¥ 1 i vx)Ri ; ^ 1 i O !-■■■■■ :^ lx_._. p :«< "^TIE on th ,,.. i,„,^ „ >1^ ^lA 7^ SOUTHERN BRANCH, iJNIVERSlTY OF CALIFORNIA, LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES. CALIF. READERS ON COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY HOW THE WORLD IS HOUSED BY FRANK G. CARPENTER AUTHOR OF carpenter's GEOGRAPHICAL READERS o><»<0 46903 NEW YORK • : • CINCINNATI • : • CIMCACO AMERICAN BOOK CO M 1' A N Y BOOKS BY FRANK G. CARPENTER — ( — Ifntro&uction to Gcograpln^ AROUND THE WORLD WITH THE CHILDREN Oeograpbical IReaDers NORTH AMERICA SOUTH AMERICA EUROPE ASIA AFRICA AUSTRALIA AND ISLANDS OF THE SEA IReaDers on Commerce anD IFiiDuetr^ HOW THE WORLD IS FED HOW THE WORLD IS CLOTHED HOW TKE WOPLC IS HOUSED ^' ■•'•"•[ FRANK G. CARPENTER. Entered at Stationers' Hall, London. carp. world is housed. E. p. 12 PREFACE Food, clothing, and shelter are man's three great neces- sities. They are common to all races and tribes, to all localities, and to all times. The desire for them has A formed the basis of civilization, and how far that desire V has been satisfied is the chief criterion of the civihzation which each people possesses. For these reasons it is of great importance that we I should know as much as possible about food, clothing, ^ and shelter as they relate to ourselves and other nations. They are among the fundamental elements of all geo- graphical study and are necessary to a knowledge of the earth as the home of man. -s The acquisition of this knowledge is the object of the travels which the children accompanied by the author are \ supposed to take in the Carpenter Readers of Industry 1^ and Commerce. In the first book of the series, entitled " How the World is Fed," their travels are devoted to learning about the sources of our foods and how they are turned into the forms in which they appear on our tables. In the second book, " How the World is Clothed," the chil- dren go over the globe to investigate what the pc()i)]e wear and how it is made. The third volume is comprised of the pages which follow, and is devoted to "How the World is Housed." In this book the children travel over the globe to learn for themselves where the materials in tluii- 3 4 PREFACE homes come from and how they are prepared for use. They also study the homes of other countries, visiting their little world brothers and sisters and seeing how they live. In each of these three books the travels are made along geographical lines, and the children, while studying the industries and home life of the various nations, learn to know the principal trade routes and other branches of the world of commerce. Their imaginary travels give them a Hve knowledge of many geographical features, thereby vivifying the study of their geographical textbooks. In " How the World is Housed," the children are first taught the evolution of the house, beginning with the homes of the cave men and the tree shelters of the aborigines and ending with the enormous buildings of our modern civilization. They travel among the tent dwellers of the great desert countries, visit some of the people who still live in huts, and also those who have homes of grass, cane, and leaves. They peep into the odd houses of Asia and Africa, and see something of those of Europe and the other continents. They have a glance at some of the buildings of the past, and especially those of colonial times, and then take up the study of our homes of the present. During their world-wide travels the children investigate the sources and manufacture of building materials. They go with the lumbermen into the forests and watch them chopping the trees and rafting the logs to the mills. They follow the logs as they pass through the band saws, planers, and other machines, coming forth in the shapes used in modern house building. At the same time PREFACE 5 the extent of our lumber regions is shown, and also the important place which they have in our national wealth. In other journeys the little travelers go down into the quarries from whence our marbles, granites, slates, and other building stones come ; and learn how artificial stones, such as concrete, cement, and plaster, are made. They also visit the brickyards, and study the great part that clay has in our homes. The next subject taken up is iron and steel as regards modern house building. To learn about this the children enter the mines, and follow the ore through the furnaces and rolling mills until it at last appears in the structural steel shapes of our great office buildings. They also see the metal turned into nails, screws, locks, and hinges. They then investigate tin and zinc as far as they are related to building, and afterwards learn about lead, copper, and brass. Other travels are devoted to glass, others to wood pulp and paper, and still others to paints, oils, and varnishes. An important part of the book is that wliich treats of the heating, lighting, and water supply ; and others are those showing the wonders of our factories, thereby giv- ing the children some idea of the advantages of the civilization in which they live. In writing this volume every attempt has been made to fill it with human interest and child interest without descending to the level of petty curiosity. It is a live book for the live, wide awake American boys and girls of the present