a general idea of the whole work. On the Iowa side, a large part of the river had been inclosed by a coffer-dam, and here work was proceeding on the big power station that was going to extract over three hundred thousand horse-power from the Mississippi River. From the Illinois shore the great dam was creeping slowly across. Already it had stretched half-way over, and the coffer- dams in advance of the concrete work left a clear opening for the river only four hundred and fifty feet wide. But the river was flowing quite freely through the dam, for, as yet, it consisted of a series of arches, something like the bridges of the Key West Railroad, except that the legs or piers of the bridge were set much closer. "That's a funny way to build a dam," I remarked. 114 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. "Oh, no, a wonderfully good way," was his response. *'This is one of the largest rivers in the world, you know, and one of the largest dams ever constructed. We have to move very cautiously. Why, if we should start to build a solid wall across, the old river would struggle more and more fiercely as it found that wall hemming it in, until it would become absolutely unmanageable. So we have humored it with the notion that it is merely a bridge we are building. All the time the water can flow freely through the arches, except where our coff'er-dams are built to keep the water out while the rock bed of the river is being exca- vated for the foundation, and the concrete of the arches is setting. After the 'bridge' has been completed all the way across, we shall begin to close in on the river by filling in between the arches. You know, between the piers we are going to build spillways to a height of thirty-two feet, leaving above each a gap that will be closed by a steel gate. But the spillways will not be built up to the full height at once. If we tried that, by the time we got half of them built, the water would be running through the other half so fast that work there would be very difficult. So, instead, the spillways will be built at first only five feet high. We'll take one span at a time, and wall it up on both the up- stream and down-stream side. Then the concrete will be cast in specially prepared forms. After all the spillways have been raised to the five-foot level, we shall go over the dam again, and raise it five feet more. In that way, we'll raise the spillway to its full height gradually. Then the Setting the River to Work. 115 gates will be fitted into slots to control the water flowing over the spillways. An electrically operated derrick will travel along the top of the dam and raise the steel gates when the water is high." When we got over to the dam, we found that the top formed a broad viaduct about thirty feet wide, on which was a three-track railroad. To carry the concrete on to the front over the freshly built arches, there was an enormous crane, two hundred and forty feet long, that ran on rails twenty-five feet apart. The crane had a reach of one hundred and fifty feet beyond its base. With it the steel form was removed from the finished arches and carried forward to the head of the line, to furnish the molds in which the concrete was cast. We went out to the forward end of the crane and watched operations. ^^This is going to be one tremendous big chunk of con- crete," declared Mr. Johnson. *^The dam with the abut- ments is pretty nearly a mile long, and it is all in one piece with the power-house and lock and a big dry-dock that we are building." ''It's good it isn't steel," said Bill, "or you would have trouble with expansion in summer-time." "Why, concrete expands and contracts just about as much as steel does," answered Mr. Johnson. "We have to allow for expansion, because it gets very hot here in sum- mer and very cold in winter. If we had no expansion-joints, the dam would crack in places, water would get into the cracks and freeze, breaking off pieces, so that, before we ii6 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. knew it, the dam might crumble away. You will see in the middle of each arch a layer or single thickness of tar paper inserted to act as a cushion, while it lasts, and when it rots out, it will leave a narrow gap that will allow for expansion.'' "But what about the spillways.^" "The mass of concrete is so great, and it is such a poor conductor of heat, that there will be little change of tem- perature in the heart of the concrete, so the paper joints between the spillways and the piers will extend only the width of a single sheet of tar paper into the concrete. "There are many things," continued Mr. Johnson, "that we have yet to learn about concrete. We never can tell just how it is going to behave, so we are taking samples of the stuff that goes into each arch. Each sample is cast into thirty-three bricks that are labeled so that we can tell from what batch they came, and in which arch the batch was poured. These bricks are tested at the end of two days, seven days, two weeks, four weeks, three months, six months, one, two, three, four, and five years. If any one of them shows symptoms of trouble, we shall know where to look for the defective concrete, and remedy the fault. If they show no ailments in five years, the concrete need cause us no further worry." The new spans were being built on dry rock, inside of a large coflFer-dam. The cofFer-dam was built of big wooden cribs. Each crib was made up of timbers crisscrossed, like a log-house. Mr. Johnson explained that the cofFer-dam w w H H w w o w p< w o w w H w o w H o Pi U < o 3 o o a < a H O U H S U s H w z <; u o z J a > < H a as a H o z < Q Q a 'we had to save that wall at all cost." — See page 122. Setting the River to Work. 117 was built just like the dam itself, by sinking the cribs twelve feet apart. Of course the sinking was done by loading them with stone. Then, when all the cribs were in place, the spaces between were closed with timbers, and the whole cofFer-dam was sealed with a bank of clay. Then the water was pumped out and the bottom of the river was laid bare. While the piers were being constructed in one cofFer-dam, another cofFer-dam was being built in advance of the first, so that the limestone bed of the river could be excavated for the foundation of the dam. We stood on the outer- most end of the cofFer-dam and watched the water go swirling by. We realized then how hard it must be to posi- tion the cribs under such conditions, and understood why it was that expert French Canadian lumbermen had to be employed for the job. Up above us the river was bridged over with a thick field of ice, and, now and then, a piece would break ofF and shoot past us on the swift current. "The ice is about ready to go out,'' said Mr. Johnson, *'and then there will be some fun. We are all ready for it, though. We have armored the more exposed cribs with boiler-plate, so that, if the ice tears away the stone and clay banked up around them, it cannot cut through the timbers." "I hope we'll see it!" cried Bill. ''Guess you will, unless there is another freeze to-night." When we returned to the Keokuk side of the river, Mr. Johnson showed us the foundations of the big power-house. *'The building is going to be a third of a mile long," he ti8 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. meH-WATEK LCVtL 6N UP' iTREAM SIDE OFMWZJi- HOUSt -^ pmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiififiin iiiiiisiiiiii ^Average lbvbl of tail iv> FIG. 8. SECTIONAL VIEW OF THE TURBINE, SHOWING THE ELECTRIC GENERATOR ABOVE, WITH A MAN STANDING BESIDE IT. Setting the River to Work. 119 TAIL B^Y V— OUTSIDE LINE^ OF DRAFT W»t 5tHtATM-V informed us, "and the generator-room will be big enough to hold a hundred and thirty-five thousand people, or the whole population of the State of Wyoming." We walked through the concrete galleries that led to the turbine chambers. These were scroll- shaped, something like a snail shell, and Mr. Johnson explained how the water would rush down into the scroll chambers, strike the blades of the tur- bines, whirhng them around at high speed, and escape through the center of the turbine wheels to the tail-race. ''More water will pour through the turbines of this one plant every hour than New York con- sumes in two days," said Mr. Johnson. " Fast to the turbine FIG. 9. SECTIONAL VIEW SHOWING THE SPIRAL COURSE OF THE WATER TO THE TURBINE. 120 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. shafts will be the revolving fields of the -electric generators, and each generator will produce about ten thousand electrical horse-power. We are going to send the current as far as St. Louis, one hundred and forty-four miles away, to run the street-cars of that city. And furthermore, to give you an idea of how much this project will do for mankind, let me tell you that it will save eight million tons of coal every year.'* After we had made a hasty survey of the foundation work, we cHmbed to the top of the cofFer-dam, and got there just in time to see an enormous floe detach itself from the ice-field above and bear down upon us. ^' There you are, boys," cried Mr. Johnson; *'now see what happens.'' '^ She's a whopper, isn't she!" I exclaimed. In another moment, it struck with a tremendous crunch- ing blow. But the coflPer-dam held firm, and the ice buckled, broke, and ground itself into thousands of pieces ranging all the way from the tiniest fragments to huge masses weighing tons. Under the irresistible pressure of its mo- mentum, the broken ice piled itself up into a wall that reached from the bottom of the river to as much as thirty feet above, and enormous slabs toppled over upon the cofFer-dam, burying it completely in many places. For a time, the four-hundred-and-fifty-foot opening between the power-station and the dam was completely choked, then big pieces began to force their way through, and eventually the whole ice jam made its escape. Setting the River to Work. 121 That ice jam was the beginning of the trouble. An ice- gorge formed several miles down the river, and dammed the river until it rose above the original level of the cofFer-dams, and men were kept busy working with steam-shovels to build the walls faster than the water could rise. In time the river began to subside, but within a few days another ice-gorge formed, and again the water commenced to rise. Finally, one night things became very threatening. The river was six feet higher than the original level of the cofFer-dam, and was still rising. A gang of fifty men was set to work building up the wall with a breastwork of sand-bags. The chief engineer himself came down to direct operations. In such circumstances, nothing could keep us boys at home, and Uncle Ed came along, to keep us out of trouble, he said, but I am sure he was just as anxious as we were to see the fun. We stayed there until long past midnight, helping with the sand-bags. Every now and then, a break in the wall would seem imminent, but some one was always on hand to check the mischief before it got under way. It was very exciting and rather weird, working there in the dark, and fighting that persistent river that kept rising inch by inch. It looked very ominous as it swirled by under the light of the arc lamps that were strung at infrequent intervals along the line of the cofFer-dam. We never knew when the water might take advantage of the inattention of some careless workman, open a gap in the frail wall of sand-bags that was only two feet wide, and, attacking us from the rear, over- whelm us and sweep us away to destruction. 122 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. It was well past midnight before we felt that the situation had been mastered, and we were glad of a chance to go home. Suddenly a pufF of wind came down the river. Almost im- mediately another, stronger, pufF followed, and before we realized it, a fierce squall came upon us. With nothing to retard its clear sweep for miles, the water was driven before a howling gale, and, heartened by this unexpected reinforce- ment, the river renewed its onslaught. In a moment, the waves were dashing over our sand-bag wall. Back into the fight leaped the httle army of men. A hurried call brought a hundred more to reinforce our wearied ranks. It was as thrilling as real war. Five thousand bags of sand had been held in reserve for just such an emergency, and these were now rushed to the battle line. It was no simple matter to stagger along the parapet struggling under the load of a heavy sand-bag, with the waves dashing over our boots and threatening to undermine our footing; but we had to save that wall at all costs, for it guarded work that had meant the expenditure of enormous sums of money. An hour or more we struggled there in the night, until the squall suddenly subsided. We were ready to drop from exhaustion, and could scarcely stagger home, but our victory buoyed us. We had put up a brave fight, and, although much water had found its way over the coflTer- dam, the work had been saved. O Iz: o O Q O hJ H < O EXTERIOR VIEW OF A BLAST-FURNACE, SHOWING FURNACE AND SKIP BRIDGE IN FOREGROUND, AND DUST CATCHERS AND STACKS OF HOT BLAST STOVES IN THE BACKGROUND. CHAPTER XIII. TAMING STEEL WITH FIRE. When we asked Uncle Ed to tell us something about Gary, all we could get out of hini was, ''I don't know, boys. I went through the place eight years ago, and there wasn't the sign of a house anywhere around — nothing but a wilderness of sand." You can imagine our surprise, then, on getting off the train at Gary, to find ourselves in a flourishing city of nearly forty thousand inhabitants. That is what a steel plant did for a wilderness in eight years. Uncle Ed had brought a pass with him from the main offices in Chicago, and so a guide was appointed to pilot us around. "Are there any ore-boats in?" asked Uncle Ed. ''Take us over there, please, for I want these boys to see the whole show from start to finish." He led us past buildings from which issued mysterious clanking noises, past tall structures that looked like giant factory chimneys. ''But there can't be anything very interesting in unloading a boat," protested Bill. "I suppose you think they take the stuff off in wheel- barrows," repHed Uncle Ed. "If it had to be done by hand, it would take an army of men a week or more; but now unloading machines do the whole job in a few hours." 123 124 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. The unloading machines were bridge-like structures mounted on wheels, and traveled on rails laid parallel to the dock line. Big grab-buckets, hung from the ends of gigantic scale-beams, moved forward over the boats, and dived down through the hatches into the holds, only to reappear in a moment with jaws shut tight over a huge bite of ore, which was dumped on shore, and afterward picked up by other buckets and dumped where required in the ore-yard. "But is that stuff iron.^^" I exclaimed. ''It looks just like red dirt." ''Oh, yes; it's iron ore, and pretty good ore, too. We'll go back to the blast-furnaces now, and see what they do with it." The blast-furnaces proved to be the "factory chimneys" we had seen on our way to the ore-unloading machines. Alongside of each furnace were four "stoves," to heat the air that was blown into the furnace. The stoves were big fellows, almost as high and as big around as the furnaces. "Do you see that big pipe that goes all around the lower part of the furnace?" asked Uncle Ed. "That is called the 'bustle pipe.' It feeds hot air to the 'tuyeres,' which are the pipes that carry the hot air into the furnace. They have copper nozzles, and are made hollow so that water can keep circulating through them; otherwise the intense heat of the furnace would burn them right out." "But why doesn't the furnace itself melt.^" I queried. "It is made of iron, isn't it.^" "Yes, outside; but it has a lining of fire-brick that will not melt, and that protects the outer shell." Taming Steel with Fire. 125 '* Where is the door to the furnace?" I asked. "The door?" "Yes; where do they put the ore in?" "Why, they dump it in at the top. Don't you see that indined elevator leading up to the top of the furnace? There goes a car of ore now." "But there must be a furnace door somewhere to let the coal in," I persisted. "Oh, no. In the first place, they don't use coal, but coke, which is coal with the coal-gas baked out of it. The coke goes in at the top, too." "What! Over the iron?" I exclaimed, mystified. "Usually we build our fire under the pot of water we wish to boil," explained Uncle Ed; "but here the fuel and the ore go into the pot together. You see, this is not Hke any ordinary furnace you ever had anything to do with. There isn't even an ash-door at the bottom, because the ashes float on top of the iron that collects in the bottom of the furnace, and so the ashes are drained oflF from time to time in the shape of molten slag. If you could get ashes out of an ordi- nary furnace or a kitchen range like that, it would simplify housekeeping a lot. The earthy matter in the ore comes out in the slag, too. To make the ashes and dirt melt, a lot of Hmestone is put into the furnace with the ore and coke. The furnace is kept full all the time, but the charge is con- stantly settling as it burns, and the molten part trickles down to the bottom, and so more material has to be added at the top. The materials are added through a sort of air- 126 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. lock, like those of the tunnels you went into last summer, because they have further use for the gases, and don't want them to escape." "I wish we could see the inside of the furnace,'^ remarked Bill, wistfully. **You can, if you want to," spoke up the guide. "Yes," put in Uncle Ed; "there are windows in every blast-furnace." "Windows!" Bill exclaimed. "Oh, you are joking!" "Yes, glass windows, only the glass is colored so that your eyes will not be injured by the dazzling glare of the in- candescent metal. They are in the tuyeres, behind the air- jets, where the glass will not melt." Uncle Ed pointed to a tiny peep-hole in the end of one of the tuyere pipes. It was just like the eyepiece of a telescope. When I peered in, I could plainly see the seething mass in the interior, with pieces of coke dancing in the blast of the tuyere. "They are about to 'flush the cinder,'" said the guide. "He means," explained Uncle Ed, "that they are going to drain off some of the slag." We saw a man pull a long-handled plug out of a hole in the side of the furnace, and out gushed a brilliantly glowing stream. "What do they do with it?" I asked. "Just watch it," said Uncle Ed. The stuff flowed along rather sluggishly down a trough banked with molders' sand. The trough ended rather Taming Steel with Fire. 1 27 abruptly at the brink of a pit, and there, from under it, gushed a wide flat stream of water. The instant the slag struck the water, there was a burst of steam and it exploded into a hail-storm of hot pellets. "I suppose they do that to cool the stuff' quickly,'' I remarked. ^^Oh, no; there is another object in view. They'll scoop the granulated stuff* out of the pit with a clam-shell bucket, and make Portland cement out of it. They'll crush it, mix it with lime, burn it, and powder it, and then it can be used for concrete work. They make money now out of stuff* that used to cost them money to get rid of a few years ago. Why, for every ton of iron they had half a ton of slag to dispose of, and you can imagine how pleased they were to find a use for the stuffs." "It is a wonderful sight!" said Bill, turning back and looking at the glowing stream. "Yes; but that's nothing to the splendor of the iron itself, as it runs out of the furnace," declared Uncle Ed. "You can find out for us, can't you, guide, when they are going to tap one of them?" As the guide turned off" to make inquiries, Uncle Ed re- marked reminiscently: "Yes, they have made a lot of wonderful improvements in ore-smelting in recent years, and that means a pile of money saved. Why, it is only a few years ago that they used to let all the blast of hot gas go to waste out of the top of the furnace. Now they burn the gas in the stoves. The stoves are filled with bricks to store up 128 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. the heat. When they are hot enough, the gas is diverted to another stove, while air is pumped through the honeycomb of white-hot bricks. In that way, the air is made as hot as molten iron before it is pumped into the blast-furnace. After a time, the bricks grow comparatively cold, and the air is turned off and the gas is turned on again. I said the bricks grow cold, but not so cold that you would care to put your hands on them. In fact, they are so hot that the gas bursts into flame as soon as it strikes them/' "But," protested Bill, "isn't the gas that comes out of a furnace all burned out?'' "Ha, ha!" laughed Uncle Ed, "I thought you would ask about that. In other words, you want to know why, if there is anything left in the gas to burn, it didn't burn in the furnace? It's a perfectly natural question; and this is the answer: The gas that comes from an ordinary fire is gorged with about all the oxygen it can carry; it is called 'carbon dioxid.' But in a blast-furnace there is so much carbon present that there is not half enough oxygen to go round, and the gas is ready to devour more oxygen as soon as it strikes the air. This half-fed gas is called 'carbon monoxid,' and is very much like the stuff we burn in our gas-jets. In fact, they are now using this gas here to run two enormous gas- engine plants, because the furnaces produce far more gas than they can use in the stoves. One of these plants runs the pumps that force the air-blast through the stoves and furnaces, and the other plant produces enough electricity to run all the machinery in the works." Taming Steel with Fire. i2g Just then, our guide came back with the news that a certain furnace was about to be tapped. When we reached the furnace, men were at work at the tap-hole, out of which the molten iron was to pour. The brick paving in front of the furnace had a trough in it lined with sand, just Hke the trough for the slag, which was to guide the molten metal to the ladles that stood ready on cars below. The tap-hole was closed with a plug of clay, but this had been cut away until there was only a thin wall left that showed red from the heat within. At a cry of warn- ing, everyone stood aside except one man armed with a long bar, which he drove into the clay stopper. Out squirted the fiery metal pressed by tons of material overhead. In a moment, it had widened the breach through the clay to the full diameter of the tap-hole, and the dazzling white iron poured out in a torrent, while a veritable shower of sparks burst into the air and rained down upon us. We hastily backed out of range. Soon the stream of Hquid fire found its way to the farthermost ladle and began to fill it. The heat was so intense that we could not go anywhere near the stream, but one of the men with a long-handled ladle dipped up some of the liquid iron and poured it into a test mold. In a few minutes, it had cooled enough for him to take it out of the mold and break it in two. Then he took it over to an inspector, who gazed critically at the grain of the broken section to determine the character of the iron. Suddenly, there was a deafening roar. Bill and I were panic-stricken at once. To tell the truth, I had come to 130 Piclz, Shovel and Pluck. the steel-works with the notion that it was a dangerous place at best, and I was really expecting trouble from the very start. Naturally I supposed that a horrible accident had occurred. The noise was very rasping and penetrating. Of course, while it lasted. Uncle Ed could not explain what it was, because he could not possibly pit his voice against that thunder. But his tantalizing smile assured us that there was no danger until he had a chance to explain that it was the "snort-valve." "The iron was coming out of the furnace a little too fast, and so they turned the * snort-valve' to shut off the air-blast from the tuyeres. The noise of that escaping air will give you some idea of the blast that is pumped into a furnace/' One after the other the ladles were filled, and then the train chugged ofF with them. We followed it over to a building where a crane picked up the ladles, one by one, and poured their contents into a big vessel so that they would be mixed with iron from other furnaces. "They call that a mixer," explained