Hudson Maxim

“ Without the pause of an instant, the doomed Japanese crew sprung the huge mine, when a vast cone of flame shot up, reddening the night, carrying with it high into the air, decks, superstructure and guns of the warship. The warship’s magazines, fired simultaneously by the dynamite blast, aided the complete demolition. The returning torrent of guns and wreckage plunged into the sea. ”

“ Therefore, just as the tramp had mounted above the line of vision into the chimney, the genius, entering the room, threw the gunpowder into the fire, which instantly exploded with a great flash and smoke, blowing cinders and embers all over the room and filling it with dense, black, sulphurous smoke, burning the face and hands of the genius considerably, and frightening the elderly people out of their wits. ”

“ My assistant at the motorite laboratory was one of that American country type, absolutely honest, perfectly fearless, painstaking and diligent, of such timber as the great men of the earth are made. He was altogether a most lovable fellow. He had all his life worked with explosives, and was a veteran in the manufacture and use of nitroglycerin and dynamite. But, when doing pioneer work with explosives, there is always an unavoidable element of risk, even when the greatest care is taken. ”

“ The first blast made by the Chinamen did explode the dynamite, which not only wrecked the shaft, but also lifted the whole jutting bit of tableland—ice, earth, everything—sending it—an avalanche—down the mountain slope several hundred feet, exposing a thick stratum of glacial detritus, under where the ice had been, so full of gold that it proved to be one of the richest finds ever made in Alaska. ”

“ One day Kruger took some sticks of dynamite and went to a neighboring stream with the intention of dynamiting some fish. He attached fuze and exploder to a stick of the explosive, and threw it toward the stream, but, missing his aim, the dynamite landed on a rock.
The faithful dog, thinking that the stick had been thrown for him to bring, ran and returned with it to his master in great glee, with the fuze sizzing nearer and nearer to the explosive. Kruger ran in horror, the dog after him, deeming it great sport. The dog being the better runner, danced about his master. ”

“ When gunpowder explodes, it is not consumed by a detonative wave, but burns from the surface, and the more strongly it is confined, that is to say, the higher the pressure under which it is burned, the more rapid is its combustion. Although the action is rapid, it is yet much slower than is the action of detonation of high explosives.
The name gunpowder is a misnomer, for gunpowder is no longer a powder, but is made in the form of hard and dense grains or sticks, according to the use for which it is intended.
A gunpowder is smoky when its products of combustion are not all gaseous. ”

“ The roar of the escaping gas and steam was so great that it was impossible to hear one shout at the top of his voice. The loudest shout was less than a whisper. The roar could be heard with great distinctness more than two miles away. A good idea can be [149] had of the violence with which the steam and gases escaped, from the fact that a door, which accidentally swung shut during one of the runs in front of the nozzle, although seven feet distant, was blown from its hinges, broken in two, and the fragments hurled twenty feet away. ”

“ If a celestial giant with a huge dynamite bomb the size of the earth itself were to approach the earth in its flight through space, and detonate the bomb immediately behind the earth, it would take half an hour for the bomb to explode, that is to say, it would take half an hour, or thirty minutes, for the explosive wave to pass through the eight thousand miles of its diameter. As the speed of the earth in its orbit is four times as great as that of the explosive wave, the earth would rush away, leaving the bomb about thirty thousand miles behind by the time it had completely exploded. ”

“ Several years ago, at the works of the American Forcite Company, a batch of nitrogelatin blew up in process of manufacture and several men were killed. One laborer who was working so close to where the explosion occurred that his clothing was nearly all blown off and he was spattered with the blood of his companions and crazed by the shock, started in a wild and aimless run along the road, with his tattered garments flying in the wind. ”

“ Mother Earth is the greatest of all explosive manufacturers.
Water seeping down into the earth’s crust and trapped in large quantities in the neighborhood of volcanoes sometimes becomes heated to high incandescence—heated until it is no longer water or steam, but mingled [21] oxygen and hydrogen, far above the temperature of their dissociation—under a pressure so great that they occupy a space no larger than the original water; consequently the entrapped waters exert a pressure as great as the strongest dynamite. ”

“ I once had an Italian laborer as man-of-all-work, who was rather a good-looking fellow. An exquisite mustache and a wealth of curly hair were sources of great pride and joy to him. One day he was engaged in burning up some rubbish, and to start a fire, took what he supposed to be a bunch of dry cotton waste, but which was in fact guncotton. Holding in one hand the wad of guncotton the size of his head, he applied a match to it. There was a quick, bright flash, and hair and mustache had disappeared. ”

“ Finding it impossible to escape by running, Kruger climbed a tree with all the alacrity he could muster, and had just reached a vantage of safety when the dynamite exploded, and the dog—well, the dog was holding the stick in his mouth when it went off. ”

“ The dynamite factory is no place for that class of persons who believe themselves to be favorites of Providence or of Almighty God, for dynamite plays no favorites.
There is probably no other class of persons so little guided by science as are the poets. They pride themselves on the fact that they ignore science. ”

“ In spite of every precaution at Government proving grounds, big projectiles do sometimes glance out of the butts or heaps of earth into which they are fired, or from the face of armorplates against which they are directed, and finally land in most unexpected quarters.
One day, while a thirteen-inch gun was being tested at Indian Head, a projectile glanced out of the butt, mounted high into the air, and then came down through the roof of a building, where there were engaged a number of officers and book-keepers. ”

