A Dangerous Business.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 9, 27 May 1893, Page 7

A Dangerous Business.

A dynamite factory consists of a number of large houses, widely separated from each other, and of a number of small lints away in the distance, half buried in the ground, and used for the purpose of storing the nitroglycerine, the essential principle of dynamite. Each process in the scheme of manufacture has a house for itself, and has a chief skilled in proportion to the danger which is encountered. A large tank is provided full of glycerine, while the acid drips slowly into it from a pipe above. The mixture of pure glycerine, nitric acid and oil of vitriol produces nitro-glycerino, the most deadly explosive known, so powerful that an ounce of it compressed would blow one into atoms, and so liable to explode that the least detonation or jar will instantly fire it. It is positively the most awful thing to deal with that man has ever discovered, remarks a contemporary. No one really seems to know when it is going off; sometimes it will stand a good shake, at others the veriest jostle will produce a disaster. And there in the tank was enough of the fearful compound to destroy a city! One could not resist the thought—what if this stuff, which often explodes by spontaneous combustion, should go off now ? The foreman kindly told me, says a writer in “Invention,” of London, that if such a thing did happen, no man could find a hair of my head or a fraction of my limbs. lie seemed perfectly unconcerned as ho told the talc, and then he showed me a thermometer dipped in the mixture to register its temperature. “If the heat of this mass goes up 6 or 7 degrees,” he said, “ the stuff will explode. I keep my eye constantly on that glass, so that if a fast rise in temperature took place I should open a tap at the bottom of the tank and let the nitro-glycerme run through into a water tank.” Fancy 5 degrees Fahrenheit standing between eternity and yourself ! When in the open I asked my guide if there had ever been a case when that shed had bees blown up, and he said “ once,”, but he told me that the mass is often run off from the tank, and nearly always without trouble, as the record proves. With all this, I can imagine no more dreadful life than that of the man who stands daily before this cistern of death, and has hut a few degrees of temperature between himself and niter annihilation.