Uncle Ed. "It holds three hundred tons of molten iron — that's three times the weight of a good-sized locomotive — and yet the pot is mounted to turn on an axis, so as to pour out metal into the ladles as needed. There goes one now!" One of the mixers was being tilted by some huge invisible hand, "just like a giant tea-pot," as Uncle Ed put it, "spout- ing a stream of white-hot tea. And that tea-cup which we see there," pointing to the huge ladle, "holds sixty tons! Let's go on and see them turn that iron into steel." Taming Steel with Fire, 131 I never had a very clear idea of the distinction between iron and steel, but now I learned that it is mainly the carbon that makes the difference. Cast-iron has more carbon in it than steel has, and steel, in turn, has more than wrought- iron. The ladle that we were following was on its way to the ''open-hearth" furnaces, to have some of its carbon burned out. That open-hearth building was the largest building I had ever seen — nearly a quarter of a mile long, and close to two hundred feet wide. The furnaces were arranged in a row down the middle of the building. Outside they were not very interesting, but a gleam of light that showed through a hole in each furnace indicated that there was something doing inside. ''They burn gas in these furnaces, not coke," explained Uncle Ed. "You see, if they brought any coke into con- tact with the iron, they would be simply adding more carbon to it. In order to make the fire very hot, the gas and the air that burns with it are heated before entering the furnace. On each side of the furnace there is a pair of stoves filled with brick. A stack sucks the burned gases out of the furnace into one pair of stoves, heating the bricks in it, while the air and gas are drawn into the furnace through the hot bricks in the other pair of stoves. Then a valve is turned reversing the current, so that the first two stoves do the heating, while the other two store up heat." "But if the air and the gas go into the furnace together, why don't they burn before they get to the furnace?" asked Bill. 132 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. "The gas and air run through separate stoves and separate passages until they enter the furnace — Hold on, there!" cried Uncle Ed, as he saw Bill go to one of the peep-holes to look in. "Do you want to lose your eyes? Why, it is as bright as the sun in there/' "I'll get him a pair of glasses, sir," said the guide. He borrowed a pair of blue goggles from one of the men so that we could see the iron boiling into steel. "How long does it have to stay in there?" I inquired. "That depends somewhat upon the grade of steel that is to be made; that is, on the amount of carbon that is to be left in it. It takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours. But there is a way of doing it in as many minutes. Guide, suppose you take us over to the Bessemer plant next, so that these youngsters can see cast-iron turned into steel in ten minutes." "But we haven't any Bessemer furnaces at these works," said the guide. "We only make open-hearth steel here." "Oh, that's so; I forgot," exclaimed Uncle Ed. "We'll have to go back to Chicago to see them. I suppose they have Bessemer furnaces there?" "Yes, and they have an electric furnace, too, at the South Works." "Very well; we'll go there to-morrow." Tapping an open-hearth furnace cannot be compared in splendor with the tapping of a blast-furnace, but there is something so fascinating about the sight of liquid steel, that we had to stop and gaze at the spectacle until we had INTERIOR VIEW OF RAIL-MILL, SHOWING A BLOOM ABOUT TO ENTER A PASS IN THE *' three-high" BLOOMING-MILL. INTERIOR VIEW OF RAIL-MILL, SHOWING (iN THE FOREGROUND TO THE LEFT) STEEL COMING THROUGH THE FINISHING PASS ON ITS WAY TO THE SAWS. BLOWING A HEAT IN A BESSEMER CONVERTER. Taming Steel with Fire. 133 seen a ladle filled to the brim and the slag drained off into a smaller ladle at the side. Then a giant traveling-crane picked up the ladle and carried it off to one end of the building. ''Now they are going to cast the ingots/' said Uncle Ed, pointing to some large boxHke molds about two feet square and eight feet high. We watched the crane-man manceuver the ladle to position over them, and then a stream of molten metal poured out of the bottom of it into one of the open-mouthed molds. As each mold was filled, a cover was placed over it. The molds were made of cast-iron, and I noticed that they rested on little cars. These cars were coupled together to make a train, which was pulled out into the yard by a dinkey engine, as soon as all the molds had been filled. It looked as though the brightly glowing molds must surely topple over, as they swayed along the uneven track and swerved around the switches. They looked top-heavy, even though they were larger at the bottom than at the top. And that puzzled me, too, because they had been filled from the top, and I couldn't figure out how in the world they were going to get the ingot out. "Very simple," explained Uncle Ed, in answer to my query. "The mold is just a box, open at both top and bottom. It merely rests on a bottom plate. A 'stripping- machine' pulls the mold off from the top, leaving the ingot resting on the bottom plate." We saw that operation a moment later. The covers 134 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. had already been removed, and then two hooks moved down over a pair of handles on the mold, and, while a plunger pressed down upon the glowing top of the ingot, the hooks pulled the mold up and lifted it clear of the ingot. After the molds had all been removed, the train pulled out with its incandescent white-hot columns, looking more ominous than ever as they swayed over the tracks. ''Next, the ingots go to the soaking-pits," said Uncle Ed, ''where the inside, which is still liquid, has a chance to be- come soHd; then they go to the 'blooming-mill,' where they are rolled down into 'blooms,' or smaller pieces, before going to the rail-mill to be rolled into steel rails.'' "Excuse me, sir," interrupted the guide; "we make our rails right from the ingot here." That was news to Uncle Ed. "Is that so!" he exclaimed. "Take us over there then, please. I know you pride your- selves on the rails you put out here." That rail-mill was certainly a wonderful sight! The enormous glowing ingots were carried on a transfer car to a sort of trough. The floor of the trough, or "table," as they call it, consisted of a series of rollers that were turning rapidly. Riding on them, the big clumsy ingot sailed along until it bumped against a pair of large steel rolls. Im- mediately the rolls seized it and hauled it through, like clothes through a clothes-wringer. We could not see that it had been flattened down very much, but we noticed that deep corrugations had been cut into its upper surface. As it moved on, the rollers turned it over on its side before it was Taming Steel with Fire. 135 caught by the next pair or ^' stand" of rolls. It went through four stands in succession, turning over between each stand, until it had made a complete turn. Then it came to what is called a *' three-high" mill, which has three rolls, one above the other. First the ^' bloom," as it was now called, went between the middle and bottom rolls; but no sooner had it emerged, than it was raised bodily, the supporting roller ^^ tables" on both sides of the mill being raised up simultaneously. The rollers of the tables were then re- versed, causing the bloom to start back between the middle and top rolls. The tables were now lowered, their rollers reversed, and the bloom sent through between the middle and bottom rolls as before; but this^ime it was switched to one side, where the rolls were a little larger in diameter, and it was a tighter squeeze getting through them. And so the bloom went back and forth, being switched over to a tighter pass each time until it was squeezed down to about eight inches square and over forty feet long. Then it was cut in two, and each bloom went through another set of rolls that gradually worked it down to the size and shape of a rail. It was fascinating to watch that snakelike bar over a hun- dred feet long, writhing as if alive. As it came back for its last sally through the rolls, a whistle was blown as a warning that the rolling was finished, and the rail was now on its way to the saws. There were five circular saws that dropped down upon the glowing metal, and, amid a shower of sparks, sawed it into four ten-yard rails. After that, the rails were carried ofF on *' run-out tables" to the ''hotbeds" to cool. 136 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. From the rail-mill we went to the plate-mill, and saw big slabs of steel rolled out into long thin sheets, but the process was so much like that of rolling rails, that I am not going to describe it here. The sights we saw at Gary were so impressive that we thought there could be little more to see at South Chicago, except possibly the electric furnace; but the Bessemer plant proved to be the most wonderful and spectacular thing yet. The Bessemer converter was a big barrel-shaped vessel, open at the top and with a lot of nozzles in the bottom, connected with an air-blast. The vessel was mounted so that it could be rocked over to the horizontal position. Then a ladleful of molten iron was poured into the converter, the air-blast was turned on, and the ponderous vessel slowly turned back to its upright position. The scores of air-jets blowing through the metal set it to boiling violently. A column of fire, sparks, and white-hot gases poured out of the mouth of the furnace, and every now and then, splashes of molten metal were blown, by bursting bubbles, high into the air, and exploded into showers of sparks. I never saw fire- works to equal that spectacle. All the time there was a steady roar, as the air forced its way up through the molten metal. In about ten minutes, the operation was over, and the vessel, still blowing a stream of fire, turned slowly over and poured out the freshly made steel. As we were walking toward one of the open-hearth build- ings, we were again startled by an explosion. A burst of flame shot out of the door, and almost at the same instant, Bb ?l^-i *. " ■j BU^i I^^^K , 'Hk^f^ ^^^^ % r-^^8 ^^^Iftvi^n 1 1 1 i^^^^^^^^^O ttI 1 ^^^^^Ik^ 1 HKe^ j '" f If ^ 1 1 r ■ 1^ **A BURST OF FLAME SHOT OUT OF THE DOOR, AND ALMOST AT THE SAME INSTANT, FOUR OR FIVE MEN LEAPED OUT OF A WINDOW." — See page I36. ALL ABOUT WAS THE WILDEST CONFUSION OF RED, GREEN AND YELLOW LIGHTS." — See page 143. Taming Steel with Fire. 137 four or five men leaped out of a window to the ground. We rushed forward to see what was the matter. ^'Oh, look! look!" cried Bill. There was a runway along the outside of the building about twenty feet above the ground, and a lot of windows opening out to it. A man had leaped out of one of the windows to the runway, wild-eyed and greatly excited. His clothing was afire, and he stopped to beat out the blaze, when suddenly he began to rush along the runway again, and presently dodged back into the building. ''Why, the fellow is crazy," exclaimed Uncle Ed; ''the excitement has gone to his head." We dared not enter the building at that point, for a mass of molten steel lay in a pool on the floor; but we ran to the opposite end and crowded in with a number of others who had collected to see what had happened. There was the man who had dashed out upon the runway, climbing out of his crane-cab, his clothing still smoking. Hanging from one hook, with the tackle at the other side slacked away, was the ladle that had done all the mischief, still pouring a trickle of molten metal. The men all crowded around the crane-man when he came down. He was pretty cool, considering the fact that his hair was singed and big patches of his clothing were burned away. "What happened?" he was asked. "Don't know. Something broke, and there was a spill. I jumped out of me cab to get out of the way of the explosion." 138 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. *^But why did you go back again?" queried Uncle Ed. *'To stop the crane. I had to jump too quick to turn off the power." ''Do you mean to say you thought of that.?" ''Sure! I ran along ahead of the crane until the first flare was over, and then went back in again and jumped aboard the crane as she come along. You see, there was men in the pit as might not have a chance to get out in time, and, besides, if I hadn't ha' stopped her, she'd ha' gone to smash and Hke as not 'a' busted a hole through the side of the building. You see, I just had to stop her." An inspector arrived just then and began an investigation. Not a life had been lost. Except for the crane-man, no one had been injured. He was only slightly burned, and pro- tested vigorously against going to the doctor. No property had been destroyed; merely a ladleful of metal was lost. The cause of the accident was a broken bearing on the winding drum of the crane. "But what made the explosion?" I asked. "There is always an explosion when hot metal spills on moist ground," replied the inspector. "The steel business is pretty dangerous," remarked Uncle Ed. "You mustn't think that a thing like this happens every day," answered the inspector. "Why, we haven't had a spill like that in years. No, the steel business is no longer the dangerous one it used to be. We are spending so much on safety precautions that our men are actually safer here Taming Steel with Fire. 139 in these works than on the streets of New York or Chicago. In proportion to our numbers, we have fewer accidents than they have in the big cities." We learned later that the crane-man who had proved such a hero was rewarded by a banquet, and a raise of pay, which was particularly acceptable, because he had been planning to get married the following month. CHAPTER XIV. IN THE LOCOMOTIVE CAB OF THE "STARLIGHT LIMITED." I KNEW a man once who could sleep to order. If he had, say, ten minutes to spare, he would lean back in his arm- chair, take his watch in his hand, and immediately begin to snore. Exactly ten minutes later, to the dot, he would sit up with a start, rub his eyes, put his watch back into his pocket without once looking at it, and go about his business. What subtle, sleep-inducing influence that timepiece had over him I never could understand. It was uncanny,^ and yet rd have given anything for a watch so hypnotic or a brain so easily quieted. I had been tossing restlessly, in my berth on the *' Star- light Limited," ever since six o'clock, and here it was after eleven! I simply could not get to sleep, although I had gone to bed before sundown so as to put in six good hours of slumber before reaching Pittsburgh, and then ! It was the anticipation of the joy awaiting me there that had banished sleep from my eyes. Uncle Ed had arranged a treat that transcended my wildest dreams — a ride in the locomotive of a crack express train. Bill was enjoying that treat as the train whirled across Ohio, and from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg I was to 140 In the Locomotive Cab of the ^^ Starlight Limited,'' 141 have my turn — a wild night ride through the Alleghany Mountains in the locomotive cab of the *^ Starlight Limited." There was something catchy about that phrase. It seemed to rhyme with the throbbing roar of the train. "The loco- motive cab of the 'Starlight Limited/'' the train seemed to say, over and over again, until it grew very monotonous. Suddenly I was awakened by a swarthy porter. '' Pittsburgh!" he shouted. I had been asleep after all. The train was pulHng into the station. I had gone to bed fully clothed so that I should not lose any time dressing. All I had to do was to slip on my coat and shoes. The instant the train stopped, I jumped off and ran forward. Bill met me half-way, his face so grimy with soot and coal-dust that I scarcely recog- nized him. "My, but it was great!" he exclaimed, as he pulled off his suit of overalls and handed them to me. "I wish I were going on over the mountains with you; but you won't make the speed we did. Why, at one place we ran five miles in three minutes and a half! That's over ninety-two miles an hour!" I hadn't time to hear all Bill had to say. As soon as I had slipped on the overalls, I snatched the automobile goggles he handed me to keep the cinders out of my eyes, and made off. When I reached the front of the train. Bill's engine was gone, but presently I made out the huge bulk of a fresh locomotive, looming up out of the darkness. Slowly it 142 Picky Shovel and Pluck. backed down to the train, bumped gently against it, and then halted, panting impatiently for the signal to start. The engineer jumped out, torch in one hand and oil-can in the other. ^'Excuse me, sir," I interrupted, *^but are you the en- gineer of this train?" *'Yep," he answered; "I suppose you're the visitor we're expecting. I'll be with you directly. I want to look over my engine a bit." I followed him around while he added a drop of oil here and there and put on the last finishing touches to the ma- chinery. Then he straightened up, and patted the loco- motive aflPectionately. '* She's a daisy!" he said. "Finest engine in the world, / say. Latest thing out of the shops. You're lucky to have a chance to ride on her." I agreed with him. "Now, sir. Where's your letter of introduction?" I handed him the precious document. "All right!" he said, glancing at it hurriedly. "Jump on." I followed him up the steps to the cab. "You can sit over on the fireman's side," he continued. "I can't be bothered with you. Jack, here's somebody to keep you company. Let me see, what's your name? Oh yes, 'Jim.' This is Mr. John Douglass, better known as 'Big Jack.'" Big Jack, the fireman, gave me a hand-shake that I thought would break every bone in my hand. He motioned In the Locomotive Cab of the ''Starlight Limited ^ 143 me to a seat on the left side of the cab, and I sat down, staring wonderingly at the strange gage-cocks, dials, levers, and complex apparatus before me. *' Isn't she a beauty!" exclaimed Big Jack. *'Yes,'' I answered doubtfully. I couldn't exactly see why they called her a beauty. To me, the engine was just an enormous monster of steel; 293,250 pounds, loaded, so Big Jack informed me. Right behind was a car-load of food and drink for this monster — 26,000 pounds of coal, enough to heat a country house all winter, and 7,000 gallons of water. "Will she use up all that coal before she gets to New York?" I asked. ''New York? Why, this engine only goes as far as Al- toona. She won't have much coal to spare by the time she gets there, and as for the water, we'll have to pick up more o' that before we get to Johnstown." Just then, a little whistle somewhere in the engine gave a thin ''peep" that seemed absurdly weak as a starting-signal for so gigantic a machine. "We're off!" cried Big Jack, tugging at the bell- rope. Charlie Martine, the engineer, pulled open the throttle, and the huge locomotive glided majestically out into the night. All about was the wildest confusion of red, green, and yellow lights: "home" and "distance" block signals, switch lamps, headlights, taillights, waving signal lanterns- How in the world could the engineer thread his way through them? Yet he went on with perfect confidence. He knew 144 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. which of the hundreds of Hghts concerned his particular path through that maze. I was content to leave it all to him. The long-longed-for moment had arrived. I was really riding in the locomotive cab of the ''StarHght Limited!" My joy knew no bounds when the fireman said, *'You may ring the bell if you want to." I never expected that I would actually have a hand in running the ^'Starlight Limited!" I went at the task with a vim, and pulled on that rope until the bell tumbled over and over. We were gathering speed right along. I found riding in a locomotive very different from riding in a parlor car. The springs of a locomotive are so much stifFer that, instead of swaying smoothly, everything was shaking around and dancing violently. A lurch of the engine threw me over toward the boiler, and I came into contact with something so unpleasantly hot that I took particular pains to avoid another such encounter. We were running through a chasm walled in on both sides, with the city streets crossing overhead, so there was but little to see. The fireman was very busy. Every now and then, he and the engineer would shout something to each other that sounded like ''Here!" It got on my nerves at first, until I found that they were caUing the signal ''Clear!" According to the rules of the road, not only the engineer, but the fireman as well, must watch the signals. After each signal the fireman would jump down off the "box," open the furnace door, put in two or three shovelfuls of coal, and then INSPECTING THE LOCOMOTIVE BEFORE THE START. 'gazing calmly AHEAD AND ATTENDING STRICTLY TO BUSINESS." — See page 148. Q W Q < O O ON o pi! W H m :z; o o Pi o w In the Locomotive Cab of the '^Starlight Limited.'' 145 slam the door shut. Then he would jump up on the box, and encourage me with my bell-pulling. "How do you know when to throw in the coal?'' I shouted. "I watch the fire/' was his reply, "and as soon as it gets ashy in any spot, I throw a shovelful of coal on that spot." "I should think some machine might be invented to do the work." "They are experimenting with an automatic stoker on some of our engines. Maybe they'll perfect the machine some day, but for the present they seem to think that they need the man on most of our engines. You see, it takes more brains to be a fireman than you would imagine." "Yes," I yelled; "you firemen don't get half the credit you deserve." I had a hundred questions to ask, but it was almost impossible to make one's self heard in that racket. Just then, there was a sudden glare of light, a roar, and a blast of air struck me, swept my cap clear off, and threw me against the boiler, from which I recoiled instantly. "What was that!" "No. 29 — the * Starlight Limited,' west-bound," shouted Big Jack. "Going some, too. She's a bit late." We were at East Liberty now, and had shot out of the long chasm. We had been climbing steadily for six miles up a steep grade, and soon we had a splendid view of the valley that was spread out below us. Off to the right we could see the flaring red lights of the steel mills and the glow of the street lamps at Pittsburgh. Low over the hills ahead of us hung the distorted figure of the belated moon, which, 146 Picky Shovel and Pluck. though now on its last quarter, lit up the whole valley with a soft, fairy-like illumination. But I was in no mood for fairy dreams. We were running downhill now, at full speed, flying along at fifty to sixty miles per hour, and still gaining speed. Flying, I said, but not with the smooth, easy motion of a creature of flesh and blood, but with the banging, clanking, shrieking, rocking gait of a gigantic steel mastodon. Beneath us tons of metal in the shape of connecting-rods, side-rods, cross-heads, pistons, valve-gear, and I don't know what-not, were pounding back and forth as if they were bent on tearing the whole machine to pieces. The big eighty-inch drivers were making four revolutions a second, and each full turn of the wheels meant an advance of twenty-one feet. Suppose something should give way! Suppose the con- necting-rod should break loose! I had heard of such an accident once, and the big steel bar, thrashing around, sliced through the engine cab as if it had been so much card- board. Or suppose a rail should give way! There they were stretching out ahead of us. I had seen how those rails were made; how, softened by heat, they were rolled into shape as if they were made of lead. Now they were gleam- ing, not of their own light, but in the cold glint of the moon, rigid, inflexible, holding this lumbering monster to its course. My, how the engine did tear around the curves! Even on a straight stretch, or ^^ tangent," as it is properly called, every slightest unevenness of the road-bed was exaggerated tenfold. It was all I could do to hang on to my side of the In the Locomotive Cab of the ''Starlight Limited,'' 147 cab. I had only one hand free to ring the bell, and I was getting very tired. I had been ringing it for a quarter of an hour straight. The fireman came up and felt of my muscle. "How would you like to trade jobs?" he shouted. I was ready to do almost anything for a change. *'Say/' I yelled, "how do you do this when you^re alone? I mean, ring the bell and stoke the engine at the same time?" "Oh, I don't ring the bell, except through the yards at Pittsburgh." "Why didn't you tell me that long ago?" I demanded. "I thought you were doing it for exercise!" Big Jack said, fairly exploding with laughter. I realized then that I had been making a fool of myself, and dropped the rope in disgust. With that responsibility off my hands, I had a better chance to analyze the sensations that had vaguely impressed themselves upon me thus far. One of the queerest things was the way objects appeared to rush at us out of the darkness. Things grew big with terrifying rapidity. The ground seemed to slip under us so fast that it gave me the peculiar sensation of sliding for- ward, and I found myself edging back toward the rear of the cab. But the most astonishing sensation was at curves. The road would appear to end abruptly, and then, when it seemed as if we must be surely going to fly off into the yawning chasm below, the engine would give a lurch and go careening around the bend. If the track should spread and we should go over, the steel coaches behind us would 148 Picky Shovel and Pluck. roll down the bank unharmed; but what of us in the loco- motive? We would not have ''the ghost of a show.'