The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-11-03


Had Edison dropped down in Salem
. couple of hundred years ago and set
m his monograph among the stern
bieots Of Plymouth colony and started
# in talk there is no doubt that he
would have been promptly hailed be
fore Judge SewaH, charged with NEGRO
NANCY. practicing the black arts ana
befng in league with Satan, and as
promptly consigned by that stern ana
narrow Judge to the stake. Even yet
there is enough of the old superstition
remaining to bestow upon him the ute
of the wizard" and not wholly With
out cause; for, even now, after years
of familiarity with his talking ma
chine" and after it has become an I'M
nlenent Of commercial intercourse,
there is still something uncanny in the
human voice issuing from the caVer-
nous funnel. Wizard or genius, his IN
yention is the marvel of the century
But Edison is not wholly the wizard.
We have had feature articles telling
us of his great shops and laboratory
at Menlo Park, where ne Pcrsues MS
investigations into the resources OF ma
ture: of a devotion to his work that
takes no heed of the ordinary division
men make of the hours into meal time
and sleep time and to whom all hours
seem to be work time; but the nara
five of what he has accomplished in
the purely unitarian work OF produc-
ing iron over in New Jersey, told IN last
Sundays Globe, will be revelation
to many of an unsupported practical
ity in the man they have called the
Wizard. The world knows him best
through the photograph, and through
that in it's capacity for furnishing
amusement. They can now see him as
q, practical man, applying his remark
able genius for invention to the pro-
sale and material work of converting
mountains of rock containing iron into
iron briquettes for the blast furnaces,
TO be turned into steel by the Bessemer
process.
AS interesting as a tale out of the
ARABIAN Nights" is this story of the
discovery of iron in the black sand OF
the Jersey coast; the use of the mag
netic needle to trace it to it's source in
the mountains; the description of the
means used to subdue the mighty
forces of nature, to work out the prob
lem Of separating the magnetic ore
from it's rocky associations, and the
simplicity of the methods used. Those
who have seen the ponderous jaws of
rock crusher at work pulverizlng
stone and comprehend the power re-
CURED to operate them will understand
the mechanical value of Edison's SUBJ
stitution Of the force of momentum for
the actual work of crushing for the
force of steam. The two great rolls,
that form the first set in the crushing
process, weigh 200 tons and are driven
by an engine at surface velocity of
mile a minute. When the five or
six-ton rock falls upon them a clutch
releases the engine, and the momentum
of the rolls carries them on, crushing
the rock mass into fragments. This
trick of shutting off the steam power
and leaving momentum to do the work
will, as the writer states, cause a reVo-
luton in rock-crushing machinery.
Again Edison uses a force in nature
to separate the particles of iron from
the sand dust to which the rocks have
been reduced. 1t was the attraction
of the magnet for the particles of iron
in the black sand which he found on
the sea shore that gave him the hint
for this process. What no human hand
could do he accomplishes easily by the
use of a series of magnets and gravity.
The dust is carried by conveyers to
an elevation and discharged, passing
as it falls three sets of magnets, one
above the other and of varying pull
ing power. AS the stream of dust de-
scends the magnets defect the iron in
the stream from the perpendicular
which the sand takes, drawing the iron
finally sufficiently apart to fall into a
receptacle of it's own and leaving the
sand to fall by itself. The ore parti-
cles go thence to a room where they
are mixed with an adhesive substance
and nodded into bricks. The sand goes
to manufacturers Of paints, cement,
plaster and like articles. In this
great plant which he has built 5000
tons of this crude ore is converted ev-
cry twenty hours into 1900 tons of bril-
quotes, and seventy-dve carloads go
daily to the blast furnaces from the
plant that stands for several years ar
duous work of the worlds greatest in