“ When one of these projectiles is fired from the gun directly against twelve-inch armorplate, which the projectile is capable of penetrating, the hard-tempered steel plate in front of the projectile is fuzed or rendered plastic from the heat generated by the energy of the impact, and is forced like wax from the path of the projectile.
There are many popular errors regarding the action of explosive materials. One of the most notable is the opinion that the action of dynamite is downward, and that if a body of high explosive be detonated on the surface of the earth the main effect is downward. ”

“ Now it happens that there is so much erraticism about high explosive mixtures with chlorate of potash as a base that the pathway of invention of such compounds has been strewn with the wreckage of the hopes and anatomy of their inventors.
The inventor had enlisted the financial support of a promoter, and the promoter was endeavoring to enlist financial support for himself, and to that end had invited several men of means, with two rival newspaper [56] editors of the place, to witness a demonstration of the explosive at the inventor’s laboratory, which was a two-story, light frame structure. ”

“ He did not merely sidle away from the perilous place—he fairly flew with an alacrity [128] born of desperation. He had barely emerged from the laboratory when there was a terrific explosion that leveled the building, and formed an enormous crater in the earth where he had stood, the concussion knocking him senseless. And, today, he still swears, with solemn earnestness, that a freight car could have been buried in the hole that was blown in the ground when his pet project went off. ”

“ The exact opposite is the truth. When a mass of explosive is detonated, it is converted practically instantly into a ball of incandescent gases and vapors under very high pressure. When confined the gases act to disrupt their container.
When a large steel projectile is charged with a high explosive, like picric acid, and the explosive detonated, the walls of the pro [10] jectile are not only broken but they are also torn, twisted and shredded, and so quick is the action that the inner surface of the metal is compressed and densified against the outer metal. ”

“ Now, the force exerted by a high explosive is dependent entirely upon the pressure capable of being exerted by the gases liberated by the explosion. The pressure exerted by the most powerful high explosives has been estimated to be about 500,000 pounds to the square inch. Consequently, were the whole molten interior of the earth to be replaced with dynamite and detonated, the explosion that would follow would not lift the eart [8] h’s crust. The superincumbent weight of the earth’s crust is greater than would be the pressure exerted by the dynamite. ”

“ When one of our big army or navy cannon is fired, the time which elapses from the instant of complete ignition of the powder charge to the instant that the projectile leaves the muzzle of the gun is about the fiftieth or the sixtieth of a second, and in that time the hard and horn-like smokeless powder material is burned through only about a sixteenth of an inch ”

“ If the interstellar [7] ether were a high explosive mixture and were to be set off by the bomb, the earth would pass on clear around the sun, and while coming back, about six months later, would meet the explosive wave still going. It would require nearly a year for such a detonative wave to reach our sun from the earth.
We have seen that if the earth were a ball of dynamite, it would require half an hour to explode. If the sun were a mass of dynamite it would require about two and a half days to explode. ”

“ In the combustion of all explosive materials, great heat is generated, and the force of the explosion is dependent upon the volume of gases and the high temperature to which they are raised.
The smokeless powder used in the United States is made by dissolving a special kind of guncotton or nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol, just sufficient of the solvent being used to gelatinate the nitrocellulose, which is then stuffed through a forming die into rods. ”

“ He had learned a useful lesson: that a small quantity of compressed dry guncotton can be very well depended upon to burn quietly away without detonating, but, when a large mass of it is ignited, the greater heat of combustion and the greater pressure generated in expelling the larger quantity of the products of combustion, is almost sure to produce detonation.
The fact that a small quantity of an explosive material will burn away quietly with [78] out exploding has often led persons to think that a large quantity would burn in the same manner. ”

“ Also it is the huge high explosive shell that makes way for the march of modern armies, and high explosive mines and torpedoes are the terror of the underseas.
All forms of dynamite are high explosives, and all high explosives may fairly be called dynamite.
Smokeless gunpowder is actually but a modified form of high explosive. It is dynamite that has been chained and tamed by the chemist’s cunning, so that it will burn without detonation, and thus permit the utiliza [24] tion of its awful energy to hurl shot and shell from war’s great guns. ”

“ Maxim placed especial emphasis upon one stipulation—that we did not want a girl under twenty or a woman over thirty-five, for the reason that a girl under twenty is very apt to lack the necessary experience and serious-minded [196] ness for such a position, while a woman around and above forty is apt to be set in her ways, and to lack the necessary flexibility of mind and nature readily to adapt herself to anything to which she has not always been accustomed, and is, furthermore, likely to be unable to learn anything new with the facility of a younger person. ”

“ It is perfectly safe for the poets to live and move and have their being in error, but it does not do even for a poet, when working with explosive materials, to eliminate scientific procedure, for in that case he is likely to get an uplift that will sprinkle the feet of the angels with his filamented fragments. ”

“ A works foreman of mine who had been employed as assistant superintendent in another dynamite factory told me the following story:
He one day intercepted an Irish laborer who was taking a barrel, which had been used for settling nitroglycerin, down to the soda dry-house, with the intention of filling it with hot nitrate of soda from the drying-pans. The foreman scolded Pat roundly, and told him that, should he do such a reckless thing again, he would be instantly discharged. The foreman then went to the superintendent’s office and reported the matter. ”