/ It was reassuring to look across the cab at the clear-cut profile of the engineer gazing calmly ahead and attending strictly to business. The cry ''Clear!'' every so often, showed that my companions were both on the alert. Then, as we swung around a curve, I saw two red lights directly ahead of us. *' Clear!" came the monotonous cry. "No; danger!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, "a red light — two of them — dead ahead! Don't you see? Can't you see? We'll hit them in a minute!" But by that time we had passed the lights, and I realized that they marked the rear end of a side-tracked freight. I collapsed upon the seat, mopping the perspiration from my brow^, and resolving to leave it all to the engineer after this. He hadn't paid the slightest attention to my agitation. Now and then, there was a hiss of steam as the engineer turned a valve to read the water-gage, or as he applied the brakes before taking a sharp curve. Suddenly an unearthly screech set my hair on end. It was our own whistle. The watchful engineer had seen some one on the track, and had taken this method of informing him that he was trespassing. If the whistle had anything like the effect on the man that it had on me, he must automatically have cleared the track with a bound. At one place, we seemed to be running right into a hill. Certainly there was no break in the ridge ahead that would let us pass. Then I made out the black mouth of a tunnel. In the Locomotive Cab of the ''Starlight Limited.'" 149 The engineer turned a lever, there was the hiss of escaping steam, followed by the grinding of the brakes, as our train slowed down. The fireman opened the furnace door slightly so that no smoke would pour out of the stack, and then came up on the box beside me. It wouldn't do to stoke the fire while going through the tunnel, because that would make smoke and vitiate the air. In another instant we had leaped into the open mouth of the mountain and were plunged into the blackest of darkness. The only light in the engine cab was a lantern almost com- pletely covered up and throwing but a sickly beam of light on the gages. Away up forward, our headlight lit up the walls of the tunnel and illuminated a small patch of the track ahead of us. The racket in that cavern as we went tearing through was almost more than my ears could endure. The tunnel was about a third of a mile long. It could not have taken us a minute to traverse it, but it seemed very much longer than that before we shot out into the moonlight again on the other side of the mountain. Then the fireman jumped down and piled on more coal, while the engineer opened up the throttle to regain lost speed. On we went, rushing through freight-yards where there were so many lights that I thought the engineer must surely be mad to go through them without slackening our pace in the least. At one point, the fireman informed me that we were going to take on water. On a level stretch right ahead of us, I caught the gleam of moonlight in the water-trough that lay between the tracks. There was a post bearing a blue-white 150 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. light as a signal to drop the scoop. Just as we came op- posite the light, the engineer shouted "Now!" and the fire- man turned a pneumatic valve that lowered the scoop into the trough. The speed of the train was enough to send the water shooting right up that scoop into the water-tank of the tender. Just as we reached the signal-light at the op- posite end of the trough, the engineer gave another shout; but Big Jack had already raised the scoop, for he had been watching the manhole at the rear of the tender, and the water spurting out had told him that the tank was full. We parsed through Johnstown, the city that was once wiped out by a flood. It lay there now, quite still and peace- ful in that fateful valley whose ominous echoes were awak- ened by the thunder of our train. On to Conemaugh we sped, and then came the long, hard climb up to the top of the Alleghany Mountains. Over twenty miles of stiff grades and sharp curves wormed up to the summit. My, how the fireman worked! I never realized before what an important personage the fireman is. He got scarcely a moment's rest during that whole climb. He was almost constantly shoveling coal into the rapacious maw of that hungry monster. But he did not forget the signals. He seemed to know exactly where they were, and just at the right instant he would snatch a moment from his work to lean out, catch the signal, and shout it to the engineer. Yes, I thought, when we get in on time to-morrow morning, the passengers, if they think about the crew at all, will give all their praise to the engineer for his watchful attention to In the Locomotive Cab of the ''Starlight Limited.'' 151 signals, and his skilful guidance of the train while they slept; but they will never give a moment's thought to the grimy, perspiring fireman who is as watchful of the signals as is the man at the throttle, while at the same time toiling at the Herculean task of trying to appease the hunger of that ravenous locomotive. There was a heavy train behind us. The cars weighed three tons for every passenger they carried. Had the fireman faltered at his task, the locomotive would have balked at hauling such a load up those steep grades. As a matter of fact, most of the trains have a helper loco- motive to take them up to the summit; but this train was obliged to go it alone. At last the laboring fireman threw down his shovel, left the fire-door ajar, and jumped up on the box beside me. As if weary of the zigzag chase up the slope, the track sud- denly dived into the heart of the mountain, and we plunged in after it. This tunnel was almost as long as the first one. When we emerged, we were on the Atlantic slope of the range with a down grade before us. The scenery was magnificent, par- ticularly when, a few minutes later, we came to the far famed "Horseshoe Curve." The road swept around three sides of the reservoir of the city of Altoona, which was still five miles ahead. On the other side of the great curve, I could make out a train, apparently running parallel with us, but uphill. Evidently the fireman was stoking his engine furiously, for it was belching billows of smoke that were beautifully illuminated as they floated into the glare shed 152 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. from the open fire-door. The next minute we had rounded the curve, and went shooting past that laboring train. On down the mountain we sped at a frightful pace. Al- most before I knew it, the air-brakes were applied, and we came to a halt at Altoona. This was not a passenger stop, but one for changing engines. Mr. Martine spoke to me now for the first time since we had started from Pittsburgh. He suggested that I go back to my sleeper now, and have a good rest."" But I hadn't had quite enough yet, and, be- sides, I wanted to run at least as far as Bill had. So I climbed out of the engine, and, while I waited for the next one to come along, munched a couple of sandwiches that Uncle Ed had very thoughtfully reminded me to put in my pocket. I am glad that I took that ride from Altoona to Harris- burg, for there was one experience that gave me a delightful thrill. The ride was a beautiful one, too. The scenery rivaled anything I had ever seen. We crossed the Juniata River fourteen times within a few miles. I was beginning to get drowsy, despite the beauty of the scenery and the violent shaking of the locomotive, and had almost fallen asleep, when I was startled by the shout *'Red eye!" in place of the customary "Clear!" and almost simultaneously the emergency brakes were applied. I was wide awake in an instant. There was the red light down the track, and we were bearing down upon it at a frightful speed. We couldn't stop, and the man who was holding the lantern had to jump out of the way as we shot by. Our brakes were In the Locomotive Cab of the ''Starlight Limited ^ 153 grinding and shrieking, but we kept on around a sharp curve, and there before us were the tailHghts of a freight- train. In a moment we would crash into it, and then what ? It never occurred to me to jump. It certainly seemed safer in the locomotive than anywhere else. Just as a colHsion seemed inevitable, we ran past the caboose and four or five cars, before coming to a stop. I had been fooled again. The train was on an adjoining track. But why had we been signaled? There was no wreck. The fireman explained it to me. ^^It is one of the rules of the road,'' he said, ^^that when a freight-train stops very suddenly because the brakes haven't been put on right, trains must be flagged on the next track until an investigation can be made, because sometimes the freight-train may ^'buckle" and throw a car across the adjoining track. Once when I was firing on the J. G. & Z., a freight buckled and threw an empty box-car square across the track just as we came along. By George! we hadn't a second's warning. Before I had time to bhnk, we hit that car right in the middle and cut it clean in two. The *old man' didn't even have time to turn the brake lever, but the people back there in the sleepers never knew a thing had happened." It was a pretty tired chap that climbed out of the loco- motive at Harrisburg and staggered down the platform to his sleeping-car. No trouble now in getting to sleep. Even before the train had started on its next lap, I was off in slumberland. I knew nothing of this mortal world, until 154 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Bill fairly hauled me out of bed about half-past nine and bade me hustle, as we had almost reached New York. The first thing Uncle Ed did after we arrived at the city- was to take us both to a Turkish bath, where strenuous efforts were made to restore our Caucasian complexion. CHAPTER XV. FLOATING A STEEL TUNNEL. Before taking a train for home, I went with Bill and Uncle Ed to pay my respects to Dr. McGreggor, and thank him for the fine trip he had given me. "Ha, young man," he grunted, as soon as he caught sight of me, "so you are back at last, are you?" "Yes, sir," I answered; "and I want to thank you for the finest time I ever had in my life, particularly last night. That ride on the locomotive was simply great!" "Locomotive, did you say?" "Yes; on the 'Starlight Limited.^" "Edward Jordan!" exclaimed Dr. McGreggor, turning to his partner. "You don't mean to tell me that you let these youngsters ride in the locomotive of an express-train." "Maybe I shouldn't have done it," repHed Uncle Ed, quite apologetically. "I must confess that I did have some misgivings on the subject, particularly after promising Jim's parents that I would be personally responsible for his wel- fare " "I should say you would!" growled Dr. McGreggor. "But," continued Uncle Ed, "I'll never forget my first ride in a locomotive, when I was about their age, and I couldn't resist giving them the treat. At any rate, nobody 156 Pick^ Shovel and Pluck. was hurt, and FU warrant you the fun was worth the slight risk; wasn't it, boys?'* '^Yes, siree! Wouldn't have missed it for the world!" But Dr. McGreggor continued to shake his head. ''The next trip you take, young man," he said to me, "will be under my personal guidance and supervision, and I'll see that you don't risk your neck, just for some foolish experience. By the way, what are you going to do now to earn your board and keep?"j ''Why, I expect to go home and work in the paper-mill, if they will have me." "They won't," snapped Dr. McGreggor. "They don't want you. They have another boy there now. Besides, I don't see any use in your wasting your time at such a job as that, anyhow. If you are going to become an engineer, you ought to work in an engineer's office. Mr. Jordan is going to put Bill in our drafting room to keep him out of mischief; I guess there is room for you there, too." "Oh, thanks!" I exclaimed, delighted. "Nothing could suit me better." "Hold on, now," growled Dr. McGreggor; "this isn't play. You'll find no thrilHng adventures here; nothing but a stiff grind of work — the real work of engineering." The following Monday, after a few days' visit at home, I was initiated into the drafting room of Messrs. McGreggor and Jordan. Bill had the advantage over me there. He was a natural artist, handy with the pencil and quick at figures, while I had but the vaguest idea of the use of drafts- GOING DOWN IN A CAISSON TO UNDERPIN A BUILDING. THE FIRE-BOAT HOUSE SHIPPED UPON A SCOW AND TOWED TO A NEW SITE A MILE UP-STREAM. LIFTING A TUNNEL SECTION OFF THE STAGING ON WHICH IT WAS BUILT, BY MEANS OF FLATBOATS RAISED BY THE TIDE. LAUNCH OF THE TUNNEL SECTION. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN JUST AS ONE OF THE FLATBOATS HAD SUNK AND THE SECTION WAS LURCHING TO THAT SIDE. Floating a Steel Tunnel. 157 men^s tools. The hours were long: From eight-thirty to five-thirty. It was hard for a boy who had lived out of doors so much to spend eight hours a day staring at ink and tracing-cloth; but I was determined to make good. Uncle Ed had to leave on an extended trip again, which left us under the sole care of Dr. McGreggor; but, although he growled and scolded a great deal, I was not disturbed, because I knew that that was his way of conceaHng a very kind heart. In fact, he scolded most just before he was going to do us some special kindness. One day he called us into his office and said: *^Here is an old friend of yours." It was Mr. Hotchkiss, the man who found us at the top of the Manhattan Syndicate Building. *' Hello, Bill! Hello, Jim!'^ he cried. "I thought you would end up in an engineer's office.'^ *^ Yes," said Dr. McGreggor, *^ we're giving them a taste of the real thing this time. No excitement — ^just steady work. I think they might as well take a vacation this morning." Turning to us, he continued: ^^Mr. Hotchkiss is going up to look at the new Harlem River tunnel. You had better go along with him; you may learn something. Better hurry along now, or you'll miss the launching." ^'Launching!" I exclaimed, ^^what has that to do with a tunnel?" ^'Run right along," he commanded, waving us to the door. "Mr. Hotchkiss will tell you all about it." "Well," began Mr. Hotchkiss, as we seated ourselves in 158 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. an elevated train, ''this is not the kind of a tunnel you worked in last summer; no' shield, no compressed air " ''Are they going through rock?" I interrupted. "Oh, no. The rock is too far under the surface. It's the simplest scheme you ever heard of. Do you know, if only we looked upon things in a bigger, broader way, they would be much simplified. If a giant were going to build us a house, he wouldn't bother to put it up brick by brick. He would cast the whole side of the house in one slab of concrete, then he'd fasten four such slabs together, and there would be your house all finished, except the trimmings, in a couple of days; or, if he was going to build a wooden house, he would go down cellar, select a giant packing-box, and make the house just as you would make a doll house. It is the same with tunneling. He would never bother with compressed air. He would go about it just as my brother and I did when we made the tunnel for a toy gravity railroad we used to have. There was a spring on the hill back of our barn, and a little stream ran down from it to the river that bordered our farm. We ran our gravity railroad down this hill, and had it cross the stream on a miniature bridge in one place, and duck under it through a tunnel near the bottom of the hill. Our tunnel was about eight inches in diameter. How do you suppose we built it? We didn't make hard work of it. My brother found a furnace pipe that was in a good state of preservation. So we dug a trench across the tiny stream and buried the pipe in it. The pipe was well covered with clay so that it would not leak, and at each end we built Floating a Steel Tunnel, 159 a clay bulkhead to wall off the water from the open ends of the pipe. That's exactly the way this Harlem River tunnel is to be constructed. They have dug a trench across the bed of the river thirty-four feet deep, I mean thirty-four feet below the normal bottom of the river, and now they are read}^ to bury their big 'furnace pipe' in it." "Do you mean they are going to put it all down in one piece?" *'0h, my, no! The tunnel is going to be a fifth of a mile long, and that would be just a little too much to handle. Besides, the river has to be kept open to navigation all the time, and the Harlem is a pretty busy stream for its size. No; they are going to lay the tunnel in five sections; four, two hundred and twenty feet long, and the fifth, two hundred feet in length. There will be a four-track subway running under the river, and so each section will be made up of four tubes abreast. What we are going to see right now, if we get there in time, is the launching of one of these tube sections, and then Monday they are going to sink it in the trench and connect it with the section they sank a couple of months ago. The engineer in charge is an old friend of Dr. McGreggor's, and he will let us see the whole show." ''I should think," remarked Bill, ''that it would be pretty hard to line up the sections properly." "Oh, that has all been provided for. They have sunk piles in the trench, and connected them with crosspieces at just the right height to support the tunnel sections at the correct grade. They have had quite a job getting the bed i6o Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ready for the tunnel. I suppose you heard about the fire- boat house they had to move? It was right in the Hne of the tunnel, and they had to get it out of the way; so they built a new concrete foundation for it, a little ways up-stream, and ran a set of fire-alarm and telephone wires to the new site, ready to connect up at a moment^s notice. Then when everything was ready, they jacked up the building, put rollers under it, moved it off its foundations upon a scow, towed it to its new location, and rolled it off upon its new foundations. Electricians were on hand waiting for it, and they began to connect up the wires at once. In two hours' time their job was done, and the fire-house was ready ^ to handle fire-alarms. They have had some diflSculty, too, with buildings along the approach to the tunnel whose foundations were liable to be undermined. In some cases, they have had to build new foundations under them. Yes, they have actually had to sink caissons down under the walls and build piers to support them. But the most ticklish place of the lot was at the cable-house on the other side of the river, where the electric power cables of the New York Central Railroad come up out of the water and are connected to the land lines. The trench runs so deep that the cable- house had to be propped up with piles. If it sagged and parted the cables, the whole railroad system would be tied up.'* We were rather surprised, when we reached our desti- nation, to find that the tunnel tubes were built up of curved steel plates. Somehow, I had the notion that they would be Floating a Steel Tunnel. l6i cast solid, but I hadn't realized that they were so large. They were about nineteen feet in diameter, but with adjoin- ing sides flattened; and then, running across all four of the tubes every fifteen feet, were plates of steel that they called 'diaphragms/' At each side, the tunnel section was in- closed with a wall of planking secured to the ends of the diaphragms, forming pockets between the diaphragms which, Mr. Hotchkiss told us, would be filled with concrete to keep the tunnel down. ''A pretty big set of 'furnace pipes,' eh?" he chuckled. ''Weighs as much as a good-sized ship. It doesn't look as big here as it would if you set it down in Broadway, say. Why, it would choke up the whole street for a block up to the top of the second-story windows! In fact, you couldn't squeeze it into lower Broadway, because this is about eighty feet wide." "Well, we are in plenty of time," remarked Bill. "They haven't begun the launching yet." "Oh, yes, they have!" contradicted Mr. Hotchkiss. "The tide is doing the launching now." "The tide! What do you mean?" "Don't you see the tunnel has been built on a sort of staging over the river? When the tide was low early this morning, they towed flatboats between the rows of piles under the tubes, and now, before very long, the tide should be high enough to raise the section oflPthe staging. Suppose we go inside while we wait, and look around a bit." The ends of the two outer tubes were closed with stout 1 62 Picky Shovel and Pluck. wooden bulkheads, but on the two inner tubes the bulkheads ran only half-way up. Mr. Hotchkiss climbed over one of these half-bulkheads, and gleefully we tumbled in after him. ''Say,'' laughed Bill, "we can tell folks that we ^ were in the Harlem tunnel before the tunnel was in the Harlem. That will set them guessing, won't it?'* There was not much to see inside, but we walked to the other end and climbed through a door in the bulkhead which here covered the whole face of the tube. Just as we got there, we felt the tunnel heave as a tug went plowing by and sent a swell rolling under the staging. "Hurray!" I shouted. "She'll be off in a minute. Let's chmb up on top." "I imagine your folks will be rather puzzled," remarked Mr. Hotchkiss, "when you tell them you took a sail on the Harlem River astride a tunnel." "Yes; they'll certainly think I've had a brain-storm." We cHmbed up a ladder and seated ourselves on a plank that lay across the diaphragms. Presently a tugboat made fast to us. "We're off," shouted Bill, as we began to move slowly out into the stream. "This is the queerest launching I ever heard of." "We are afloat, but we are not launched yet," corrected Mr. Hotchkiss. "They must sink the flatboats yet, and pull them out from under us." " But they won't do that now» will they, with two of the tubes open at one end?" Floating a Steel Tunnel. 163 *^0h, yes; the outer tubes are more than big enough to keep it afloat. You'll find that the section will float high out of water. Suppose we go down and help them scuttle the boats.'' We ran along a plank walk to the middle of the tunnel section, but by the time we got there the men had already opened the valves, and the water was rushing in. ''They don't seem to be in any hurry to get out of the boats," I remarked, pointing to a man who was standing on the gunwale of one of the flatboats. ''Oh, no; it will take a quarter of an hour for the boats to sink." It seemed like an interminable wait. Then we noticed a slight list to one side. Suddenly the whole tunnel section gave a lurch as the boat on that side sank first, but in another moment the others were submerged too, and we floated on an even keel, while the tug drew the flatboats out from under us. "Now is the time for your shouting!" cried Mr. Hotch- kiss. "We are really launched this time." "What's next?" I asked. "Home, I guess; there is nothing more to see here to- day. Monday we'll see them sink this section." CHAPTER XVI. A HANGING OFFICE-BUILDING. '^By THE way/^ said Mr. Hotchkiss, as we were on our way back to the office, ^'I am working on an odd job just now; maybe you would like to stop off and look at it/* ''Oh, certainly!" we both cried; ''let's see it/* "It's a steel building '* "A sky-scraper?" I interrupted. "Well, a few years ago," replied Mr. Hotchkiss, "vou would have thought it was pretty tall, but it is only nineteen stories high, and yet it is one of the queerest buildings ever put up, or maybe I should say put down.' Of course this whetted our curiosity. "Now suppose you had this problem put up to you/' continued Mr. Hotchkiss, "I wonder what you would do: a company erected a twelve-story steel structure alongside of an old building it had been occupying for years. Then it moved into its new quarters and tore down the old buiding with the idea of constructing on the site a twelve-story extension to the new building. Before the work on the extension was begun, the company bought a piece of property on the other side of the new building, and then decided it would like to have a ninteen-story structure over the whole of its property. But right in the middle of it was this brand- 164 A Hanging Office-Building. 