United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"It is a scientific toy," said the men of trade and commerce. "It is an interesting instrument, of course, for professors of electricity and acoustics; but it can never be a practical necessity. As well might you propose to put a telescope into a steel-mill or to hitch a balloon to a shoe-factory." Poor Bell, instead of being applauded, was pelted with a hailstorm of ridicule.
Before the telephone was invented, the telegraph had been made a State monopoly; and the tele-phone was regarded as a species of telegraph. The public officials did not see that a telephone system is a highly complex and technical problem, much more like a piano factory or a steel-mill.
No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the industrial, world.
I see the glare of the furnaces, the belching flames, the showers of sparks from the converters, the streams of white-hot metal, and they seem to pour over me. I have the same dream always; I've had it ever since the night after my father was killed." "You told me he was killed in a steel-mill." "Yes, before my eyes. I saw it." Lilas shuddered. "I was a little girl then, but I've never forgotten.
He used the solenoid-hammer, slowly pounding a hole in the glaze, and placed a small charge of the plastic explosive. Chunks of the lava-like stuff pelted down between the little mound and the huge one of the old library, blowing a hole six feet in diameter and the two and a half feet deep, revealing concrete bonded with crushed steel-mill slag. "We missed the door," Altamont said.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital, with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking" near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims.
It is said that the light could be seen from Fusan itself, a hundred miles away. "From our village it looked like a light over a great American steel-mill city," said a missionary to me. And when the morning came, the flames were still leaping high against the crimson sky of dawn. For days this burning of villages continued.
They have been replaced since then by the steel-mill, and then by the Davy-lamp, and other safety-lamps of various kinds. I have here a candle that was taken out of the Royal George , it is said, by Colonel Pasley. It has been sunk in the sea for many years, subject to the action of salt water.
It is noteworthy that mere red heat is insufficient in itself to ignite fire-damp, actual contact with flame being necessary for this purpose. Bearing this in mind, Spedding, the discoverer of the fact, invented what is known as the "steel-mill" for illuminating purposes.
Presently a former moonship-pilot grounded to an administrative job on Luna on his own free time checked over the ship. Jones arranged it. With rocket-motors of adamite the stuff discovered by pure accident in a steel-mill back on Earth the propelling apparatus checked out. The fuel-pumps had been taken over in fullness of design from fire-engine pumps on Earth. They were all right.
Word Of The Day