day, who are here traveling over the globe to examine things of real interest to them ; and to study their world brothers and sisters as such, and as they are related 6 PREFACE to and connected with them in the work of the world. It is beheved that these many journeys will do much to give the children an idea of the earth as a whole, and of the relations which it has to the places upon it in which they live. Acknowledgments are due to the Buffalo Sunday Illus- trated Express, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the American Radiator Company, Atlantic Terra Cotta Company, Atlas Portland Cement Company, Beal and Scott, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, Post and McCord, Sherwin Williams Company, Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, and Yale and Towne Manufacturing Company for their courtesy in furnishing material for illustrations. CONTENTS CHAPTER I . Introduction 2. Among the Tent Dwellers .... 3. People who live in Huts .... 4. Houses of Grass, Cane, and Leaves 5. Some Odd Dwellings of Far-away Lands . 6. Homes of Colonial Days .... 7. In the World's Great Forests 8. Our Logging Industry 9. From Log to Lumber 10. Woodworking in Other Lands 1 1 . Among the Ruins of Some Great Buildings of Past 12. A Visit to the Quarries — Marble, Granite, Slate 13. Artificial Stone — Concrete, Cement, and Plaster 14. Brick Structures of Antiquity 15. Our American Brickyards .... 16. Iron 17. Mining Iron 18. In the Furnaces and Rolling Mills . 19. Nails and Screws, Locks and Hinges . 20. Tin and Zinc 21. Lead, Copper, and Brass 22. A Trip to Fairyland 23. A Visit to a Glass Factory 24. Paper — Wood Pulp 25. The Story of Paper 26. Pai.nts, Oils, and Varnishes 7 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 27. Building a Home 232 28. The World's Tallest Buildings 238 29. In a New York Hotel 247 30. Fire 257 31. Warming our Homes — Fireplaces, Stoves, Hot Water, and Steam 271 32. Lighting the House 278 ;i2. Our Great Oil Industry 286 34. How Gas is made 291 35. Lighting by Electricity 299 36. Lamps and Burners. How Matches are made . . 307 37. The Old Oaken Bucket and its Successors . . 317 38. The Water Supply of Great Cities . . . -325 39. Furniture 33i 40. Floor Coverings 339 Index 347 HOW THE WORLD IS HOUSED I. INTRODUCTION THIS book is to be the record of the doings of a party of children who are to travel with the author over this big round earth. Each one who reads it is to imagine himself one of the party, and we are to go together over the oceans and across the mountains and plains looking at and learning about the world for ourselves. There will be so much to see that we must keep our eyes wide open. We shall carry cameras with us to photograph the most interesting sights, and our pencils and notebooks must be always at hand to write down the things we wish to remember and tell to our people at home. We shall not travel without an object. The world is so large and it has so much to show us that we might spend our whole lives in journeying over it and not sec it all. So it is best to take up one class of things at a time, and devote our journeys to that. In other books of this series we have already gone over the globe to learn how the world is fed, and how it is clothed. In our present travels we shall try to find out how it is housed. We shall peep into the dwellings of our little brothers and sisters of other races in different parts of the earth and sec how they live. We want to know how their houses arc made and 9 10 INTRODUCTION furnished. We would also learn as to our own homes and how they are constructed, and we shall go to the places from where the building materials come, and see how they are prepared for our shelter and comfort. All this will require many long journeys. We shall travel over the various grand divisions, and explore many parts of them. We shall go into the mighty forests to see where the wood comes from ; to the quarries to watch men getting out the granite, marble, and other building stones ; and perhaps descend below ground to learn about the iron, copper, tin, and other metals used in putting them together. We shall visit factories and foundries of many kinds, and find that thousands of people all over the world are always at work in the industry of making our houses. We shall see the great part that commerce has to do with preparing the materials and bringing them to the places where they are required for building, as well as in erecting the structures. Our travels will therefore be along the two great lines of industry and commerce, which have so much to do with our own employment and comfort. Before we start out, however, let us have a little talk about those people who lived long ago before houses, as we know them, existed. No one can tell just what was the first language spoken or just where was the first place on earth that man lived ; and in the same way it is hard to say what the first house was like. We beUeve that all mankind were originally savages. They either went naked or dressed in skins or leaves, and in all probabihty their earliest shelters were the wide-spreading trees of the for- ests in which they lived. They crowded around the trunks INTRODUCTION II of the trees to keep out of the sun and the rain, and climbed into the branches to be safe