165 new building only twelve stories high. What was to be done with it? Its steelwork was designed for but twelve stories, and certainly could not support seven more; it would be a foolish waste of money to tear down a building that had been finished less than two years; and, finally, they needed the building for their offices, and could not afford to have their business upset by another moving. But all this did not worry the owners. They merely said: ^ Build us a nineteen-story office-building over and around our twelve-story one, so that the two will match up per- fectly, and look like a single structure, without any hint of patchwork, and you mustn't disturb our business while you are doing it, either. '^ Now what would you young gentlemen have done if you had been faced with such a problem as that?'' "Oh, I have it!" cried Bill, "I would build a bridge right over the old building, and then run the seven stories up from that." "Yes," answered Mr. Hotchkiss, "that was our first idea, but there were two serious objections. We figured out the size of the girders necessary to span the old building and support the seven stories above, and we found that they would have to be over eight feet deep. Architecturally it would have looked very bad if we had a band of blank wall-space across the front of the building just above the twelfth story, to cover the girders. We could not have avoided that patched-up appearance that was expressly prohibited. Besides that, it would have been very awkward 1 66 Picky Shovel and Pluck. to have such deep girders running across the building. The space would have to go to waste or the rooms on that floor would have to be formed like long, narrow halls between the girders, with no chance for windows except high up near the ceiling." ''I have an idea, but it is rather daring." ''Let's have it, Jim. Engineers love to deal with daring things." ''If you couldn't bridge across, I suppose you might lift the building up and build the seven new stories under it." "Well, well," laughed Mr. Hotchkiss, "I should say that was daring. A twelve-story steel building lifted seven stories in the air! That would be a job and a half. But I didn't say we couldn't bridge across." "I have it this time," declared Bill. "You needn't put just one bridge across, but have a bridge for each story." "No, you haven't it yet. The span was so great that our girders, even for one story, would have to be too deep to harmonize with the architecture of the building already com- pleted. You need not feel badly if you don't guess the solution right away. It took us a long time to solve it, or, rather, I shouldn't say 'us,' because the problem was all solved before I became connected with the work, and I can therefore say, without boasting, that the solution was a very clever one indeed. Instead of running the bridge across just above the twelfth story, it was placed above the nine- teenth story, after the steelwork of the extensions at each VIEW OF THE BRIDGE OVER THE OLD BUILDING, SHOWING THE FIRST HANGER IN PLACE. H o w Q o S w H K U 5 H U Q H W A Hanging Office-Building. 167 side were carried up that far, and now we are building from that bridge down/* ^^ Building down r **Yes; the whole seven-story section will be hung right over the old structure. It is the first hanging building I ever heard of. Not a bit of weight is going to be supported by the old building, and yet, when it is all completed, you will never know where the old building stopped and the new one began.'* When we arrived at the queer building, we found that the bridge girders were all in place, and that they were just be- ginning to set the *^ hangers.** Those girders were enormous things, sixty-two feet long by eight feet deep, and they weighed forty tons each. To lift them up into place they had a giant crane with a boom seventy-two feet long. Mr. Hotchkiss told us that it took twenty-three minutes to hoist a girder from the street two hundred and fifty feet to the top of the building. Of course, the steel columns of the new structure at each side of the old building were made extra heavy to support the girders and the seven stories they were to carry, "Building upside down is very different from common construction work,** he said. ** Ordinarily, the columns grow lighter as we go up. At the bottom they are very heavy, because they have to support not only the floors there, but all the rest of the building above as well. Here things are reversed. Instead of columns we have hangers, and they start heavy and grow lighter as we go down, be- 1 68 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. cause they have less and less weight to support. In fact, they are Hghter than columns because they are under a pulling instead of a compressing strain. They don't have to be braced to keep them from buckling, and so you will notice that in our hangers we have removed most of the side plates that are ordinarily put in a column to stiffen it.'* It reminded us of old times to be up there among the riveters, even though we were only half as high up as when we met Mr. Hotchkiss for the first time on the Manhattan Syndicate Building. *'By the way," I asked, **what has become of Mr. Squires, our caisson friend V ^'He is over in Long Island City now,'* Mr. Hotchkiss in- formed us, ^'working on the land end of the new East River tunnel. We might all go over and visit him, Monday, after we have seen the tunnel section sunk in the Harlem." When we reached the site of the Harlem tunnel, on the following Monday, the tunnel section had already been towed to the spot where it was to be sunk. At each end of the section, two large cylinders had been secured across the tubes. "What do those cylinders mean.f^" I asked. "We didn't see them here last week." Mr. Hotchkiss explained. "When they sink the section, they will want to move it around until they bring it into exact alignment with the section already sunk. They are going to use a couple of derricks for this purpose, but they will hardly be powerful enough to support the weight of the A Hanging Office-Building. 169 heavy section unaided; with these cyHnders to buoy up the tubes, however, the weight on the derricks can be regulated very nicely to about five tons each, by filHng the cyHnders more or less with water. *'But I don't yet understand how they can fit such a cumbrous section to the one already laid," said Bill. FIG. 10. HOW THE TUNNEL SECTIONS WERE LOCKED TOGETHER. "Don't you see those steel masts at each end of the tunnel?" asked Mr. Hotchkiss. "They are location masts," and carry targets that are carefully centered over the outer tubes. Surveyors on shore will sight those targets and signal which way the section must be moved to bring it into perfect alignment. That done, the section will be moved back until a couple of heavy pilot pins just above the two outer tubes enter widely flaring "eyes" in the previously sunk section. 1 70 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. A diver will be down there to drive a wedge through the pin so as to lock it fast." (See Fig. lo.) "But/" Bill pursued, ''will that make the joint tight enough to prevent leakage when they pump the water out of the tubes?" "You forget that the tubes are to be buried in a mass of concrete. That scow," pointing to one alongside the tunnel section, ''is the one that they are going to concrete the tunnel with. Concrete hardens all right under water, but the difficulty is to keep the cement from washing away, so they are going to drop the stuff through what they call 'tremie' pipes " "And keep the ends of the pipes under the surface of the concrete," interrupted Bill, "so that the fresh stuff coming down through the pipes will be discharged under a protecting layer of concrete." "How did you know that.^" exclaimed Mr. Hotchkiss, in astonishment. "Oh, we have been traveling since we saw you last. That is the way they built the concrete piers of the Key West railroad, out in the sea." We had to take a boat over to the tremie scow. They had already begun to sink the section, but there w^as little to see; it went down so imperceptibly. It was stupid wait- ing for that deliberate tunnel section to go under, so we turned to the tremie scow. It was quite an elaborate affair with its sand, gravel, and cement bins, its elevators and conveyors, and its concrete mixers. It was fitted with five A Hanging Office-Building. 171 tremie pipes. Mn Hotchkiss explained how, after the section was sunk, the scow would be anchored right across the tunnel, and the tremies would be lowered into the pockets, one pipe between each pair of tubes, and one at each side, making five in alL ^*It will take them a day to fill each pocket,*' he said, "or a month for the whole section. You see, they have to fill each pocket before the protecting layer of concrete gets so hard that it will not rise above the fresh concrete coming through the pipes." We hung around for two long hours before that tunnel section went under, and then we thought we had had enough. As we left, the diver was preparing to go down to lock the connecting pins fast. On shore, men were taking observa- tions on the targets, and directing the movements of the derricks. Altogether, it was a very queer way of building a tunnel. CHAPTER XVII. TRAPPED IN A FLOODED TUNNEL. The work on the land end of the East River tubes, where Mr. Squires was in charge, was complicated because they ran partly through rock and partly through earth. The first step was to run a lower heading through the solid rock, only one-half of the height of the tunnel. While one set of men was pushing on with this heading, others at different points along the way broke up through the rock into the soft earth above, and dug out an upper heading. This was done without a shield and compressed air by carefully timbering the work as shown in the drawing (Fig. ii). Because the earth was of a clayey nature, it was not so neces- sary to guard against being swamped with water. However, at one point, during the early part of the work, some water had been encountered in one of the tunnels, and it became necessary to use compressed air; so a couple of concrete bulkheads were built across the tunnels to form an air-lock. After the danger had been passed, the doors of the air-lock were removed, but the concrete bulkheads were left in place for use again, if needed. On Sundays no work was done at the tunnels, except possibly some repairs to the machinery which could not very well be done during the week-days. However, a couple of 172 Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 173 watchmen were supposed to take turns patrolling the work to see that everything went well. It was a lonesome job for the old men at night, particularly during the small hours, UPPER ;-:S^i::HEADING k'OWER 'HEADING FIG. II. RUNNING AN UPPER HEADING THROUGH EARTH, AND A LOWER ONE THROUGH ROCK. THE DOTTED LINE INDICATES THE OUTLINE OF THE FINISHED TUNNEL. when the whole city was asleep. As night after night went by with nothing happening, they became rather lax, and spent much time chatting, or even napping, when they should have been going their rounds. 174 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Late one Sunday night (it happened to be the day before we saw the sinking of the Harlem River tunnel), these two old watchmen had climbed into one of the upper headings to smoke and swap yarns. They must have been there for hours, when suddenly, about two o'clock in the morning, the lights began to flicker strangely. Then they awoke to their responsibilities, and hastened down from their pleasant retreat to see what was up. To their horror, they found a torrent of evil-smelling water pouring through the lower heading. It was running so swiftly, and was so deep, that they were afraid of being swept off their feet if they at- tempted to wade through it. In another moment, the lights went out and left them in darkness. Of course they carried lanterns, so the darkness was not absolute; but they knew that the water must have risen high enough somewhere to short-circuit the wires, or else that they had been torn apart by a cave-in, which was not any more reassuring. All they could do was to withdraw into the upper heading and watch the water grow deeper and deeper, until it com- pletely flooded the lower heading and began to rise up the inclined passage leading to their retreat. There was no escape, and with increasing terror they saw the water creep toward them, inch by inch. With cruel deliberation it rose until it had climbed to the floor of their heading; then it halted, but whether this was a temporary pause, or whether its attack was spent, they had no way of teUing. They were trapped — there was no mistaking that; and a small chance they had of ever getting out alive, with forty Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 175 feet of earth between them and the surface, and the whole city fast asleep. The foul odor of the water was sickening, and it lay there within a few feet of them, black and motion- less, as if gloating over the prey it was soon to devour. Presently, one of the lanterns began to grow dim. A new terror beset them. Extravagantly, they had been burning two lanterns, instead of saving one until the other was ex- hausted. Disgusted at their thoughtlessness, they ex- tinguished the good light until the poor one flickered and died. Then, with shaking hands, they rehghted the good lantern, turning the wick low so as to preserve the oil as long as possible. In about an hour's time it, too, began to flicker. In the meantime, one of the men had found the stump of a candle in his pocket, which kept them going a little longer. While the light lasted they made one last desperate search, to see if some way of escape might not suggest itself. Up through the center of the heading ran a pipe. What it was for or where it led to, they had not the slightest idea, but with the vague hope that it might reach help of some kind, they began to hammer upon it. There was no response. Nevertheless, they kept on hammering more and more desperately as the candle burned lower and lower. That wavering Httle flame seemed the most precious thing in the world to those poor old men, and they nursed it as best they could, building a little wall of clay about it to keep the liquid paraffin from running away. But a candle cannot keep burning forever, and eventually it, too, died. 176 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. In the blackness that ensued, the terrified men clung to the pipe as their last refuge, and beat frantically upon it. Then one of them hacked a few splinters from the timbering of the heading and lighted a fire. But that was a most foolish thing to do, because there was no way for the smoke to escape. For a short while they endured the choking fumes, and then kicked the fire into the hissing water. That glimmer of light had cost them three matches, and now they had only six left to give them a peep at their miserable surroundings when the darkness became unbearable. They were being severely punished for their laxity — those two old men down there in that underground trap. About six o'clock in the morning, a man who was walking to work through the railroad yards over the tunnel, was surprised to hear some mysterious rappings, which seemed to come from nowhere in particular. He stopped and listened. Most men would never have noticed the noise, but he was of an inquisitive turn of mind, and his curiosity was aroused. Presently, he noticed a pipe sticking up through the ground; he remembered that it had been sunk by the surveyors to locate the center of the tunnel. Getting down upon his knees, he Hstened intently at the open end of the pipe, and, sure enough he heard hammering upon it. Picking up a stone, he rapped back. At once the signal was answered, and he thought he heard a faint call for help. He yelled back a word of encouragement, and ran as fast as he could to the shaft, which was twelve or fifteen hundred feet away. There he found the trouble. Just beyond the THE SPOT WHERE THE WATCHMEN WERE TRAPPED. THE LOCK THAT BARRED THE RESCUERS. < O c 5z; C w n IS O P o Pi < c > o c /5 Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 177 shaft, where a large trunk sewer crossed the line of the tunnels, there was a great cavity in the ground. A glance down the shaft showed it to be nearly full of sewage. Evi- dently the sewer-main had burst. What was to be done? The tunnel workmen began to arrive, and as each one learned that some one was trapped in the tunnel, the excitement grew to a high pitch. But no one knew what to do until the foreman appeared. He imme- diately got in touch with the superintendent by telephone, and steps were taken to rescue the unfortunate watchmen. We knew nothing of these events as we made our way over to see Mr. Squires and his tunnel, about half-past four that afternoon. Before we reached the shaft, we noticed a large crowd of men out in the railroad yards. "Hello, that looks like trouble!'^ exclaimed Mr. Hotchkiss. We ran over, expecting to see a railroad accident of some sort. "What's the matter?" I asked, as we came up to the crowd. "Sewer's busted. Tunnel flooded, and a couple of watch- men are caught down there," was the laconic reply. "Where is Mr. Squires?" demanded Mr. Hotchkiss. "Over there," pointing to the thick of the crowd. We elbowed our way through to him. "Well, Squires, what are you doing here?" "Oh, hello, Hotchkiss! I'm in a peck of trouble. The tunnel is flooded, and a couple of our men are trapped down there. Been trying to get to them since early this morning. 1 78 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. Looks as though we might not be able to unwater the tunnel for some time, so we have started to dig down to them/' "What is the matter with your pumps?" ** Pumps! Why, I have five of them going full tilt. But it's hopeless to try to pump against the whole ocean. That broken sewer-main runs into the East River below tide-level just beyond here, and ever since we started this morning, the tide has been running in faster than we could pump it out. Fortunately, the tide is falling now, and we are getting the upper hand. The company is sending over a giant ^sinker' (pump), and if we can get that to work in time, we may get the men out at low tide this evening. In the meantime, we are not going to stop digging until we are sure that the pumps will do the trick. The men are trapped right under this spot." "How in the world did you locate them.^" we asked. Then he told us all about the pipe and the knocking that had been heard. "They are caught in one of the upper headings. The air bottled in there must have kept the water from drowning them like rats. We have succeeded in pumping the water down below the level of their heading, so there will be no danger of their being overwhelmed when we dig down and break into their air-chamber. I have sent for a boat, and as soon as the water is low enough, we are going to send a rescue expedition into the tunnel. They must be in pretty sore straits, poor chaps, without a light and nothing to eat or drink all day. I have stationed a man over there at the 'location' pipe, just to rap on the pipe and Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 179 keep their courage up with the knowledge that we are stand- ing by them/' We watched the men dig for a while. It was hard work, because the shaft had to be timbered as they went down, and then it was only four feet square, so that only one man at a time could do the actual digging. But the work was done very energetically, because there were always plenty of volunteers ready to jump in as soon as a man grew tired. *'ril have to be going back now," said Mr. Squires, *'to see if there is any word from that big pump." We followed him over to the main shaft, but we hadn't gone far when we were halted by a cheer from the crowd around the *^ location" pipe. A man ran up to Mr. Squires with the information that the prisoners had broken a hole in the pipe, and were using it as a speaking-tube. Mr. Squires was all action at once. He sent for one of his electricians and had him drop an electric light down the pipe. Then he despatched another man to the nearest restaurant for some sandwiches. The sandwiches were slit in two to make them narrow enough to enter the pipe. Then they were tied to strings and lowered to the half-famished vic- tims. At last, the poor old men had plenty of food and light, but, best of all, they could talk with the outside world, and learn what was being done for their rescue. ^^ Suppose the water should get the best of your pumps now," queried Bill, "wouldn't the men drown with that pipe open to let the air out?" ''We could soon fix that by plugging up the top of the i8o Pick, Shovel and Pluck. pipe," answered Mr. Squires, ''or, if necessary, we could pump some air down to them on a few minutes' notice. I do wonder what has happened to that giant 'sinker.' If it doesn't come soon, we'll have to wait until morning. The tide is low at eight-thirty to-night." We hung around a long time, watching the workers and waiting for the big pump to arrive, but there was no sign of it, and finally we went ofF to supper. Mr. Hotchkiss left us and went home, but we were determined to see the thing through, and returned as soon as we had had a bite to eat. When we got back, whom should we meet but Danny Roach, the hero of the caisson fire. FIG. 12. DIAGRAM OF THE FLOODED TUNNEL, SHOWING THE BROKEN SEWER NEAR THE ELEVATOR SHAFT, AND THE RESCUERS ON THEIR WAY. Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. i8i "Well, well, b'ys!'* he exclaimed, "Oi'm glad to see yez ag'in. Ye're always around whin there's throuble, ain't ye? But we're goin' to have thim watchmin out, prisintly, Oi'm thinkin'. Oi guess nixt toime they'll watch, eh?" "Has the big pump arrived?" we asked. "Not yit, but the other pumps is doin' foine, and we're goin' to have a boatin' party soon." "Oh, could we go with you?" "Sure and Oi couldn't ask for bether company. If Oi had the say av it, ye'd go; but Oi haven't. The boss has made me chief navigator av the expedition, but he has picked the crew for me. They'll be three av us in the boat, and if we :WATER k>AIR-LOCK- FIG. 13. WHERE THE WATCHMEN WERE TRAPPED, SHOWING THE AIR-LOCK THAT BLOCKED THE RESCUERS, ALSO THE EMERGENCY SHAFT BEING SUNK. 1 82 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. was to take you along too, there wouldn't be any room for the watchmin/' We sought out Mr. Squires and pleaded with him to let at least one of us go with the boat, but he would not listen to the proposition. About nine o'clock, the water had sunk so low in the shaft that it was thought possible to reach the watchmen. The boat was loaded upon the elevator, and Danny Roach with two other men went down into the shaft. We all hung around and waited for an interminable period. Little was said, and seldom was a sound heard other than the steady chug-chug of the pumps. Digging over the spot where the men were trapped had stopped. All had gathered around the elevator-shaft, anxious to learn of the success of the rescue expedition. "Danny Roach will get there if it is humanly possible!'' declared Mr. Squires. But along toward ten o'clock, when we had about decided that something serious had happened, the boat returned with no watchmen in it. "It's no use," said Danny Roach, as he stepped off the elevator. "Ye've got to get the wather lower!" "Why, what's the matter, Danny .