Manchester Democrat. [volume] (Manchester, Iowa) 1875-1930, 1901-07-24
FOUNDED ON NOVELS.


Fortunes Ballt from the Imaginative
Pages of Fiction.
Oxygen parties are now the rage III
fashionable circles. The gas has the
property of reyiving tired nerves and
bodies III a way which no tonic can
equal. tits supplied in tanks, and the
guests inhale it through long tubes
just as Turkish smokers do tobacco
smoke from Il hookah. The firm of
Ellsworth, who supply the gas, is rap
idly reaping a fortune, and this for
tune they will owe, indirectly at Least.
to the novelist, Jules Verne.
One of Jules Yerne's books-"Dr
OX's EXperiment"-deals with sc.en-
fist who flooded little sleepy Dutch
town with oxygen, and thereby pros
duced fruit and vegetables such as the
world had never before seen. Incl
dentally, its effect was also to render
the phlegmatic Dutclimen. violently
quarrelsome. The perusal of this book
gave the head of firm of chemical
engineers the idea which is now caus.
ing such delight to bored people of
fashion.
Jules Verne, with his wonderful
prophecies and inventions, which have,
since he wrote of them, become actual
facts. is responsible for more than one
Individual rising from poverty to rich
es. No one was ever more fascinated
by story than was Claude Leverson
by Jules Verne's Journey to the Cen.
ter of the Earth" In this book the
novelist describes how party climbed
down the crater of an extinct Iceland:c
volcano, anad so reached the inner re-
cesses of the earth. Young Leverson,
who was at school when he read the
book, made up his mind to copy the
adventures of his hero, and many
years afterward did actually explore the
craters of number of unmapped peaks
in New Granada.> 1t was in 1894
while camped on the shores of the
river which fills the old crater pit at
the top Of the San Geronimo Mountain
that he made his famous discovery of
the Geronimo emerald field, which has
since made him one of the five richest
men OH the South American continent
In Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward" the people of the world
us 1t is to be couple of centuries
hence. use. no money at all. 1t is
therefore, rather curious that the book
should have been the means of bring
ing large fortune to an enterprisine
| American who started colony In Mex
leo on the lines laid down by Bellamy
Th colonists used no money, but the.
| grew immense quantities of fruit ant
corn, which their manager, who's,
name was Daily, sold for the ,publi,
good, and bought with the money sucl
supplies as they needed. No one Seems
to have called on Dalby for accounts
of his transactions; but one day h,
disappeared, and 1t was found that III
had taken with him nearly $4,000
which his colonists had been kim
enough to make for him.
| A writer who is still alive is responsi
BILE for the millions of James McKen
M, the finder of the Half Moon Creel
dlggings in Alaska. 1t was a poem o
Bret Harte's, written thirty years ago
which put it into McIkenna's head t,
go to Alaska. In the poem in question
Bret Harte describes miner as WELD
ing his pick in the midst of snow an,
Ice in Alaska. Why shouldn't there b
gold up there? thought McKenna, al
though none was then known Of ii
reached the country two years befor
the Klondike rush, and attributes al
his good fortune to his favoritc poet