from the wild animals that might attack them. In the winter they sought out caves in the rocks and holes in the earth on account of the cold, often driving out the savage beasts who had their homes there. After a short time man learned to make shelters of branches covered with leaves or grass, and then to twist Palm-leaf huts. the branches together and chink them with mud into huts. He roofed these rude shelters with grass or the skins of the wild animals he was able to trap, and finally learned how to sew the skins into tents. Indeed, there are many people now living in the more savage parts of the world who have shelters as rude as those of our own ancestors of long ago days. F'or instance, in the islands about the Strait of Magellan at the south- ern end of South America, I have seen natives who go almost naked. They have no villages nor fixed habita- 12 INTRODUCTION tions and move about fishing and hunting, making rude shelters wherever they stop. They choose a bushy spot, and, bending the branches together, tie them at the top. They then break off other branches and lean them against this framework, making a little tent about three feet high into which they crawl to sleep at night. Their food is fish and mussels and such small animals as they can trap and kill with their bows and arrows. They have no stoves and cook on fires in the open air. They are wild savages, and live but little better than beasts. It is much the same with the tribes of black people who inhabit the wilder parts of Australia. They make their shelters by tearing off pieces of bark from the fallen trees and leaning them against one another. The pygmies of the great forests of the Kongo in the heart of Central Africa have no better homes. They are black dwarfs, so small that the full-grown men and women are no taller than American boys and girls of twelve and thirteen. They wear almost no clothing, and but few of them have permanent homes. Most of these little people travel about from place to place, sleeping upon the ground or in the branches of trees. Some of them dwell in caves, and others in rude huts of bark which they erect where they stop. A few of the tribes have villages or collections of such shelters. The ordinary pygmy house is so low that we could hardly stand upright within it, and the entrances are such that the little owners themselves have to crawl in. It is usually of an oblong shape with two doors, one in front and one behind, so that the pygmies may run out at the back if attacked at the front. The houses are formed of branches INTRODUCTION 13 stuck into the ground, so that they lean towards one an- other. They are tied at the top, and the sides and top are rudely thatched with leaves and grass. They have no furniture. The pygmies sleep upon the ground or on beds of leaves. They live upon roots, and by trapping and hunting, their weapons being bows and poisoned arrows. Very similar to these people are our own little brown cousins, the Negritos, or black dwarfs of the Philippine Islands. They wander about from place to place, putting up shelters to sleep under when night overtakes them. They sometimes dwell in caves or holes in the rocks, and we may suppose that their homes arc much the same as those of our race before it began to be civilized. 14 INTRODUCTION Caves have been found in England, France, and in other parts of Europe in which man once dwelt, and in them the tools of bone and flint which he then used. In some places our ancestors of the long-ago days cut homes for themselves out of the soft rock ; and, even now, in the loess country of western China, there are people who dwell in similar homes. The soil there is many feet deep, and of such a nature that the streams and roads have cut deep ravines through it, the walls of which are almost perpendicular. In these walls the people have made rooms and fitted in doors and windows, forming dwellings which are comfortable and not at all damp. "In Tunis are tribes which have homes in the cliffs." INTRO DUCl ION 1$ Not far from the Gulf of Gabes in Tunis, on the edge of the Desert of Sahara, are tribes which have similar homes in the cliffs. In the southwestern part of our country are to be found the remains of the Indian cliff dwellers, who lived in the crevices of the cliffs which they walled up with stone, and still farther south in Mexico are other cliff dwellers. In the northern parts of Alaska the Eskimos build their winter homes half underground, roofing them with snow, and digging passages below the earth through which they go in and out. In many newly settled countries the pioneers often use caves as dwellings until they can erect more comfortable homes, and there are now houses made of sod and clay in different parts of our West which are almost like caves. Returning again to that long-ago time when men were but little better than savages, we may suppose one of them grew tired of his cave home or brush tent and tried to make a permanent shelter which the rain could not enter nor the wind blow away. To do this he piled up stones into rude walls, and made a roof of some kind above them, thus constructing the first hut or real house. His fellows did likewise, and step by step man discovered how to make the foundations, to improve the roofs, and to form the doors and openings for light and