^" cried Mr. Squires. "You're all wet!" "Oh, it's nothin'. Oi got a bit splashed up." "He fell overboard, I guess," remarked one of the men. Danny Roach ignored the interruption. "You know thim concrete bulkheads down there .^ Well, we got along Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 183 all right, at first, though we did have some bother bumpin' into the muck cars and timbering But whin we come to the first bulkhead, we met throuble face to face. The wather was wan fut from the top of the door. We had to push the boat down and jam it through, be main force. Afther we got into the air-lock, we was stuck for sure, be- cause the door in the other bulkhead was all kivered up. We saw we couldn't get no farther, and so we turned about while we had a chancet to git the boat back." ^^But you haven't told us yet how you happened to get so wet,'' I said. "It was a foolish act, but Oi might as well tell ye what happened. It seemed too bad to go back whin we was so near the min, so Oi thought Oi'd dive under and swim to thim." "What!" I cried, "under the bulkhead in that sewage?" "Sure Oi niver thought av it, thin! But whin Oi come up on the other soide, Oi knowed what a fool Oi was. There wasn't a speck of light nowheres, and in a minute Oi was so turned about Oi couldn't tell which way Oi was headin'. It was none too pleasant splashin' about in that wather ayther. But Oi felt around, and, afther a whoile, Oi found the bulkhead and the door in it. Thin Oi doived back through it, and cloimbed back into the boat. 'Tis an un- lucky day, this! Whin Oi got back and was scrambHn' aboard, wan av our lantherns fell overboard, and, say, Oi'd Hke to know the feller what filled the other one. We wasn't half-way back whin the blame thing sputtered and wint out; 184 Picky Shovel and Pluck, and there we was with niver a match betwane us. Oh, it was some skilful navigatin' we done thin, bumpin' around there in the dark ag'in' the muck cars and other things. Half the toime we didn't know if we was comin' or goin.* Yez kin bet yer swate loife we was glad to ketch a glimmer av the loights in the shaft. Nixt toime we go in, Oi'll fill the lantherns mesilf, and thin Oi'll nail thim to the boat. And say, Misther Squires, if ye'll give me the loan av that pocket search-loight av yours, Oi'll go right back and rescue thim watchmin now.'' "That would be foolish," answered Mr. Squires. "The water is creeping up on us again, and we dare not send you down again to-night. Besides, what would be the use of swimming to the watchmen; you couldn't hire them to dive under the bulkhead with you. It will be low tide at about nine o'clock to-morrow morning, so you had better go home now if you want to lead the next rescue expedition." As there did not seem to be anything else to do, Bill and I went home, too. Unfortunately, we would have to go to work the following morning, and couldn't be around to see the next rescue expedition start off. Sometime during the night, the big pump arrived, and by half-past nine Tuesday morning, the water was so low that Danny Roach had no difficulty in navigating his boat through the two bulkheads to the two watchmen. Mr. Squires told us all about it the next time we saw him. "I suppose the watchmen were * fired' for neglecting their duties," I remarked. Trapped in a Flooded Tunnel. 185 «i Tired!" he exclaimed. ^^Well, I guess not! They are the most vigilant watchmen in New York. Thirty-two hours in that tunnel gave them a lesson they will not soon forget.*' CHAPTER XVIII. SEALED IN A CHIMNEY FLUE. It really wasn't our fault, but the laugh was on us all the same, and Dr. McGreggor never got through referring to our ^^ youthful incompetency." This is how it all came about: Uncle Ed was interested in a factory over in Hoboken. It happened that the smoke-stack of the factory was badly rusted through and needed replacing. Another crying need of the factory was a good ventilating system. At first it was proposed that a big fan be installed, but Uncle Ed had a better idea. A fan would require an engine or a motor to drive it, and would be using up power. Uncle Ed was going to let the smoke-stack do the pumping at practically no cost. Figure 14 shows how he planned to do it. The ventilating flues had already been installed in the factory building, running to all the different rooms. They terminated in a single main where originally it had been planned to install the fan. According to Uncle Ed's plan, when the smoke- stack was put up, a second stack would be erected around it. The inner stack was to be about thirty inches in diameter, and the outer one fifty-two inches, leaving a clear space of eleven inches all around. 186 Sealed in a Chimney Flue. 187 We caught on at once, when Uncle Ed showed us his plan. The air in the space between the two stacks would be heated by the hot furnace gases passing up through the inner stack, and would expand and rise, so that the outer stack would "draw'^ like the inner one. Then it was merely necessary to connect the ventilating system of the factory with this outer stack. The ventilating main was to be a big flue, six feet high by two feet wide. Of course the plant would have to be shut down while the work was being done. It happened that Decoration Day came on Monday, and so the men were given a holiday from Friday night until Tuesday morning, and in that brief time, the old chimney was to be taken down, the new one put up, the outer casing built around it, and the big flue set up from that casing to the terminals of the ventilating pipes in the building. The job was a little out of the ordinary for our oflSce. Bill and I had had a good deal to do with the specifications and the drawings, so Uncle Ed asked us to oversee the work while he took a week-end holiday. He wished to have some one on the spot thoroughly familiar with the plans, who could settle any questions that might arise, without loss of time; for time was very precious. Things did not go along as smoothly as had been planned. The work was to have been finished by five o'clock Monday, but at six there was still a good deal to be done to the venti- lating flue. However, only two men were needed for this work. The sections of the flue were joined by riveting their 1 88 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. 1§5 Sealed in a Chimney Flue. 189 overlapping ends. One man had to go inside with a "dolly" which he held against the rivet head while the man outside battered down the projecting shank of the rivet. After the two men had had their supper, we went out for ours. Not anticipating any trouble, we stayed out until after eight, expecting that the work would be about done by that time. When we returned, we found that a problem had arisen, and the men had proceeded to solve it themselves. By some mistake, the flue sections were made a little too long. However, this was not discovered until the last one was about to be riveted in place. The last joint was intended to be a butt-joint, that is, the ends of the section were faced with angle-iron, and the rivets were to be run through the flanges of the angle-iron, as shown in the insert in Figure 14. When they found that the last section was too long, the thing to do was to rip off the angle-iron and set it back the proper distance, and then cut off" the surplus material. But this would have taken much time, so, instead, they cut both sections just back of the angle-iron, and still had material enough to make a sHp joint in place of the butt joint. The two sections were joined, and they were just beginning to rivet them when we returned. The man inside had an electric light that was run in through a small door in the outer stack. It struck me as rather decent of these men to try to save time for which they were getting double pay. At last, at a quarter to ten, the last rivet was battered down, and we congratulated ourselves on finishing up the 190 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. work in plenty of time. Then a new difficulty presented itself that was of so serious a nature that we all held a council of war, and finally decided we must call up Dr. McGreggor for help. Bill said he hadn't the nerve. I didn't Hke the job myself, but something had to be done at once, so I did it. ''Hello, is this Dr. McGreggor.?" I called. "Yes; who's calling?" "Why, this is Jim." "Yes, yes; what do you want?" "I called up to say that we have finished that job." "You have, eh?" "Yes, it is all riveted up good and tight." "Well, that's good " I heard the telephone cHck. "Hold on," I cried. "That isn't all " But he had already hung up his receiver. I rattled the hook violently. "Ring him up again," I shouted to Central. "Well, who is it?" came the response after a few minutes. "It's Jim; I wasn't through." " I thought you said the job was finished." "Yes; I did, but " "But what?" "Well, you know the space between the casing and the stack is only eleven inches." "Yes." "And the door in the casing is only twelve inches square." "Yes, yes!" Sealed in a Chimney Flue. 191 **And at the other end the largest pipe that connects with the flue measures only eight by twelve inches." ^'What are you getting at?'' ^'Well, a man could never crawl through any such open- ings/' "I should say not." ''Well, there is a man in the flue now, and we cannot figure how to get him out." "A man! Whatman.?" "Why, one of the workmen — ^the fellow that held the dolly against the rivet heads," I explained. There was a violent explosion at the other end of the line. I was glad that three miles of telephone wire separated us. ''This is about the most stupid thing I ever heard of," shouted Dr. McGreggor. "We provided a butt-joint for that very purpose — so that the last joint could be riveted from the outside." "But," I protested, "the last section was too long, and had to be cut down, and we thought it would save time to cut off* the angle-iron and make a slip joint of it. In fact, it was the men who suggested it, and we thought they knew what they were about." "Look here, Jim; what do you suppose we sent you down there for if it was not for just such an emergency. The workmen were sent to use their hands, but we sent you along to use your heads. There is not a moment to spare. Get a piece of paper at once and jot down these orders. — Ready .f^ — Go as fast as the cars will carry you to No. — 192 Pick J Shovel a?id Pluck. Halsey Street, Brooklyn, and wake up John Kruger. Tell him to go to his shop, and get that two by three door that he was making for the Mansville people last week, and sell it to us on pain of death. We'll pay him double price for it. Tell him you must have it at once, and that he must help you^ carry it over to Hoboken, or he'll never get another job from me. Now call Bill here! I want to talk to him while you are gone.'' ''Come, Bill, and take yours." I was only too glad to abdicate in his favor. Grabbing my hat, I ran out of the building and jumped aboard a passing car. It is a long ride from Hoboken to Brooklyn at that time of night. By the time I had routed out my man and he had gone to his shop for the door, it was far past midnight. When we reached the factory with the door, I found that Bill had carried out his directions. A hole had been cut in the flue just large enough for the door, which let the imprisoned man out. Quick work was made of riveting the door in place, but the east was taking on a rosy hue before the last rivet was battered down. At any rate, the job was completed before the firemen arrived to start the furnaces. H O <3 > O U H O < U » » O O n H o g u H o pa D u THE EXPERIMENTAL AERATOR AT THE RYE OUTLET OF THE KENSICO RESERVOIR. THE BIG AERATOR BASIN AT KENSICO. CHAPTER XIX. WASHING WATER WITH AIR. *'Let me see/' mused Uncle Ed, *'you boys saw a good bit of the aqueduct last year, didn't you?" "Oh yes,'' Bill spoke up. "We saw all the work under the city and the big siphon under the Hudson River at Storm King." "That's a pretty deep tunnel there." "I should say it was," declared Bill, "Eleven hundred feet deep." "Yes, eleven hundred and fourteen feet," corrected Uncle Ed; "that is, below sea level, but the aqueduct west of the Hudson before entering the pressure tunnel is about four hundred feet above the surface of the river. The shaft on the west side of the river is to be closed with a plug of concrete; but on the east side they are going to close the shaft with a cover that can be taken off if desired, so that they can get into the siphon to clean it, or make any necessary rapairs. Now you can imagine that if there is a difference of four hundred feet in the water level of the west side over the east, there will be an enormous upward pressure on that cover. Suppose you reckon it up for us. Bill, and tell us just about what it will be." 193 194 Pick, Shovel a?jd Pluck, After a bit of figuring. Bill declared that it would be a hundred and seventy three pounds on ever}' square inch. **A11 right," said Uncle Ed, "the shaft is about fourteen feet in diameter. Now, tell us how much weight that water wUl lift." It took Bill longer to work out the answer to that problem, but finally he arrived at the enormous sum of 3,834,891 pounds. "You see," said Uncle Ed, "it will have to be a pretty good sized cap to cover the shaft and take all that thrust. The cover has already been made and it is over in the Green- ville freight yards now. I thought you might like to take a look at it. It is an enormous dome, nearly seventeen feet in diameter and sLx feet deep, and there is a ring that the cap is to rest on, which measures nearly eighteen feet across, or seventeen feet ten inches, to be exact. When you see the big dome you will realize that it was no small job casting such an enormous chunk of steel; why, it took 138,000 pounds of molten steel to fill the mold of the dome completely, and after it had stayed in the mold twelve days it was still very hot. You know that in casting iron or steel they always have to make the mold a trifle larger, to allow for the shrink- age of the metal when cooling. They figure about three- sixteenths of an inch of shrinkage to the foot. In this case the cover shrank three and three-sixteenth inches in dia- meter and one and one-eighth inches in height. When it was taken out of the mold, it was put into a big boring mill to finish oflf the face that is to rest on the curb-ring. Then the Washing Water with Air. 1 95 manhole in the top of the dome had to be machined and the holes with which the cap is to be held down had to be drilled. It took three months to machine the giant casting, and then its weight had been reduced to 92,500 pounds. Altogether it took thirteen months to make that dome and the curb- ring and to test them thoroughly.'' ^'That seems Hke a very long time," commented Bill. "Yes, but you do not realize what a difficult matter it is to make such big castings. Why, it took four months to build the mold alone; eleven car loads of sand were used in it. You won't find many steel works that would be willing to undertake such a big job. A plant in Philadelphia did the work, but after the castings were finished, then came the job of getting them to New York. They couldn't be placed on a flat car, because they would stick out too far on each side and would interfere with traffic on adjoining tracks You know, an ordinary flat car is only eight feet wide. If they should put the castings on end they would be too high, because locomotives and trains are seldom over fifteen feet high, and many bridges are constructed with only a very little clearance above that height. Finally a couple of "well cars" were used. They are flat cars with a well or opening in the floor, so that the castings could stick through. The curb-ring was set on a slant, so as to reduce its height as much as possible. The lower edge of the ring came within four inches of the rail. A special train was made up to haul those two castings, and it had to come by a roundabout way to Greenville in order to avoid low 196 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. bridges, but at one place it was actually necessary to lower the tracks, so that the train could pass under a bridge! Then at another point, there was such a tight squeeze that the castings actually knocked ofF a few bolts from the bridge in passing under. It took fourteen hours to make the trip from Philadelphia to Greenville.'^ *' Fourteen hours,'' ejaculated Bill, "'I could almost walk it in that time." "Well hardly, that would be over six miles per hour, but I must admit that that is very slow traveling for a railroad train. You see the castings were so heavy and so tall that they made the cars top-heavy and would get to rocking dangerously, so that the train had to move slowly and every once in a while when the swaying threatend to upset the cars, it was necessary to stop until the motion quieted down. The big castings arrived at Greenville last night. I think that if you go over there now you may find them still on the cars and can see how they were set up on an elaborate tim- ber framing." We did go over and have a look at the monster castings^ but it isn't worth while describing how they were mounted in the cars; that is shown well enough in the accompanying photographs. The big cover was much the harder piece to mount, because it was so very heavy and of such an awkward shape. The castings were about to be shipped on a lighter and towed up the Hudson. A man who had come over to inspect them told us about the enormous bolts that were to anchor the cover down to the concrete lining of the shaft Washing Water with Air. 197 ''They are going to use thirty-six bolts/' he said, "each of them four and one-half inches in diameter and fifty feet long! When they came to testing them, they could not find a machine in the country both long enough and strong enough to break one of them. They had to cut one of the bolts into short pieces and it took a pull of 1,716,000 pounds to break one of the pieces. I guess thirty-six bolts as strong as that ought to hold the cap down, eh?" ''Hold it down!" I exclaimed, "why, to look at that big dome you wouldn't think it would be necessary to anchor it. While we are on the subject of the aqueduct, I might as well tell of two other curious things we saw during the sum- mer. One afternoon Bill and I took an excursion boat down to Coney Island. As we came to the Narrows, Bill pointed out something that looked interesting, but we could not make out just what it was. There was a barge with a derrick at one end and a queer looking framework that ran down into the water. "It looks as though they were setting a pipe in that frame." I remarked. "Yes, that's a pipe they are raising with the derrick," agreed Bill. "Do you know," I exclaimed, "I believe it's the aqueduct. They were to run a pipe line across here from Brooklyn to Staten Island. And, see that dredge there, it must be digging a trench for the pipe line." "It does look hke a pipe Hne," reasoned Bill, "but it can't be the aqueduct. They could never make the joints tight 198 Picky Shovel and Pluck. enough if they are going to connect the sections together before lowering them into the trench. Why, the water wouldn't be fit to drink if any of this dirty, salty bay water leaked in. No siree; that can't be the aqueduct. You'll find it's a sewer, or something like that." It sounded Hke good reasoning, but Bill was wrong. It was the aqueduct siphon that was being laid. We made it a point to find out all about it. In fact, through Uncle Ed's influence, we obtained a permit to board the pipe-laying barge and witnessed the operation ourselves. The launching cradle or ** skid-way," as they called the steel frame we had noticed, curved down under the barge and dragged along the bottom in the trench that was ex- cavated by the dredge directly in front of the barge. It wasn't safe to do the dredging too far in advance of the pipe- laying, because the tide, sweeping through the Narrows, was Hable to wash the mud right back into the ditch and fill it up again. In fact, they were depending upon the tide to do this, after the pipe was laid. We noticed that there was a sewer outlet along the line of the siphon, and one of the first things we asked was, how they were going to make the joints tight enough to keep sewage water from leaking in and yet expect the pipe line to slide down that curved cradle. ''Leak in!" ejaculated the engineer in charge. ''That's not worrying us. What we have to look out for is that the water doesn't leak out. There will be a much bigger pres- sure inside than out. But we are going to make the joints Washing Water with Air. 199 water-tight and flexible too. Just watch and you can see for yourselves how the joints are made/' The pipe sections were three feet in diameter inside and twelve feet long. Each was formed with a ''bell" at one end and a "'spigot'" at the other, as shown in Fig. 15. The in- side of the bell was finished very accurately to a spherical surface. FIG. 15, THE FLEXIBLE. JOINT USED IN THE SIPHON. "If it varies six one-thousandths of an inch from a truly spherical surface/' the engineer told us, "'the pipe is thrown out." We saw them raise one of the pipe sections (it weighed nearly four and one-half tons) with the derrick and place the spigot end in the bell of the last pipe section connected. Then a "snake" or piece of rope was placed around the spigot to close the mouth of the bell and molten lead was poured in to fill up the space between it and the spigot. 200 Picky Shovel and Pluck. Washing Water with Air. 201 "When that lead cools, won^t it shrink and make a leaky joint?'' asked Bill "Certainly, it will shrink,'' declared the engineer. We'll have to add about twenty-two pounds to fill the shrinkage spaces, but we'll add that lead cold." "Cold, how?" "Just watch," he said again. All around the bell there were "gib" screws, thirty-two altogether. After the molten lead had set, which it did al- most instantly, these were unscrewed very quickly with pneumatic tools. Then little slugs of soft lead, about an inch long, and half an inch in diameter were set in the holes; after which the "gib" screws were screwed into the holes again, forcing the lead slugs into the mass of soft lead al- ready cast, making it fill the bell completely. In that way a lead ball was formed on the spigot that fitted the bell perfectly, and the pipe was now swung about on the lead ball to see that it would turn smoothly. The next process was to test the joint. The testing ma- chine was a cylinder that fitted freely inside the pipe and was lowered from the upper end to the joint. It had wheels to roll on the inside surface of the pipe and keep it from stick- ing fast anywhere (see Fig. 16). At each end of the cylinder there was a rubber gasket and a tube something like an auto- mobile tire. When water was admitted into the tires they expanded and jammed the gasket against the pipe walls making a dam at each side, to keep the water from leaking past them. Water was also admitted between these dams 202 Pickj Shovel and Pluck. and the pressure was raised to one hundred pounds per square inch, at which pressure it was held for ten minutes. As not a drop oozed out of the bell the engineer declared the joint perfect. Then the barge was moved slowly forward by- hauling in on the forward anchor cables and slacking off on the after ones, until the bell end of the pipe section, just connected, slid down the skid-way to a convenient level for fitting on the next section. It was slow work, but far easier than laying the pipe with divers. The engineer told us how they had dragged heavy anchors of different kinds across the site of the siphon to find out how deeply the pipe Hne would have to be buried to render it safe from damage by ships' anchors; for the pipe line was to run across the place where incoming ships must stop and wait for the quarantine doctors to examine their crews and passengers. The other interesting feature in connection with the aque- duct we ran across late in the summer. The city water was getting to have a very bad taste. I was almost afraid to drink any of it, lest I get typhoid or some other disease. However, Uncle Ed assured me that there was nothing dan- gerous about the taste, but that it was due to a harmless microscopic growth. ''When the new aqueduct system is in service,'' he said, "we won't be bothered with that disagreeable taste. All the water is to be washed with air." "What do you mean by that?" I queried. "They are going to shoot it up into the air and make it Washing Water with Air. 203 fall in a spray. In that way the air will come into contact with the water, purify it and carry off the disagreeable odors/' *'You mean they are going to do that to all the Catskill water!" I exclaimed, incredulously. *' Certainly, it is all to be aerated.'' "It ought to make a tremendous geyser, then.