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Straightening himself once more he said, "Again I must apologize to you, for again I have forgotten the small spot of grease. If the flame had reached the spot of nitro-glycerine it would have exploded, as you all know. When a man has his thoughts concentrated on one subject he is apt to forget something else. I shall make no more experiments with dynamite.
Bob believed, as did a great many, that the firm holding the patent had no legal right to prevent any one from exploding nitro-glycerine by the means of a percussion cap placed in the top of a tin shell or cartridge.
One of the engineers told me he had seen stones thrown thirteen hundred feet from a cutting. They use nitro-glycerine, and have had several serious accidents while handling it. One poor lad who was carrying a can weighing fifty pounds up the dump, tripped, and was blown to atoms; part of one foot, stuck in the fork of a tree about a hundred feet off, being all that was found of him.
This simple compound of nitro-glycerine and gun-cotton, or with some slight modifications, has been found, when properly granulated, to be the most smokeless powder that has yet been discovered or invented.
"They might easily batter in one of the windows," said Ralph, as the pounding at the door was continued. "They would hardly try that plan," replied George, with a meaning smile. "There are a hundred or two quarts of nitro-glycerine stored here, needing only the necessary concussion to explode them.
The owners or prospective owners of the land whereon the wells are to be sunk, employ me to survey their tracts, and by that means I frequently make the acquaintance of those people who, for the almighty dollar, will peril their lives driving around the country with nitro-glycerine enough to blow an entire town up."
Ralph looked at his friend in speechless astonishment for several minutes; this careless, good-natured boy was very far from being the famous moonlighter his fancy had conjured up, and it is barely possible that he was disappointed at not having seen some more savage looking party, for he had speculated considerably about these people who explode nitro-glycerine in an illegal manner.
I have specimens of two kinds in my possession; one is circular, flat, and hollow, about six inches in diameter and an inch and a half thick, and fitted all round its edge with little hammers, which play upon a glass case inside filled with nitro-glycerine. Whichever way the bomb falls it is sure to strike one of these hammers, which explodes the nitro-glycerine.
Through the great clouds of dust and smoke it could be seen that not only was the cathedral shattered, but that the walls of every building adjacent to the square on which it stood were down. The Spaniards were dropping nitro-glycerine bombs into the city from the balloons.
In fact, it appeared from experiment that the dose of carbon might with advantage be so great as not only to be itself oxidized into carbonic oxide by the oxygen of the nitro-glycerine, but to reduce the carbonic acid developed by the explosion of the latter itself into carbonic oxide.
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