The St. Johns herald., 1894-04-05
VALUE OF DYNAMITE.
The Many Useful Purposes Which
 It Serves.
Harmless and Safe to Handle If Precau- tions Are Taken = Both Heat and Percussion Needed to Explode
 It-Methods of Manufacture.

Percussion Needed to Explode It-Methods of 8Ianufacture. Dynamite is name that, to the ma j iority of people, is synonymous with murder, ruin and anarchy. In reality ! 1t is a very safe and useful commodity when properly handled, and will not explode except under peculiar condi- tions. When match is applied 1t will merely burn and sizzle as the ordinary red fire does, says the Providence Jour nal, and ninety-nine times out of a | hundred it may be thrown from the 5op of building without doing any
 harm. To explode the substance there
 must be the heat and concussion com ,ined, and this can be obtained only by the use of the dynamite cap or fulmin- ate of mercury, discharged either by a lighted fuse or by the passage of an electric current.
 The explosive substance itself is a mass of sawdust or lamp black soaked in nitro-glycerine. Either of these two preparations is called dynamite. There is another, the latest explosive yet in vented, which is obtained by mixing the nitrO-glycerine with gelatine, or any suitable gfutinous su55tuuvr. This is called forcite, and has the double advantage over dynamite of be- ing safe to handle and more effective in it's working. The dynamite is made up in sticks or cartridges, generally of half pound weight, and held in hol- low pape r cylinders eight inches long and one and quarter inches in diame- l ter. For shipment these sticks are put up first in ten-pound packages, and then five of these packages are placed | in a strong wooden case, and in that bulk they are sent out from the facto- ries to the selling agents. It is not brought here by train, and neither is ordinary gunpowder, for that matter, because none of the railroads which run freight lines in Providence will carry any kind of explosives. But the dynamite is brought as far as Acton, Mass, in the freight cars, and then carried from there in four-horse teams. It takes the team day and half to make the trip, and the selling parties pay the carriage. Of course there is more or less of the stuff smuggled in here by train; sometimes it comes marked as soap or some equally harm less commodity, and the freight hand lers throw it around accordingly, and very frequently workmen who are going short distance by train out of town to do some blasting take enough with them in valise to cause full-fedged modern railroad horror if it should go off.
 In the retail stores, where the dyna mite is for sale, there is no unusual precaution taken in the storing of it. It is kept under the counter or on the shelves, very much the same as com mon salt is; only the dealer is very careful to keep his dynamite cartridges at one end of the store and the dyna mite caps at the other. The latter is the more dangerous of the two, and it is when they are brought together that dynamite is a most excellent thing to keep away from. It is the cap and the cartridge that are so often con- founded in the accounts of explosions, etc. The prevailing idea about Anar- chist Lingg's death is that he exploded cartridge in his mouth; instead it was the much smaller but just as dead ly cap.
 The explosive retails for anywhere from twenty-five to sixty cents a pound, according to the percentum of nitro-glycerine with the sawdust or lampblack. The uses to which the dynamite is put in everyday work on the farms, lodges and highways are many, for simple rock blasting, remov- ing powders, breaking up iron, clear ing tree stumps and shattering ice and frozen ground. It has been frequent ly used at Benedict pond, where it's ex- plosion under water, after drowning accident, has brought to the surface some body that could not be secured with the dragging irons.
 If the charge is to be used under water or in break ing up ice the cap has to be made water-tight where the fuse enters before it is inserted in the cartridge by filling in the opening with tar or some kind of grease. Water does not injure the dynamite, but it must be kept from the fulmin- ate. The powder is injured, however, and its power greatly diminished by low temperature. High explosives freeze at a temperature of forty de- grees to forty-three degrees, Fahren- heit, and when in this condition will explode, if at all, with but little effect.
 So to use them in cold weather the worlxmen have some contrivance for warming the cartridge, either by leav- ing it in an iron kettle which is inn mersed in a larger one containing hot water, or by burying it in sand heated to temperature of seventy degrees. Carelessness in this part of the work has on several occasions resulted in a premature explosion and accident, for while both concussion and heat are generally necessary to produce any re- suit, either ono of the two agents alone may do so, as was the case in the re- cent catastrophe at Santander.
 There is one rule of safety that is al- ways needed in blasting experiments. %I ok Co s1c 4o Id, 4l