*' "Oh, it won't be one geyser, but hundreds of them," he explained. "There is to be one large aerating basin at Ash- okan to cleanse the water before it enters the aqueduct, then there will be another just below the Kensico Lake to cleanse the water as it comes from the lake, before letting it into the city. You might run up and take a look at it some Saturday afternoon. It isn't working, of course, but the basin is all finished and piped, and you can imagine it filled with foun- tains, sixteen hundred of them, each spouting a whirling jet of water fifteen to twenty feet high." We went up to see the aerator the very next Saturday. It covered an area of three acres. The basin was very shallow, because it was not intended to let the water collect there. Down the center ran a broad slot covered with an iron grating through which the water would flow out freely and enter the aqueduct on the last lap of its long journey from the mountains to the city. We got some idea of how the aerator was going to look and smell by walking over to a small experimental aerator just below the Rye dyke of the lake. This small aerator was made up of a cluster of foun- 204 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. tains that shot the water ten to twelve feet high. It was a beautiful sight, with the rainbows playing in the spray, but it was far from being as agreeable to our olfactory organs when we stood on the windward side, for then we got in concentrated form the tainted odors that the air was wash- ing out of the water. LAYING THE AQUEDUCT SIPHON ACROSS THE NARROWS. m o o w H CHAPTER XX. FIGHTING AN UNDERGROUND STREAM. **Look, Jim; what's the crowd there for?'' cried Bill, pointing to a knot of men that had collected about half a block off. ''Oh, it's a street fakir, I suppose." "No, it isn't," he persisted. ''Why, don't you see, there's a fellow climbing up the side of the building. He's trying to get into a window up on the fourth floor." We ran over to find out what was up, but nobody in the crowd seemed to know. "Looks like a very bold thing to do right here on Broad- way in full daylight," said one of the bystanders. "But nobody tried to stop him. I suppose it took them all by surprise, just as it did me." "Why," I asked, "you don't think he's a burglar, do you r "Well, I don't know, but you must admit it looks very much like housebreaking for a man to chmb up the leader of a building and crawl into a fourth story window. If he had a right to go in there, why didn't he go in by the front door?" "And if he hadn't a right in there," I retorted, "why did he break in, in broad daylight?" 205 2o6 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. **I suppose he depended upon the very audacity of his exploit to fool the people, and keep them from interfering." "It doesn't look to me as if there was anything to steal in that place," commented Bill. ''It's nothing but an empty loft." ''Nevertheless, persisted the man, he can't be in there for any good. Somebody ought to notify the police." I felt like asking him why he didn't, when it occurred to me that the same question could be applied to myself. I was like everyone else in the crowd, waiting for the other fellow to act. But someone had acted. In response to a telephone call, four burly poHcemen rushed around the corner and charged through the crowd. They had just reached the entrance of the building, when the "housebreaker" appeared and calmly walked out as if nothing was the matter. "That's him," shouted the crowd quite ungrammatically. It was easy to recognize the fellow because he was dressed in khaki. The four policemen pounced upon him, and dragged him forth. I never saw such a queer expression of astonishment and apprehension on a man's face before. Certainly his was not the face of a criminal. In fact there was something strangely famihar about it." "Why, it's Jim HalUday," cried Bill, "the transit man we used to know down in the East River Tunnel." "Sure enough." "Hey, Jim HalUday," I called, trying to get near him. "What's the matter.?" Fighting an Underground Stream, 207 Jim Halliday turned an appealing look in my direction. At the same instant one of the policemen reached through the crowd, and seized me roughly by the collar. ^*You know this man?'' he demanded. ^^Yes, he is a transit-man, a surveyor." *^Come along then," barked the policeman, giving me a yank. I started to protest that his prisoner was not a crim- inal, and that I had no deahngs with him any way, but he only handled me the more roughly." As we reached Canal Street, the big traffic pohceman stationed at that corner came over to see what was up. Jim HalHday knew him and appealed to him, protesting his innocence. ''He's all right," declared the big policeman, "I know him. He's on the subway job here." ''But what's he cHmbing up the side of a building for, and breaking into fourth story windows?" protested his captors. "I've been trying to tell you," gasped HalHday, "but you won't listen." "Let go of your strangle hold, Mike," demanded the traffic man, "and give him a chance to talk." Reluctantly the bluecoat released his grip on Halliday's collar. At the same time the hand that clutched my collar relaxed; while Halliday explained that he had to get to the roof of the building to see if the line of the building had been disturbed by the subway work. "The fourth floor is vacant," said Halliday, "and when 2o8 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. my rod man went upstairs he found the door locked, so that he couldn't go up any further. We had to get up there somehow, so I climbed up the leader, got in through the window and opend the spring lock from the inside, then when I came down for my rod man these cops ^pinched' me." *^Well, next time,'' cautioned the traffic policeman, while the others melted away, ^^you get the key from the owner or his agent. CHmbing leaders ain't safe for any man, and besides such athletics are against the law — see?" Halliday, still wearing that half frightened, perplexed look, ran across the street to the construction office. Bill, who had been sticking close to me through it all, but prudently keep- ing his mouth shut, made after him. ^'Come on, Jim," he shouted, ^^ maybe he'll show us what they are doing down here." We overtook our man at the entrance to the construction office. "Oh, I am much obliged to you fellows," he said, "for trying to save me. What stupid blockheads those cops are. Wouldn't listen to what I had to say, but just dragged me off to the station house." "But I can't understand just what you were going to do on the roof," said Bill. "Well, you know we are digging the subway through here, and we have to be pretty careful not to undermine any of the foundations. We made a careful survey of every building before we started work and photographed every crack in the walls. Now as the work progresses we keep watching things to see that no new cracks develop and every now and Fighting an Underground Stream. 209 then we have to sight from the street to the eaves of the buildings to see that they are not sagging or leaning out of their original line/' *' But why should these buildings sag. Don't their founda- tions go down to rock?" "'Rock! What, here? Why, there is no rock here. You can go down two hundred feet without striking anything but sand." *'I suppose that is why there are no skyscrapers in this part of the city," I suggested. "Well, we are going to put up a fairly tall building right here. It will be twenty-two stories high." "What, on sand foundation?" "Yes, on a floating foundation. We are going to put in a mass of concrete and steel girders under each column. It is going to be quite a job too, because the subway will pass under a corner of the building." "You mean the building is going to rest on the roof of the tunnel?" "Oh no. The weight will be taken by the main columns, and the building will be bridged right over the subway. Would you like to go down into the 'hole' and take a look around?" We jumped at the suggestion and eagerly followed Halli- day through a gate in the wooden fence that enclosed the site of the building. A couple of flights of rough wooden steps led us down into a perfect forest of timbering. Over- head was the planking that supported the traffic of Broadway . 210 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''What's all this lumber for?'' Bill inquired. ''Why, to hold up the street and to keep the sides of the cut from caving in on us. This is the upper level here. You know the subway is double decked at this point." "You mean there will be two sets of tracks, one on top of the other.?*" I asked. "Yes, the Canal Street line runs into the Broadway line here and instead of joining with it on a level the tracks pass under and come in between the Broadway tracks." "Where is all that water coming from," asked Bill. "Springs," said HalHday. "There's a regular under- ground river running here all the time. There used to be a pond near this place and a stream ran out of it across town to the Hudson. When the city was built up as far as this the stream was confined between two walls and there was a street at each side. They called it a "canal" then, but it was little more than an open sewer, because a lot of sewer pipes discharged into it. They used to make the prisoners come down here and clean it out every once in a while. Only the other day one of our men dug out a foot-iron." "What's that?" I inquired. "A big ball of iron that they used to chain to the foot of a prisoner to keep him from running away. This ball had an arrow cut in it, which was the mark the British used on the foot-irons of their prisoners. Evidently the fellow that wore this had been captured in one of the battles of the Revolution, and had been set at work on the canal during the British occupancy of New York. They have the ball Fighting an Underground Stream, 211 at the office now. We'll take a look at it when we get back, and you can see where the chain was broken off from the ball, showing that the prisoner had probably freed himself and made his escape. ''Well, after a while," continued HalHday, ''as the city grew, the old 'Collect pond,' as it was called, and the "canal" too, were filled in and disappeared from view, but the stream is still there as we have found out to our sorrow. It is giving us a lot of trouble. Why, we are pumping out twenty million gallons of water per day." "Whew," whistled Bill, "are you, really?" "Yes, and it's fine spring water. There's enough to supply a large part of New York with drinking water." "What do you do with it.?'" "Pump it into the sewers and get rid of it as fast as we can. We merely want to keep it oiit of our excavation." "But what are you going to do when the subway is finished," I asked. "You won't have to keep pumping here forever, will you ? " "Oh! the water won't give us any trouble then. The floor and walls and roof of the tunnel are made of concrete thoroughly waterproof, and the concrete is made very thick in some places so as to keep the subway down." "To keep it down?" "Yes, if it were not for the extra weight of those masses of concrete, the tunnel would be light enough to float. The water might hft it, crack it open and then drown it out!" We were peering down at the pumps when a drop of muddy 212 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. water splashed on my neck. Another drop hit me in the face, as I looked up. Then we heard a peal of thunder. "Why, it must be raining," exclaimed Halliday. "You'd better get out of here, if you don't want to get your clothes spoiled. It's awfully dirty when the mud and water from the street overhead drip through the cracks in the planking." We made a hasty retreat up the steps. "Good gracious, Jim," cried Bill, "it is raining cats and dogs. How shall we ever get back?" "Yes, and it's ten minutes past one," I exclaimed, looking at my watch. "Dr. McGreggor will have it in for us." The sky had suddenly grown as black as night and water was pouring down in torrents, while lightning was flashing all around us. "There's no use trying to get back in this storm," declared Halliday, "you might as well phone to the office that you are marooned. You may use our phone." Bill undertook that disagreeable task and then we hung around the office, waiting for the storm to stop. In the meantime Halliday, who was also kept away from his work by the storm, sat down in the office and began to tell us all about the subway: "Its going to be a wonderful transportation system, when it's all done. There will be track enough in it to reach from New York almost to Indianapolis, that is, counting in the elevated lines, too, because they belong to the same com- panies. You will be able to travel all day right here in New York City, without going over the same track twice. Fighting an Underground Stream. 2It^ ''All for five cents?" asked Bill. "Oh, no; there are two separate companies. But I'll tell you what you can do; you will be able to ride on one line all the way from Flushing to Coney Island for five cents, and that is twenty-one miles, and on the other line you will be able to ride from White Plains Road at the northern border of the city, twenty-six miles to New Lots Avenue, Brooklyn, all for five cents. You would have to pay seventy-five cents to go that far in a steam train. ''By the way, talking about the old canal, we uncovered the foundation of an old bridge here, the other day. It's down there now. Would you like to see it?" "Sure," I exclaimed, "but wouldn't vve get all covered with mud?" "Oh, I can fix that up all right; there are some extra boots and slickers here you could put on." Fitted out in oilskins and boots we descended into the "hole" again. It certainly was disagreeable down there. There was a constant shower of mud — the scourings of the street above. Through that disgusting rain we made our way down the slippery steps to the lower level where Halli- day pointed out a cluster of piles. "Are you sure they belong to Revolutionary times?" I asked. "I don't know just how old they are," repHed HalHday, " but you can see that it is an abutment for a bridge. See the 'batter' piles," pointing to some of the piles which were slanted back to take the thrust of the bridge. 214 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. " But the piles don't look very old," I objected, "why, they haven't rotted a bit." "That doesn't signify anything. Wood does not rot under water. If you keep wood wet all the time it will last centuries. These piles may be much older than the Revolu- tion. There has been nothing but wet sand around them since they were driven into the ground." "Do you see that pipe up there?" asked Halliday, pointing through the maze of timbering. "That's a high pressure line." "Air.?" I asked. "No, water. I mean the high pressure fire line. You know there is a special high pressure service in this city that can be turned on whenever there is a serious fire. They pump water out of the river with powerful pumps that deliver the water under pressure enough to send it up to the top of a sixteen-story building. It takes three men to hold a fire nozzle when the high pressure is on. The hose wriggles and squirms like a big snake. It's all the men can do to handle it. Why, one of the men told me that he blew out a small blaze, once, with a high pressure hose, just as you would blow out a candle. Of course, the line was full of air to start with, and then when the water was turned on, all that air was driven out in a blast that simply blew out the fire. Last Saturday afternoon they turned on the pressure for a test, and do you see that joint there.? Well, it parted about an inch, and the water streamed out in all directions in a big sheet. Why, it shot through the cracks in the street Fighting an Underground Stream. 215 planking and splashed up against the buildings as high as the third story windows. It's good it was late in the afternoon, when there is not much traffic overhead, or there would have been a panic/' ^^What are those pipes up over the street?" I asked, referring to the pipe Hues that ran on a trestle over the sidewalk along the subway work. ^^ Somebody told me that they are water pipes." ^'Oh, no, they are the gas mains," explained Halliday. *'The local service pipes run along the curb of the streets, but we put the mains up on stilts where they can do us no harm. We are dreadfully afraid of gas in tunnel work. You see, in undermining a street we might strain the joints of one of these mains, and the gas would leak out into our excavations and collect in a pocket. If it was not discovered in time, it might suffocate or poison some of our workmen, or worse still, if, by any chance the gas were exploded, just think of the damage it would do to the street traffic over- head, say nothing of our own work. Oh, no, we don't care to have anything to do with gas. Our troubles with water are bad enough. \ *'By the way," continued HaUiday, ** talking of gas mains, a very clever job was done up in the Bronx on one of the subway sections. The contractor found that he had to move about a thousand feet of gas main from one side of the street to the other, but as that furnished practically the only gas supply for a large community, he couldn't de- Hberately turn off the gas and move the pipe line at his 2i6 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. leisure, nor did he want to go to the expense of laying a new pipe line. Fortunately the people in that section, who are mostly Jews, don't use much gas except on Fridays, Satur- days and Sundays. As there happened to be a small pipe line that would take care of their needs during the daylight hours of an ordinary week day, the contractor figured out a quick way of moving that pipe line and connecting it up again. He picked out Thursday morning for the job. The street had already been excavated down to the level of the gas main, the new bed had been prepared to receive the pipe line, and timbershad been laid across from the old bed to thenew." '^Do you mean," interrupted Bill, "that the whole street was excavated?" "Yes." ''But what about the traffic?" "Oh, up there there is practically no traffic. The street was simply closed while the work was under way. As I was saying, he had everything ready with a track along the side of the excavation and four dinkey engines on it. Then cables were stretched across the street, running under the gas main and back through pulley blocks to the dinkey engines; a section of the gas main, four hundred feet long, was cut; and, at a given signal, all the engines moved as one down the track, rolling the big iron main over the timbers to the opposite side of the street. It didn't take but a minute to! do the job. Then the engines were backed up and went through the same performance with the six- hundred-foot section." Fighting an Underground Stream. 217 ^*It seems simple enough," was our comment. **Yes, after you know how to do it/' All this time the rain was coming down in torrents. The street above must have been washed pretty clean, for the shower in the tunnel had changed from thick mud to com- paratively clean water, but the timbering was slimy and slippery. Water was running in rivulets down the floor of the tunnel, toward the sumps where the powerful electric pumps sucked it up and threw it into the big sewers. We were standing in the stream watching the work of one of the pumps when there was a shout from the workmen. Before we realized what was up, the stream about our boots swelled into a torrent that swept the footing out from under us. So unexpected was this onslaught that we were all dragged under. I crashed into a post with such force that it stunned me for an instant. Bill and Halliday were washed ten or twenty feet past me before they could check themselves by grabbing hold of the timbering. Then came a mad scramble to get out. We had no time to make for the steps. There was not a moment to spare, for the water came rushing in and filling the tunnel steadily. We tried to climb up the posts and reach the upper level before the water did, hoping that then we might run down the planking to the exit. It seemed as if we could never get up the slippery columns with our heavy boots and slickers on. The water was rising faster now, for it had drowned out the electric pumps, and thousands of gallons from the underground river were added to the water which came 21 8 Pick, Shovel and Pluck, pouring down the subway. I recalled the two old watch- men who had been trapped in the Long Island tunnel, and wondered whether we would be caught in the same way. The thought gave me the horrors. I don't know that we would ever have got out had not HaUiday discovered a place where the cross-bracing gave us a good foothold. We had barely reached the trackway over- head when the lights went out. Fortunately we were not in complete darkness, for some light filtered through the cracks and chinks from the street above, so that we could make things out as in a dim twilight. We were hurrying along the plank walk laid between the tracks to an exit that was nearer than the one through which we had entered the tunnel, but the water was rising rapidly over the track, and, as we splashed on, we missed our footing more than once where there was a break in the plank walk or where we had to scramble around a stalled car. Once I stepped out on open water and would have gone under com- pletely had not Bill caught me. Bill also had a fall or two, and even Halliday stumbled and fell across the track. It was lucky we didn't have far to go or we would never have escaped. We reached the exit and raced up the ladder just as a crowd of yelling and jabbering Italian workmen rushed up. ''Where did all the water come from?" I gasped, as soon as we had reached safety. "Blest if I know," repHed Halliday. The storm was beginning to abate, but the water still WE REACHED THE EXIT AND RACED UP THE LADDER See page 218 THE CHUTE SYSTEM OF POURING CONCRETE, % 1 1 Bi ^^^^ #. ' ^ ^ ^ ^^^^ 1 , » i-v ' - ' i iiPlili^'' -j>^m^:- -~ .<^*^r— ^■*'- „■."". _.. 1 CONCRETE LEGS OF THE VIADUCT LEADING TO THE GREAT ARCH. Fighting an Underground Stream. 219 rose steadily in the subway until it was not far from the street level. A warning was sent out to stop the street cars and all heavy traffic for fear that the water might have un- dermined the columns that supported the street planking and a serious cave-in might result. We learned that a large storm sewer had burst about five blocks up the street, and all the rainwater for blocks around was draining into the subway. We were drenched to the skin, so we 'phoned our pre- dicament to Dr. McGreggor, and acting on his advice went home for a change of clothing. CHAPTER XXL THE GREATEST STEEL ARCH IN THE WORLD. One day in the middle of the summer, Bill and I were at luncheon, when who should walk into the restaurant and sit down beside us but Mr. Hotchkiss. "Why, hello, boys," he cried. "Where have you been keeping yourselves? I haven't seen you since we visited Squire's tunnel." "We are working pretty hard these days," I replied. "We haven't the easy time that we had last year. Dr. McGreggor believes in keeping our noses to the grindstone." "But there are lots of interesting jobs to be seen. What does your Uncle Ed think about it?" "He has been away so much of the time that we have been left almost entirely in Dr. McGreggor's care." "But there are some things that you really must see. For instance, there is a railroad now under construction, only a few miles away, that is well worth investigating. More than a third of the line is a bridge." "Oh, you mean an elevated railroad," exclaimed Bill. "No I don't. It will be an elevated line, true enough, from twenty to a hundred andthirty-five feet high, but it isn't meant for city traffic. It is to be a regulation, four- track railroad for freight and through passenger trains." 220 The Greatest Steel Arch in the World. 221 We were puzzled. *^ But why do they need so much bridge work?