air. The first tools were of stone, bone, horn, and wood. Later, as man learned how to work in metal, he made im- ]jlements of copper and bronze and, after many ages, of iron and steel. As the tools became better the shelters steadily improved. The stones were cut into blocks and the trees chopped into logs. After a time smooth walls of stone or wood were constructed, and roofed with flat stones i6 INTRODUCTION or hewn boards and afterwards with shingles and slate. Then somebody discovered how to make bricks, and plaster and cement came. Cliff dwellings in Arizona. By and by the secrets of glassmaking were learned, and step by step invention marched along with industry until the rude huts became houses and the villages grew into cities. Civilized man then began to make temples and AMONG THE TEXT DWELLERS 1 7 palaces and mighty structures of every description. The work of improvement went on in small buildings as well as in great, until we now have our wonderful homes made of materials gathered by commerce from all parts of the world, and, by industry, so combined that they give us all the comforts and conveniences of modern life. In our travels we shall find races and tribes who are now living in the many different stages through which man has risen in making a home for himself, and, by our imagination, can see how our ancestors lived M'hen they were passing through these same conditions. More- over, by observing the ruins left by the people of those long-ago days, we shall learn something of the houses in which they dwelt. 2. AMONG THE TENT DWELLERS WE shall begin our journeys to-day by visiting some of the simpler homes of mankind. One of the first was the tent. It came into use during the early stages of civilization when man maintained himself largely by hunt- ing and needed a shelter which he could carry with him to the spots where the game was nuxst ])lcntiful. Later on it became the home of those who lived by rearing cattle and sheep, the animals being driven long distances to the best feeding grounds. This was so in the days of the Scriptures. In Genesis we read that Jabal " was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle " ; and that Abraham " sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." CAkK HOUSES — 2 i8 AMONG THE TENT DWELLERS The first tent was probably of leaves or skins sewed to. gether, and stretched over a framework of poles, or the branches of trees. It may have been like the wigwams of poles covered with skins in which our Indians were living at the time that America was discovered, or the skin tents which now form the summer homes of the Eskimos in the northern parts of our continent. Skin tents are the dwell- ings of some of the natives of Siberia who travel about in their reindeer sledges, and also of the Mongols of the Desert of Gobi and the regions beyond the Great Chinese Wall. The latter have circular dweUings made of a frame- work covered with skins. Tents of skin are common in parts of Thibet, where yaks are used to carry them from place to place. They are also the homes of certain tribes of Hottentots, and other wandering African peoples. Australian shelters. The first cloth tent was probably of felt, somewhat simi- lar to that now used by the nomads of Persia, or by the Kirghiz of western Asia. The Kirghiz have round tents AMONG THE TENT DWELLERS The Kirghiz have round tents on latticework frames. of a considerable size. They are upheld by a folding lat- ticework frame made of sections which can be opened and closed and therefore can easily be packed upon horses and carried to new grazing grounds. After this wooden frame- work is set up, a cover of thick felted cloth is spread over it, being stretched tight around the walls. It has a door at the front, and is fastened at the bottom with stones or pegs. The Kirghiz rear many horses and sheep, and their chief food is mutton and h,,) 70 IN THE WORLD'S GREAT FORESTS earth to the sun. That would have taken nine hundred and thirty milHon miles of lumber and left something like seventy million miles to spare. The remainder would have paved a road more than two hundred and ninety-one feet wide all the way to the moon, and had we nailed it down, covering sea and land, around our little earth at the Equator, have made a board belt twenty thou wide or of a width of three and a with many millions of boards sawed into flooring, it would enough boards to have covered England with the addition of Jersey, Pennsylvania, Dela- Of these vast woodlands haps was the Northern Maine throuo^h New . ,-., Vy^ i York and the most central and north- sin to Minnesota, # it would sand feet half miles, to spare. If have furnished the whole of New New York, New ware, and Maryland. the most valuable per- forest, which ran from England, across New of Pennsylvania, through 4p lachian Moun- k'M/ 1^ ern Michigan and Wiscon- Georgia, covered an state of •^j rv extending along the Appa- tains as far southward as Roughly speaking, this forest area about six times that of the <^^/ N^y Virginia or Kentucky. In it there were many cone-bearing trees. It was the home of the white pine, which was mixed with red pine, spruce, hemlock, cedar, and fir, as well as birch, cherry, maple, and some other hard woods. The total amount of timber IN THE WORLD'S GREAT FORESTS 7 1 in that forest was