Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1913-10-01
Monkeying With The Buzzsaw.

ing machinery is facinating; and
there is no time when skating is more
enjoyable than when the ice is not
quite strong enough to support us.
And we never know just what will
happen when we investigate a blast
ing cap. When we ask the results
of hitting it with a hammer we are
frowned upon. and there is no way of
being enlightened on the subject so
fruitful of immediate and convinc-
ing results as by trying it ourselves
When we ask "What is illuminate of
mercury p with which blasting caps
are filled, even the learned are apt to
hedge. If we inquire what would
happen if we dropped cap into the
kitchen stove, our desire for learning
is not appeased. We are told we had
better not try it; so we have either
to abandon our search for exact know
ledge or try the experiment. It was
reported lately that
Willie found some dynamite,
Didn't understand it quite:
Curiosity never pays
1t Iained Willie seven days
The disintegration and distribu-
tion of this earnest investigator is
much to be deprecated and lamented,
of course, but Willie will probably
be much better off as the result of
this experiments with dynamite than
he would have been going through
life with one or two eyes and several
fingers or hand missing, which pro-
badly would have been the case if
blasting caps had been the subject
of his examination, instead sof the
benefcent and kindly dynamite
Willie was undoubtedly an IN
usually resourceful child in making
the dynamite go off at all. Modern
powder makers are lying awake nights
thinking up ways of making dynamite
safer and more insensitive. That is
all very we'll; but unfortunately,
larger and stronger blasting caps
must be made to explode this dynamite,
and more and more of them Then
some miner carries home a few caps
in his overall pockets, his wife finds
them when she goes through his
pockets. and puts the caps on the
kitchen shetland the first thing you
know Willie or Heinie or Dominick
or little Angelo has one and is max
ing off with it, and pretty soon there
is trouble in that household.
There are lots of ways of getting
crippled by exploding blasting caps
besides hitting them with a hammer
and putting them in the fire. Extract
ing the contents with a pin distributes
untold fingers; holding a lighted
match under them or thrusting the
flaming end into the cap gets i'm
mediate action. In the mines and
quarries, even. where the men who
have to use blasting caps every day
ought to know BETTER there are plenty
of mangled hands and punctured hides
as the result of crimping caps on fuse
with jack-knife, pointed nail, or
any tool that's handy. Many a miner
has blown a hole through his face in
biting the cap on the fuse, and others
have filed themelves with copper
or have been killed outright by the
sparks from their hat lamps or pipes
dropping in an open box of caps.
Lots of blasters continue to bite the
caps on the fuse, and think that be-
cause they have never exploded them
they never will; but some day they
will bite the business end and lose
something beside teeth. It is much
easier, and lots safer, to use the
crimper, tool made for the purpose
Accidentally stepping on cap will
often spoil perfectly good foot
Sparks, flame, heat, blows, friction
it's all the same to the cap to
which they are applied.
Boys often play in and around
qaarries on Sundays, and sometimes
pick up stray caps and start to in
vestigate them. 1t is the rarest thing
that they ever do this without getting
hurt. They perhaps know they are
dangerous, and that a spark or blow
will explode them; but they do not
realize how sensitive they are, how
violent the explosion, or how the
pieces of copper fly. Even the name
is misleading in this respect. The
word leaps suggests the paper caps
used with toy pistols, and because the
blasting caps are called by this name
it is natural to think that the two
articles belong to the same family.
They may; but they bear about the
same resem blance to each other that
hungry, man-eating tiger does to
the gentle pussycat.
Over six hundred children have
been hurt or perhaps crippled for life
in the last five years from playing
with blasting caps If this had hap