*' I asked. *^ There is no great swamp around here, is there ? Or does it run out over the ocean, like the Key West Railroad?" "Wait a minute, now. You talk as though the bridge might be a hundred miles long, whereas the whole railroad has an extent of only ten miles. But what it misses in length it will make up in traffic; for it is to connect two of the busiest railroads in the world. Did you ever stop to think how New York City blocks traffic? It has a wonderful harbor. Deep water all around, right up to the shore. But that very harbor is an obstacle to transportation. You can travel by rail all the way up the coast, from the tip end of Florida, but when you strike New York, your journey is interrupted. ^ You cannot jgO' on directly to Boston without '' '"But,'* 1 broke in, "there is an express that runs from Washington to Boston." "Yes, but the train has to be ferried across from Jersey City, around the battery, and up the East River to Harlem, before it can proceed on its way to the New England States. Recently, a railroad has dodged under the obstructing North River, coming into New York by tunnel, and the tunnel has been extended under the East River to Long Island. Now a railroad is being built from Long Island back across the East River, to connect with a line running on up to New England. A few years hence, the New England traveler on his way to the South, will enter New York on the surface level, cHmb far above the surrounding housetops, 222 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. H 8 n n a' w H o < PL. CO W H o p S u H > < O 2 The Greatest Steel Arch in the World. 22^ skip across the river to Long Island, using Ward's Island and Randall's Island as stepping-stones, and then he will dive under ground, crossing the same river in a tunnel that will lead him through Manhattan, beneath the North River, and on to the other side of the Jersey heights. It will be a splendid ride over that bridge, three miles and a half of it, and high enough to give a panoramic view of the whole city." "Seems fooHsh to me,'' said Bill, bluntly. "What is the use of crossing over the East River, only to cross back again?" "Well, It isn't the most direct connection possible," ad- mitted Mr. Hotchkiss. "But you must remember that valuable real estate may be a more serious obstacle than a river or two. By running the connecting railroad through a sparsely built section, the right of way could be purchased at comparatively little cost." "But why cross the river on a bridge? Why not use a tunnel for both crossings?" "Simply because it would take four tunnels to equal tne capacit}^ of this one bridge, and they would cost twice as much as the bridge. Then, too, it is much pleasanter riding out in the open than down in a stuffy tunnel. That span across Hell Gate will be a wonder. It will be the largest of its kind in the world. Quite different from the other East River bridges. Most of them, you know, are suspension-bridges; the Queensborough bridge is a cantilever, but this will be a steel arch with a span of a thousand feet! Oh, you will have to go up with me and see it." 224 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. Most emphatically we assured him that we would be only too glad to go, if only he would plead our cause with Dr. McGreggor. *'Just you leave that with me/' advised Mr. Hotchkiss. We did; and as a result, the following Monday found us on our way to Astoria, the Long Island end of the bridge. Long before we reached the bridge, we saw the tall white piers that were to constitute the legs of the viaduct leading to the great steel arch. ''It looks something like a suspension-bridge,*' I remarked, noting a couple of slender, lattice steel towers with a system of cables running out from them. . "Don't you know what that is?" asked Mr. Hotchkiss, in surprise. "It is the chute system of pouring the concrete into the molds." It had not occured to me, but of course there would be considerable difficulty in hauling the concrete up to the top of the piers, particularly when they were nearing their full height of well over a hundred feet, and there would be a great deal of concrete to pour. Mr. Hotchkiss said he had read somewhere that there would be seven hundred thousand barrels of cement in the whole bridge. "And that," he explained, "is enough to fill a freight train thirty miles long, while the sand and stone to go with the cement would fill another train ninety miles long." To save time in delivering such an enormous quantity of concrete, the chute system was used. A tower was erected near the site of one of the piers. Chutes lead from the tower The Greatest Steel Arch in the World, 22$ to that pier, and also to the pier at each side of it. The con- crete was mixed on the ground, and then elevated to the top of the tower and delivered, as needed, to the different piers. As the piers grew, the chutes had to be raised higher and higher on the tower to give them the proper incHne. This meant that the towers had to be very tall. One we saw was 234 feet high, as high as a twenty-story building. Naturally, our chief interest was in the work on the towers for the great steel arch. A letter from Dr. McGreggor introduced us to the engineer in charge of the work. "I see," remarked Mr. Hotchkiss, "that you have the tower on this side of the river well ahead of the one on Ward's Island." "Oh, yes, far ahead," replied the engineer. "We have had no end of trouble over there. The rock on this side is sound enough, but over there, after we got down to bed-rock, we came across a deep fissure that ran square across the site of our foundation." "But I thought they always took borings of the founda- tions before they decided where they were going to put them," said Bill. "That is very true, but after all it is bUnd work. The borings show rock here and there at certain depths, and then on your map you connect up the points and make up a probable profile of the rock. You have to take a chance on what lies between those borings. In this case, before the right of way was bought, borings were made that indicated rock quite near the surface. So the property was purchased, 226 Pickj Shovel and Pluck. and then we were given the job of putting the bridge across. You know this place is called ^^Hell Gate," and it always was a treacherous spot. The channel here used to be obsturcted with reefs that wrecked hundreds of vessels. Tides coming down the sound and up from New York Bay meet here in battle twice a day, and when the reefs were here to add to the swirling eddies and vicious currents, the navigator had all he could do to get through. Finally, the rock was undermined with nearly four miles of tunnel, and then was blown up by a blast of three million pounds of nitroglycerin. That put an end to the treachery in the channel, but it fell to our lot to discover further treachery in the rocks under the shore. We knew quite a bit about the geology of this locaHty, and suspected that the rock was not quite so favorable for a foundation as the borings seemed to indicate; so we used core drills. They work something like an apple corer, you know, and cut out a core of earth and rock that enables you to see just what the drill has been through. The cores we got showed us that what had been thought solid bed-rock was merely boulders carried down by the glaciers. "'The glaciers!" I exclaimed. "Yes; you know this whole region was covered with ice once, just as Greenland is now, and glaciers ground their way over the land, tearing away all obstructions, and carry- ing off masses of clay and rocks on their backs, exactly Hke the Greenland glaciers of to day. Geologists can show you the worn-down mountain range in Canada from which the boulders around here were hauled by the ice. The Greatest Steel Arch in the World. 227 "We found bed-rock," he continued, "from forty-four to seventy-six feet under the surface, but it was very irregular. We suspected that there was a fissure somewhere around here, because one was found when the gas tunnel was bored under the river just above here, and it had a trend in this direction. But our drills did not happen to strike it, and we hoped that the foundation would avoid it. The foundation measures 125 by 140 feet. Because the rock is so irregular, we are sinking the foundation in twenty-one caissons instead of one big one. Where the direct thrust of the bridge trusses is to come, we shall have two sohd walls of reinforced concrete built with rectangular caissons keyed together (see Fig. 18); while between these walls and at each side are rows of cylindrical caissons eighteen feet in diameter. Over all will be a slab of concrete eighteen feet thick. One of the cylindrical caissons struck the edge of the fissure, and so straight were the walls of this underground cafion, that we carried the caisson down with one side through rock and the other through clay to a depth of 109 feet without finding the bottom. Then we flared the bottom of the shaft, to give the column as broad a footing as possible, and let it go at that." "You couldn't do that under the trusses, though," re- marked Mr. Hotchkiss. "Oh, no," answered the engineer. "The fissure was so wide in one place that we could find no rock at all under one of the middle caissons, so we built an arch across the chasm." "An arch?" 228 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''Yes; it does sound rather remarkable. It has never been done before, so far as I know; but we are building a forty- five-foot arch across that chasm, seventy-five feet under- ground. And under the next wall, where the fissure is nar- rower and happens to come at the joint between two caissons we are bridging the gap with a cantilever." NORTH TRUSS SOUTH TRU55 5HADtD PORTION REPRESENT!^ ROCK FIG. l8. LAYOUT OF THE CAISSONS OF THE WARD's ISLAND TOWER, SHOWING, ALSO; THE FISSURE IN THE ROCK. The Greatest Steel Arch in the World, 22<^ "Do you mean you are putting a steel bridge across down there?'' asked Bill. "Oh, no; a concrete cantilever. The concrete is built out from the rock Hke a shelf." "Say, could we go down and see the work?" I begged. The engineer laughed. "Do you know," he said, "I sent a green hand down the other day — a negro — and he was so scared, that he fell upon his knees and began to pray." "Why, what is there to be afraid of?" I asked. "The air-pressure on the ears, the hollow noises, the un- canny sensation of being buried alive." "But we have been all through that. We are old-timers." "That's right," attested Mr. Hotchkiss; "they know all about pneumatic work. But," he added, teasingly, "their first experience in a caisson gave them a scare. They thought that their time had come, too — fatal paralysis, you know — ^when they found they couldn't whistle." "Yes," I said, "they played that practical joke on us. But can't we go down and see that underground bridge?" "I am sorry to say that there is nothing for you to see now," replied the engineer. "The arch is already laid, and we are filling in above it." "It was lucky that you had clay to work in," remarked Mr. Hotchkiss. ''Yes," agreed the engineer; ''if it had been quicksand, it would have been no simple matter to have laid the arch." Then he went on to explain how the steel work was to be set up, and gave us a good idea of how the finished bridge was to 230 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. look. The main towers of the bridge were to be enormous structures rising to a height of two hundred and forty-four feet above the river, and the four-track roadway was going to pass through them at a level of a hundred and thirty-five feet above mean high water, so that ships could safely pass under without lowering their masts. FIG. 19. SECTION OF THE LOWER CHORD AT Ay FIG. 20. *^That steel arch,'' said the engineer, ''will be the most wonderful structure of its kind in the world. The distance between the towers will be a thousand and seventeen feet. It is hard to get an adequate conception of its size. When you go back to your office this afternoon, you will pass the tallest building in the world. Imagine it fallen over on its The Greatest Steel Arch in the World, 231 side across Hell Gate, and then realize that it will not reach more than three-quarters of the way across the span of this bridge. Then stand under the spire of Trinity Church, and remember that this arch will overtop that spire by twenty feet. In fact, there are many so-called skyscrapers that cannot look over the top of this steel arch. It is going to be made up of the heaviest steel members ever used in bridge work. The trusses will be a hundred and forty feet deep at the towers, and will taper to forty feet at the crown, and the lower chords of those trusses will be so big that you could drive a loaded hay-wagon through them if they were cleared of web plates! It will be a big job erecting them. The heaviest chord sections will weigh a hundred and eighty-two tons each." ^'What I can't make out," said Bill, ^Ss how the arch is to be erected. Won't you have to build some sort of false work to support the trusses until the arch is completed?" ''This is to be an arch, of course," said the engineer, ''when it is completed, but while it is being erected, it will be put up as a cantilever." "What do you mean?" "Simply this: after the towers have been built up to the road level, work will begin on the steel arch. First a post will be set up a short distance back from the tower, and an- chored down with steel members that will later be used in the viaduct. Ties will run from this post to the top chord of the arch. After the bridge has been built out so far that its overhang is liable to tear up the anchorage, a second post 232 Pick, Shovel and Pluck, will be set up on the tower itself (see Fig. 20), and attach- ment will be made farther out on the trusses. This will suffice to keep the trusses from falling over into the river, until they meet at the center, w^hen, of course, they cannot fall without pushing the towers apart." ^^I should think there would be an awful strain on the 'ties,' as you call them," I remarked. ''Oh, yes; there will be a truly colossal strain. Something like 76,000,000 pounds. That is more than 1,520 locomo- FIG. 20. METHOD OF ERECTING THE HELL GATE ARCH tives could pull; double that for the two arch ribs together." ^'I can understand," said Bill, "how they can figure out straight work, like the columns and girders of a building, and punch out the rivet holes in the shop beforehand, but how in the world are they going to do it for a bridge that curves and tapers as this one must?" **Why, they are going to assemble the whole bridge at the factory, but it will be built on its side on the ground. It will be laid off to the exact curve, and the rivet holes will all be drilled so that the job of assembling it here will be The Greatest Steel Arch in the World, 233 simple. No fitting will have to be done here except at the crown, after the two halves of the arch have come together. After the arch is completed, hangers will be let down from it to carry the floor of the bridge. This will be a steel trough ninety-three feet wide. The trough will be filled with stone ballast. On this ballast the tracks will be laid, just as they are on the soHd ground." Before leaving, we climbed 135 feet up one of the lattice steel towers, so as to get some idea of what passengers would see when crossing the bridge. The view was superb, and we realized what a magnificent approach to the great city this enormous viaduct and bridge would provide. CHAPTER XXII. WRECKING A SKYSCRAPER. ^^Huxtra!" shouted a breathless newsboy, running up to us as we were going to the office one morning. ^'Huxtry, huxtra! Turrible loss of life," he yelled, waving a paper in our faces. We caught sight of the heading, BUILDING COL- LAPSED, in type three inches high. Bill seized the extra and produced the required penny. '*I thought so," he grunted, after hastily scanning the paragraph. "No lives lost; but it might have been a serious accident, just the same." The paper told of an old brick building that had fallen about five o'clock that morning — that is, the front wall had fallen. There were only a few people who slept in the build- ing, as most of it was used for business purposes, and they had all been accounted for. Fortunately, the accident had occurred when there was probably no one on the street, al- though they were excavating the ruins to make sure that there were no victims buried in them. The story was very vividly written, and told of the harrowing experiences of one of the tenants who had been startled out of a sound sleep, by the ripping of the lath and plaster and the crash of falling masonry, to find his room torn open to the morning 234 Wrecking a Skyscraper. 235 twilight and his bed sHding down the sagging floor after the wall. "'I wish/' exclaimed Bill, ''it had been that old ramshackle pile of bricks across the way from us!" The windows of our drafting-room opened on a court. On either side we were hemmed in by extensions of our own office-building, while directly opposite was this dilapidated loft building, and, as we were on the fifth floor, it eff^ectually cut oflF our view. ''You know," I said, "I shouldn't be surprised if it did fall soon. That crack in the wall seems to be growing larger." Whether they had been spurred on by the accident I do not know, but that very afternoon a couple of men in uni- form appeared on the scene, tapped on the walls, measured the fissure, looked down into the court, and shook their heads gravely. It would have been a serious matter if that building had fallen, for three stories below us was a skylight roof forming the bottom of the court and covering a large office in which there were about a hundred typists. There would have been an awful catastrophe had the old building crashed through the skylight during working hours. The next day we learned from our office boy that the building department had condemned the old eyesore, and it would have to come down immediately. The tenants lost no time in getting out, and in a couple of days a gang of house wreckers showed up. I am afraid we did very little drafting while that building was being dismantled; we were so interested in the work. 236 Pickj Shovel and Pluck. First, all the plumbing and lighting fixtures were ripped out, and then the doors and windows were removed. We sup- posed that they would begin tearing off the roof next, but instead they stopped work altogether on the upper stories. ^'I wonder what they can be doing now," remarked Bill. "They seem to be working down on the ground floor, judg- ing from the sound." "We'll have to go around at lunch time and see," I suggested. That noon we snatched a hasty bite, then rushed around the block to interview the house wreckers. The men were still at their lunch pails, and Bill soon had one of them en- gaged in conversation — "Goat" Anderson they called him, because he was as spry and sure-footed in ticklish places as a mountain-goat. He was a very intelligent fellow, and told us many interesting things about house wrecking. "When you put up a house," he said, "you begin at the foundations an' build up, don't you.^ An' you'd natcherly think that when you tear down a house, you'd begin at the top an' work down, wouldn't you?" "Why, of course," we answered. "Well, you wouldn't; you'd work from the bottom up." "'From the bottom up!'" we quoted in astonishment. "Why, how is that?" "It's much easier," he declared. "In fact, you couldn't go about it in no other way. Just s'pose you started on the top floor, all the lath an' plaster an' such like would drop to the next story an' bury the floor so there wouldn't be no Wrecking a Skyscraper. 237 chance to get up floor-boards an' rip them open. But s'pose you did get them boards up, by the time you'd worked down to the next floor below it would be hurried under twice as much rubbish. It would get worse the farther down you went. Each floor would be piled up with the rubbish from all the stories above; an' so, at last, when you got to the ground floor, you would find it choked up as high as the ceilin'. So, you see, you would have to do the same work over an' over again. Now, what we do is to pull up the floor- boards on the ground floor first; an' then we tear out the partition walls an' rip oflF all the lath an' plaster an' let all the rubbish fall into the cellar. Next we go up to the second floor, rip that out, an' let all that stuff' drop straight into the cellar; an' so on to the top, lettin' the rubbish from each floor fall clear to the cellar every time, without blockin' up any other floors on the way." "That sounds like common sense," I commented. "Sure it's common sense! You'll find the wreckin' busi- ness takes brains. It ain't just smashing a house down with a sledge-hammer. Takes four years to make a good *bar man.'" "A 'bar man'?" I queried. "Yes; that's what they call us, because we use these here * pinch-bars,'" he explained, holding up one of the long steel bars with curved end and flattened point, used in prying things loose. "But," interrupted Bill, who could never be led oflF the subject, "after you have cleared off" all the floors, you still 238 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. have the walls to take down, don't you, and you must begin at the top with them?" "Sure!'' was the answer. "We have to climb up on them walls an' pry off the bricks in chunks." "That's pretty risky work, I suppose," Bill suggested. "No, it ain't, unless we strike a wall that's rocky." "^Rocky'.?" I queried. "Yes, shaky." "I guess you'll find this one rocky." "Looks as if it might be," he repHed. "And that rubbish in the cellar," persisted Bill, "what becomes of it?" "Oh, most generally we leave that for the excavator to cart off. When the contract calls for us to take the rubbish out, we clear out all the partition walls on the second floor, and run chutes out over the sidewalk. Then we begin tearin' out the floors above, one after the other, lettin' the rubbish gather on the second floor. At night, when there ain't much street traffic, we shovel out the stuff into the chutes and slide it down into dump-carts. They haul it off to the city dumps." "But I thought you saved it all?" "Oh, yes; all that's worth selling, but most of it ain't, in a building like this. All the sound lumber and bricks are saved out an' sold." Just then a shrill whistle announced that the noon hour was over, and we beat a retreat to our office. From our window we had an excellent chance to watch the Wrecking a Skyscraper. 239 wreckers gradually eat out the heart of the building to the very roof until only the thin shell of brick wall remained with the floor beams left in place to steady it. After the rafters had been removed, a couple of men climbed up on the wall at our side of the building, and began prying off the bricks. One of them was the man we had been talking to. It looked like very precarious work on that thin wall, only a foot and a half wide, but ^'Goat" Anderson calmly sat astride it and dug away at the bricks with his pinch-bar, while the other man hammered at the wall from time to time with a big mallet to loosen the mortar. Every time he hit the wall the dust pufi^ed out of the seams, and it looked as though he might knock the footing out from under himself; but the men went on working,'^calmly tumbling the bricks down in blocks about two feet square, without ever once dropping a single brick over on the skylight below. But as they proceeded, we noticed that they grew more and more cautious. Evidently the wall was growing rocky. ''Say, look at that!" cried Bill, ''did you ever see a blacker sky?'' So intent had I been with watching the work of the wreckers, that I hadn't noticed the wicked-looking storm coming up out of the west. "Gee!" I exclaimed. "There's wind in those clouds. They'll have a tough time of it when that strikes them." "Yes, it's coming this way, and is going to topple that wall right over onto the skylight!" 