perhaps one bilUon feet board measure, a board foot being one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch thick. Another extensive wooded tract of the East was the Southern forest. This began in southern New Jersey and covered all our South Atlantic and Gulf states, as well as parts of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. It contained many pines, of which the yellow pine was the most nu- merous. It covered more than two hundred million acres, and. had as much timber as the Northern forest. Between these two was the Central forest, which ex- tended from the Atlantic to the great western plain. It was composed chiefly of hard woods, and before the clear- ing began comprised about two hundred and eighty mil- lion acres and contained more than fourteen billion board feet of standing saw timbers. This timber was walnut, oak, elm, hickory, maple, chestnut, sycamore, red gum, and ash, as well as basswood, cottonwood, and some other trees. The forests of the Rocky Mountains were situated on the higher plateaus and slopes. They were almost entirely pine and contained less than half the amount of timber that stood in either the northern or the southern portions. The original extent was not over one hundred and ten million acres. The Pacific Coast forest was less in area than any of these others. It was thickly timbered and the trees were so tall that it surpassed in the amount of the good tim- ber then standing any of the other forest regions, except- ing the hard wood forest of the central belt. This forest extended through the greater part of California, and of 72 IN THE WORLD'S GREAT FORESTS Washington and Oregon. It was composed almost alto- gether of trees bearing cones, consisting chiefly of Douglas fir and redwoods, many of which were two hundred or more feet in height and of enormous thickness. In addi- tion to these there were vast quantities of fine yellow pines, red cedars, sugar pines, and other firs and spruces. Such were the woods which we had in our country when it came into our hands. Of this vast treasure more than one half has already disappeared. By cutting, clearing, and forest fires the area of the woods has been so reduced that it does not now amount to much more than one fifth of the United States proper ; and instead of our having fifty-two hundred billion feet of lumber still standing we have not half that amount. Much less than one third of the Northern forest remains. More than one half of the Southern forest has been cut away, and of the Central forest, we have not one fifth as much as we had when the country came into our hands. The woods of the Rocky Mountain region are in a better condition. We have from one half to three fourths of them left, while in the Pacific Coast forests a much greater proportion of the trees are still standing, so that all to- gether our forests are still exceedingly valuable. Nevertheless, it is sad to think of the vast amount of good timber which has been wasted through fires and bad lumbering. Of late years the National Bureau of Forestry has done much to remedy these evils. Under its direction woodlands are being set out in most of the states, the national forests are being carefully preserved, and the trees are so cut that the ripe timber is turned into lumber, while the younger trees are left to grow for the future. OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY 73 8. OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic. Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms." WE have crossed our wide continent, and are now on the western slope of the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington, in one of the most densely wooded regions of the Pacific Northwest. Mighty fir trees, some as thick as the Pullman cars in which we crossed the Rockies, rise to a height of two or three hundred feet on all sides of us. Their green branches begin at one hundred or more feet from the ground, and they are so thick that they interlock and shut out the sun. The great trunks stand about like mighty columns, and we seem to be in a vast cathedral which reaches on and on as far as we can see, reminding us of one of Bryant's Forest Hymns : — ■ " The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them, — ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems ; in the darkling wood, Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication/' The sounds about us, however, are far different from those of a church. We are in the heart of a lumber camp, with hundreds of men sawing and chopping away on all sides. Not far from where we are standing is a stationary steam engine, which puffs and blows as it drags the mighty 74 OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY • This is the forest primeval." logs with steel ropes to the cars and with similar ropes loads them for shipment to the mills. In order to see the better we have climbed upon a OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY 75 great fir which has just fallen. It is two hundred feet long, and so thick that a cross section of it would reach from the floor to the ceihng of the largest schoolroom. Other fir trees are still standing, the tops of some of them piercing the sky three hundred feet over our heads. Ex- cept where the lumbermen have cut their way through, the In the