240 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. ''I wonder if they see it coming — Hey, there! Mr. Ander- son!" I shouted. "Look at the cyclone!" My voice was drowned in a growl of distant thunder; but that was just as effective a warning. "Goat" Anderson looked up with a start, then shouted an order to the men below. In another minute, half a dozen bar men had climbed astride the wall around the cracked part, each deftly nib- bling it down brick by brick. They dared not pry the bricks ofF in big chunks because the wall was too shaky. There was no way of tying it fast, and that weak section must be torn down before the wind blew it over and sent it crashing through the glass below. Rapidly and yet captiously they w^orked, making good progress. Then suddenly, with a shriek and a slamming of iron shutters, the storm broke. The fury of that first blast nearly swept them off. We could see them clinging desper- ately to that tottering old wall as we hastily drew our windows shut. It looked as if the wall must surely topple over, and yet, instead of sliding down to safety and shelter, the men braced themselves against the wind and went on with their ticklish work. Blast after blast rattled our win- dows and streamed whistling through leaks in the casement. Clouds of dust swirled up out of the wrecked building, at times almost hiding the men from view. Maybe it was imagination, but we were confident that we saw that old wall sway. Still the men stuck to their work, even when they were pelted with rain and hail. For fully fifteen minutes they labored feverishly in that Wrecking a Skyscraper, 241 storm without dropping a single brick over the outside of the wall. It was marvelous work. Then, when the danger spot had been nibbled away and the wind had nearly abated, they clambered down and sought shelter on the floor below. It was a wonderful exhibition of nerve and devotion to duty. At the first opportunity we went around to talk to "Goat" Anderson. "Oh, it was nothinV' he said. ^'But weren't you afraid the wall would topple over?" "Sure, it was a bit rocky, but that's why we stuck there. We couldn't leave it to fall on that there skylight. A house wrecker's got to take chances, you know. " "Well, it was the pluckiest piece of work I've ever seen!" declared Bill "It was nothin', I tell you; nothin' at all," protested "Goat" Anderson. "This ain't much of a job anyhow. It's only a ^wall-bearin' house'." "'A wall-bearing house'? What's that?" "A house where the floors are carried by the walls," he said. "In a steel frame buildin' each floor carries its own wall, that's why they can start buildin' the walls at the top or the middle or wherever they want to. " "Oh, yes, I know," said Bill. "But you don't ever have to tear down a steel building, do you?" "Sure we do. Next week we're goin' to tackle a sky- scraper." "A skyscraper!" we ejaculated. 242 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. "Yep; twenty-two-story office-building. Three hundred and six feet high." "And you're going to tear it down?" "Sure." "But what for?" "It ain't big enough. Land is worth so much there that they have to get more office rent out of it." "How old a building is it?" we inquired. "Why, it ain't been built more than fifteen years. I re- member seein' it just after it was finished. Thought it was a pretty slick buildin' then. Shows you how quick things get out of date in this town." "Wonder if they'll tear down the Manhattan Syndicate Building in the next fifteen or twenty years," mused Bill. "I guess not," said "Goat" Anderson, shaking his head. "Still you can never tell. I never thought, when I first saw that buildin', I'd be tearing it down inside of fifteen years. It will be some job, too. You'll have to come 'round an' see it." "We'll surely do that," we replied. The skyscraper whose death-warrant had been signed merely because it could not grow like the value of the prop- erty it stood upon was, luckily, not more than four blocks off, and that gave us plenty of opportunity to go around there at noon time. It was really marvelous to see how systematically the work was done. "Makes me think of a miUtary campaign," remarked Bill; and the simile was not a bad one, for the men went at the Wrecking a Skyscraper. 243 work like trained soldiers. There were several distinct armies. First the bar men attacked the walls, stripping away the brick from behind the stone facing and ripping out the brick arches of the floors. Then another gang of men chipped off the brick filling in the steel columns. After that came an army of masons, who took down the stonework while a fourth gang consisted of iron-workers who chipped away the rivets of the skeleton framework and removed the steel beams. Of course, these forces of men did not begin their operation until the building had been stripped of all piping and fixtures, wooden moldings, marble trim, etc. The floors were opened up for a narrow space along the walls so that rubbish could be dumped through. In order to get the proper slant for the chutes over the broad sidewalk, they were run out from the third floor, and it was on this floor that all the plaster and rubbish was accumulated until nightfall. The bricks, how- ever, were carted away during the day. A system of steel troughs zigzagged down to the shed over the sidewalk, and the bricks would be sent coasting down all the way from the top until they came up against a gate at the mouth of the chute. Here there was a tender who would let the gate swing open long enough to fill a cart with bricks, and then would slam the gate shut until the next cart came up. There was a steady stream of carts all day hauling oflF the bricks; and there was no respite for those bricks. A large building was being erected near-by, and as fast as they could be carted over there, they were built into the walls of 244 Pick J Shovel and Pluck. this new building. Of course, many of the bricks were broken and could not be used again, especially those built into the steel columns. They were dug out with pneumatic riveters fitted with chisel points in place of hammers. There was a wide variety of work going on all the time. In some places, it was even necessary to blast out heavy concrete walls. No time was wasted. The men took only a half-hour for lunch. The whole structure was razed to the ground in the remarkably short period of six weeks. But the conquest was not achieved without heavy losses to the attackers. Ambulances were kept busy. There were eighty-five men hurt, altogether. This made it seem all the more like a real battle. Of course, most of the injuries were not serious. I had considered the iron-workers the most reckless class of men in the world, but I noticed that although they ran around on the beams like monkeys, they always preferred to feel good, solid steel underfoot, and would seldom trust to planks or brickwork; besides, they were up where things could not fall on them. The bar men, on the other hand, were constantly running chances. Not a few were injured by the slipping of an insecure plank or the collapse of a weakened floor arch. We had to leave for college before the wrecking was half done, but on our last day at the oflSce, we went around to make a final inspection of the work. Neither Dr. McGreg- gor nor Uncle Ed, who was back in the city again, knew of these visits. They would never have dreamed of letting us Wrecking a Skyscraper. 245 CLEVIS go into a place so dangerous. That day we watched the masons taking down a large stone cornice. One huge slab had been pried loose, and they were about to raise it off its seat and lower it to the shed over the sidewalk. ^Tm puzzled to know how they are going to lift such a stone/' I remarked to Bill. ''It must weigh several tons, and it is certainly too heavy for them to pry it up and pass chains under it.'' "It is just as puzzling to figure out how they laid it there in the first place/' returned Bill. The man in charge of this part of the work was a grumpy fellow, and we could not get much infor- mation out of him. When we asked him how he was going to hitch this stone to the hoisting- cable he snapped, "Use a lewis." Maybe most of the boys who read this book know what a "lewis" is. We didn't; but as the man's manner repelled further questioning, we withdrew and waited for our eyes to supply the definition of the word. In the center of the huge slab was an undercut or dove- tailed hole. In this something was placed which was evi- dently the "lewis." It was a sort of clamp. Figure 21 shows exactly how it looked. There were two steel fingers flat on one side, but flaring on the other. These, when placed face to face, could just slip through the throat of the dovetailed FIG. 21. DEVICE FOR LIFT- ING STONES. 246 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. hole. After they were introduced into the hole, they were separated and a third finger was inserted between them. Then a bolt was passed through all three fingers and through the arms of a ''clevis," or open ring. This made a firm at- tachment to the stone so that it could be Hfted by passing the hoisting-hook through the clevis. The boss showed his confidence in the strength of the lewis by climbing upon the stone and riding down on it to the platform below, where he had something to attend to. With the boss out of the way, we felt freer to talk to the workmen. They showed us how a lewis is released by tak- ing out the bolt and pulling out the middle finger first, after which the other two fingers may be removed. Presently we noticed a group of men, a couple of floors below us, and we were informed that they were a party of engineers who had come to inspect the steelwork and see how it had stood the strain of fifteen years' service — whether it had rusted away under the brick filling or beneath the concrete covering. As the party climbed the stairs. Bill grabbed me by the arm. '*Jim," he exclaimed, "there is Dr. McGreggor!" ** You're right. Bill!" I cried apprehensively. '*And that's Uncle Ed with him, isn't it? I would just as leave they didn't see us." " But how are we going to get out without passing them ?" "Why don't you ride down?" suggested one of the men. "Jump on that stone there." "Is it safe?" 'how foolish it was for me with my fly s weight to attempt to SWING THAT PONDEROUS SEE-SAW." — See page 247. Wrecking a Skyscraper. 247 ''Safe as an elevator," he assured us. We climbed aboard a big slab. Bill stood up, but I felt safer to sit down. Then the signal was given, and we were swung out over the side of the building. I don't know how it happened, but the men must have been careless in putting that lewis together. At any rate, when we were within about fifteen feet of the platform over the sidewalk, the bolt worked loose. There was a sudden jar as one end of the clevis sHpped free. Before I could scramble up, the clevis parted with a sharp crack, and down I plunged with the massive stone. At the same instant, I felt a stinging blow as Bill's heel struck my forehead, and I caught a fleeting gUmpse of my chum clinging to the dangling cable. The next instant, there was a terrific crash as the big stone struck the platform. I have no clear idea of just what happened, the fall or the kick must have partially stunned me. They told me afterward that the stone struck almost exactly at its center upon a string-piece at the edge of the platform. It quivered there uncertainly for a moment, as if undecided which way to fall, and then began to rock slowly toward the street. I have a vague recollection of feeling the slab tip up and seeing, directly below, three frightened women in an automobile that had been blocked by the trafiic. Instinctively, I scrambled back to the rear end of the slab. I say instinctively, because, if I had thought a moment, I should have realized how foolish it was for me with my fly's weight to attempt to swing that ponderous see-saw. But, miraculous as it may seem, that stone was so deHcately 248 Pick, Shovel and Pluck. poised that my weight did actually check its swing until a couple of men rushed up and, by adding theirs, bore it down to the platform. Then I swooned. The next thing I knew they were dashing cold water on my face. Uncle Ed was standing over me and Dr. Mc- Greggor was trying to stop the blood from a cut in my fore- head. Behind him was Bill, white as a sheet. 'Tm all right," I said, struggHng to rise. I was heartily ashamed of my weakness. "Now, there's no hurry," admonished Dr. McGreggor. '^Just rest there a minute." '' But I feel like a baby here," I protested. ''The grittiest baby I ever saw!" said Uncle Ed. ''Don't you know that your quick wit saved three women from being crushed under that stone.?" I shook my head. It felt nice to be praised, but I knew I didn't deserve any credit. If I had used my wits I should have jumped off the stone, instead of being such a fool as to attempt to rock that monstrous slab. It was Providence that saved those lives, not I. They made me wait there until an ambulance surgeon arrived, and he bandaged my head. Then Dr. McGreg- gor bade me go home. He never said a word to me about our going into such a danger-spot without his permission. The next day, when I was leaving for college, he actually patted me affectionately when I bade him good-by. "I believe you have the right stuff in you," he said. That unexpected word of encouragement made me set my Wrecking a Skyscraper. 249 teeth with the determination to make a record in college. '^It's funny, Jim/' remarked my chum, as we took our farewell view of the city, from the deck of a ferry-boat, "we had our first adventure in New York where they were build- ing a skyscraper, and our last where they were tearing one down. '' (the end.) INDEX. A Aerator at Kensico Lake .... 203 Aerator, odor of 204 Air, fighting sea with 52 Air, raising wreck with 39 Air, washing water with. 193, 202 Anchor, diver caught by ... . 53 Anchors dragged across site of siphon 202 Aqueduct aerator 202 Aqueduct, Bill hurt in 4 Aqueduct, Hudson River si- phon 193 Aqueduct, pressure at Hud- son River ehaft 194 Aqueduct shaft, cap for 194 Aqueduct shaft cover, bolts for 196 Aqueduct shaft, flooded 2 Aqueduct siphon to Staten Island 197 Aqueduct water, bad taste . . 202 Arch, building in a caisson. . 227 Arch, Hell Gate, erecting . . . 232 Arch, Hell Gate, length of. . . 230 Arch, Hell Gate, size of trusses 231 Arch, iteel, greatest in world . 220 B Ball chained to prisoner's foot 210 Bar-man, house wrecking. . . 237 "Batter" piles 213 Bessemer converter 136 Bill, in hospital 5 Bird Rock 40 ''Birdena,'" old French boat. 34 ''Bloom," steel mills 135 Blast furnace 124 Blast furnace, '* snort valve" 130 Blast furnace, tapping 129 Boiler, diver trapped over. . . 56 Bolts for aqueduct shaft cover 196 Boston & Albany vs. Panama Railroad 38 Breakwater, pneumatic 58 Brick chutes 238, 243 Bridge abutment found in subway excavation 213 Bridge Arch, erecting 232 Bridge building in a caisson . 22S Bridge, Hell Gate arch 220 Bridge towers, Hell Gate 230 Building, collapsed 234 Building downward 166 Building, fire-boat, moving. . . 160 Building, hanging 164 Building on sand founda- tions 209 Building, wrecking 234 Building, underpinning foun- dations of 160 Buildings, watching align- ment of 209 "Bull-dredging" 41 '' Bull-wheel," Panama locks. 25 Buzzards and marl 16 251 252 Index, Cable house propped on piles. i6o Caisson, building bridge in 227, 228 Caisson, floating 103 Canal, buried 210 Canal, old bridge abutment. 213 Cantilever bridge in a cais- son. . . 228 Cap for aqueduct shaft 194 Cast-iron converted into steel 131 Cast-iron, shrinkage of 194 Cement, amount in Hell Gate Bridge 224 Cement made from slag 127 Chagres, conquest of 20 Chimney flue, man sealed in. 186 Chute system of pouring con- crete 224 Coal, burning in mine 90 Coffer-dam around Maine. . . 76 Coffer-dams, Keokuk 113 Coffer-dams, sea-going rail- road 17 "Collect Pond'' 211 College, deferred ^6 College, Dr. McGreggor's offer I College, leaving for 249 Colon, arrival at 20 Concrete, amount in Hell Gate Bridge 224 Concrete cantilever in caisson 229 Concrete, chute system of pouring 224 Concrete dam, expansion joints in 115 Concrete, laying under water 1 70 Concrete, samples at Keokuk 116 Congressman and Colonel Goethals 30 Converter, Bessemer 136 Conveyor, chain, for lumber. 104 Conveyor, trolley, in caisson . 109 Cover for aqueduct shaft. . . 194 Cradle, launching, for siphon. 198 Crane-man, hero 137 Cucaracha slides 37 Culebra cut 34^ 37 Curb-ring for aqueduct shaft cover 194 D Dam built with water 22 Dannie Roach dives under bulkhead 183 Dike, Gamboa, blown up . . . 36 Dinkey engines, moving gas main with 216 Diver caught by anchor .... 53 Diver fighting shark 71 Diver trapped in smoke-box. 56 Diving bell, building quay with 103 Diving for Bill in aqueduct. . 4 Divingln tunnel under bulk- head 183 Diving suits, going down in. 47 Drawbridge, to the keys. ... 13 Dr. McGreggor, interview with 7 Dr. McGreggor's office, work in 156 Dr. McGreggor, telephone in- terview 190 Dredge, locks for 12 Dredging, "bull" 41 Dredging for Panama lock foundations 23 Dredging for siphon under Narrows 197 Ed, Uncle, see Uncle Ed. Engines, moving gas main with 216 Everglades, Florida 11 Expansion joints in concrete dam 115 Explosion in open hearth building 136 Index. 253 F Fight with sharks 71, 72 Fills protected by marl 15 Fire-boat house, moving. ... 160 Fire, taming steel with 123 Fire, blowing out with high pressure hose 214 Fissure in wall 235 Fissure under tower founda- tion 225 Floating foundations 209 Flood at Keokuk, fighting. . . 121 Flood, in aqueduct shaft .... 2 Flood in East River tunnel. . 172 Flood in subway 205 Floods, Mississippi 99 Flue, man sealed in 186 Flue, riveting sections of . . . . 189 "Foot-iron" in subway exca- vation 210 Foundations for Hell Gate tower 225 Foundations on sand 209 Foundations undermined by subway 208 Fountains for aerating water 203 Furnace, open hearth 131 Gamboa dike,Tblowing up. . . 35 Gary steel works 123 Gas main, moving with dinkey engines 216 Gas mains on trestle 215 Gatun Dam built with water 22 Gatun Lake, elevation and area 21 Gatun locks 23 Girders of hanging building. 165 Girders, wicket 28 Glaciers and Hell Gate bridge 226 Goethals, Colonel, and young congressman 30 Goethals, interview with Colonel 29 Hammer, steam 16 Havana Harbor 74 Hay wagon through chord of bridge truss 231 Heading, tunnel, upper and lower 172 Hell Gate, blowing up 226 Hell Gate arch, erecting .... 232 Hell Gate bridge 220 Hell Gate bridge, size of. ... 230 High pressure fire line, burst . 214 "Hole in the sea*' 62 "Horseshoe Curve" 151 Hose, bursting of 3 "Housebreaker," transit man 205 House-wrecking 234 House-wrecking, "bar-man" 237 Hurricane, at Bird Rock. ... 48 Hurricane and Florida rail- road 14 Hurricane warnings for rail- road 19 Ice jam at Keokuk 120 Ingot molds 133 Iron converted into steel. ... 131 Iron, shrinkage of 194 Isthmus, severing the 32, 36 Joint, butt and lap 191 Joint, flexible for Narrows siphon 199 Joints, paper in concrete dam 116 Joints, testing machine for. . 201 ^54 Index. Keokuk dam iii Knight's Key viaduct i8 Krakatua, Volcano of 36 Ladle of steel, spilt 137 Launching cradle for siphon. 198 Lead, in siphon joints 201 Lewis for lifting stones 245 Lewis gives way 247 Location pipe and trapped watchmen 176 Lock gates, emergency 27 Lock gates, Panama 25 Locks, Gatun 23 Locks, for dredges, Florida. . 12 Locks, Mississippi 113 Locomotive cab, ride in 140 Locomotive, sensations in. . . 147 Locomotive, weight of 143 Locomotives, electric towing. 27 Long Key viaduct 18 M McGreggor, see Dr. Mc- Greggor. Madeline f wreck of 40 Maine f after-turret of 75 Mainey baring mystery of . . . 74 Maine, turret sunk with dynamite 83 Marl, Florida R. R., odor. . . 16 Mats, willow, weaving 98 Mining sulphur with hot water 84 Mississippi dam, coal saved by 120 Mississippi, discharge of . . . . 100 Mississippi flood, at Keokuk 121 Mississippi, flood reservoirs.. 99 Mississippi floods 99 Mississippi, ground sills 10 1 Mississippi, keeping crooked. 96 Mississippi, keeping in check 92 Mississippi, Keokuk dam. . ^iii Mississippi, length of ...... , 92 Mississippi locks 113 Mississippi, paving banks . . 98 Mississippi, sailing up by drifting down 93 Mississippi, willow mats .... 98 Missouri, see Mississippi. Mitering motors, Panama locks 26 Mixer in steel plant 130 Morning, a disastrous i Motion pictures under water 63 Open hearth building, explo- sion in 136 Open hearth furnace 131 Open hearth furnace, tap- ping 132 Ore-boats unloading 124 "Over Sea Limited" 11 Oxy-acetylene torch 81 P Pacific Ocean, sunrise in. . . . 33 Panama, blowing up Gamboa ^v dike 36 Panama Canal, tides 21 Panama, dredging for lock foundations 23 Panama, emergency lock gates 27 Panama, French canal 21 Panama, geographical posi- tion 33 Panama, lock gates 25 Panama locks, mitering motors 26 Panama, old city of 34 Panama, rack railroad 27 Panama Railroad^z;^. Boston & Albany 7 38 Panama slides 37 Index. '-o:) Panama, trip to 9 Panama vs. Krakatua vol- cano 36 Photographing chamber, sub- marine 66 Photographs, submarine.... 62 Piles, "batter" 213 Piles, capping, in a caisson. . 109 Piles driven in rock 16 Piles, sheet 78 Pinch bars (house- wrecking). 237 Policemen and "house- breaker" 206 Prisoner's foot-iron 210 Pump, "giant sinker" 2, 178 Pump, smoke-stack as 186 Pumping twenty million gal- lons from subway 211 Pumps, electric, in subway. . 217 Quay, building with diving bell 103 Quicksand, freezing 91 Rack railroad, Panama 27 Rail mill 134 Railroad across Hell Gate. . . 220 Railroad bank protected by marl 15 Railroad, New York trans- portation system 212 Railroad, lowering for aque- duct castings 196 Railroad over the sea 9 Railroad signal, danger 152 Railroad, transporting big aqueduct castings 195 Railroad, well cars 195 "Red-Eye," danger signal. . . 152 Rescue expedition in tunnel . 182 River, setting to work 1 1 1 Road-bed built with dredges . 1 2 Rock, driving piles in 16 Salving wreck by dredging. . 41 Sea, fighting with air 52 Sea, hole in 62 Sea, railroad over 9 See-saw, stone 247 Sewer burst in East River tunnel 177 Sewer, burst in subway 217 Shafts, collapsible, for "hole in sea" 65 Sharks fight duel 70 Sharks, fight with 46, 71, 72 Sharks, fishing for 47, 69 Sharks, spearing 46 Sheet piling 78 Shrinkage of cast-iron and steel 194 Signal, danger 148 Signals, railroad 143 "Sinker" (pump) 2, 178 Siphon, flexible joints 199 Siphon under Hudson River. 193 Siphon under Narrows 197 Skyscraper, foundations on sand 209 Skyscraper, wrecking. . . .234, 242 Slag, making cement from.. . 127 Smoke-box, diver trapped in. 56 Smoke-stack as air pump ... 186 "Snort valve" of blast fur- nace 130 Soaking pits of steel works. . 134 Springs in subway 210 "Starlight Limited," in loco- motive cab of 140 Steel, cast-iron converted into 1 3 1 Steel, shrinkage of 194 Steel, taming with fire 123 Stone, see-saw 247 Stones, lifting with lewis. . . . 245 Storm, on the Madeline 48 Storm, salving wreck with.. . 42 Storm, wrecking wall during 239 256 Index. Stream, underground, fight- ing 205 Stripping machine 133 Submarine photographs 63 Subway, flood in 205 Subway, gas mains, moving . 216 Sulphur, mining with hot water 87 Subway, rain in 212 Subway, storm, sewer burst. 217 Subway transportation sys- tem 212 Subway weighted to keep from floating 2II Subway work, visit to 209 T Testing machine for siphon joints 201 Tidal wave, Krakatua 37 Tides, and Panama Canal. . . 21 Torch, oxy-acetylene 71 Towers of Hell Gate bridge.. 230 Transit man, ''house-breaker" 205 Tremie, Florida railroad work 17 Tremie scow, Harlem River. 170 Trestle, gas mains on 215 Trusses of Hell Gate arch. . . 231 Tunnel, floating 155 Tunnel, flood in (East River) 174 Tunnel, flood in (Subway).. . 205 Tunnel, Harlem River 157 Tunnel heading, upper and lower 172 Tunnel, rescue expedition in. 182 Tunnel, ride on locomotive through 149 Tunnel section, launching. . . 159 Tunnel section, sinking 168 Tunnel sections locked to- gether 169 Tunnel tubes, floating 162 Tunnel tubes, launching. ... 163 Tunnel tubes, size of 161 Tunnel weighted to keep from floating 211 Turret sunk with dynamite.. 81 Turkey-buzzards and marl. . 16 Uncle Ed, meeting at New Orleans 84 Unloading machines at Gary. 124 Viaduct, Hell Gate 224 Viaduct, Knight's Key 18 Viaduct, Long Key 18 Volcano vs. Panama excava- tion 36 W Wall, rocky, wrecking 239 Watchmen trapped in tunnel 174 Water, bad taste 202 Water, locomotive scooping ^ip 149 Water, mining with 84 Water superheated to 335°. . 87 Water, washing with air. . 193, 202 Well cars 195 Willow mats 98 Wreck of Madeline 40 Wreck on Panama Coast. ... 40 Wreck protected by pneu- matic breakwater 60 Wreck, raising Maine 74 Wreck, raising with air 39 Wrecking house from bottom up 236 Wrecking rocky wall 239 Wrecking skyscraper /234 Wood under water does not rot 214 3477-2 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Aug. 2003 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township. PA 16066 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS '^iiililii i