Oregon woods. jungle is almost as dense as that of the Himalaya Moun- tains. The ground is covered with rotting underbrush. There are fallen trees and broken branches everywhere, and the older trunks have a thick coating of moss. There are giant ferns, and brambles with sharp thorns which tear one's hands and clothes as he makes his way through. Not far from where we are the lumbermen are felling a 76 OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY great Douglas fir. They have made cuts on the opposite sides of its trunk five feet from the ground and into these have fitted two springboards, upon each of which one of them stands. They are making a notch in the tree which will give it the right direction for falling; Their axes swing alternately, and each cut brings a great chip to the ground. By and by the gash in the trunk is so large that Big tree of California with a company of soldiers on it. a man could lie down inside it, and this gash determines the direction in which the tree will drop when the saw has cut its way through. A little farther over we see another tree already notched, at which the lumbermen are cutting their way through the trunk. This is done by a cross-cut saw six feet in length, with a man at each end. The work begins at the OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY 77 opposite side from the gash. The saw cuts like velvet as it eats its way through the soft bark. Now it strikes the wood, and the tree seems to shriek as the cruel teeth plow their way to its heart. That mighty giant has been hun- dreds of years in its growth. It came through the soil more than a century before Columbus discovered America, and it was one hundred feet high when our ancestors built their first log huts on this continent. Nevertheless, these men will cut it down in less than an hour, and within a few days it will be on its way over the world to make homes for man. As soon as the tree comes to the ground other men take charge of it. They trim off the great branches and measure it, cutting gashes upon it twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty feet apart, at which places a third set of men saw it into logs. Each log is now wrapped around with a steel rope, joined to the engine, and by this means is dragged over the ground to the railroad which has been built to take the logs out of the woods. Many of the logs are so heavy that they plow up the earth and sometimes tear up smaller trees by the roots on the way. A single forty foot log from one of the larger trees is a full load for one car, containing enough wood to make five thousand feet of good lumber. Some of the logs when green will weigh from twenty to forty tons, but tlie steel cable, moved by the engine, drags them through the woods to the track, each log looking like a huge live worm which sways its head this way and that as it goes. As the log reaches the railroad, it is raised by another cable with heavy hooks on the ends. This passes through 78 OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY a block suspended above the car. The hooks are fastened into the log, and as the engine is started it reels up the cable, dragging or raising the log to the car. Trainload of logs. In some of the lumber camps the steam engines move the logs to the streams, where they are rafted to the mar- kets or to the railroads ; and in other parts of the North- west they are carried to the sawmills, from where the lumber sometimes floats down the mountain in great flumes or troughs of boards into which streams have been run. In California, in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, is a mill which has a flume sixty miles long. The lumber is thrown into this and it goes flying down to the trains and the market. In many parts of the Cascades the logs are sawed not far from where they are cut and the lumber is carried on the railroads to the cities. In other regions the logs are floated down the Columbia, and from some places they go OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY 79 into Puget Sound and are thence rafted to the great mills on its shores. Some rafts are so built that they can be towed by steamers from Puget Sound down to San Francisco and other ports ; and on the Columbia River are similar rafts which are taken out into the Pacific Ocean and towed to the markets. These giant rafts are often as large as the biggest ocean steamer. One constructed on the Columbia was seven hundred feet long, fifty-three feet wide, and thirty feet deep. It drew about twenty feet of water and contained all together seven thousand logs. This great mass was placed within a cradle much like the hull of an ocean steamship, and so wrapped around with chains that it was safely carried down through the Columbia, and along the coasts of Oregon and California, to the Golden Gate and These giant rafts are often as large as the biggest ocean sieamer." 8o OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY San Francisco Bay, a distance of more than seven hundred miles. In our great forest regions east of the Rocky Mountains most of the lumbering is done in the winter, the logs being loaded on sledges, and carried on roads of ice or snow to the streams. The snow for the roads is often beaten hard and then sprinkled with water, which freezing, turns it to if" u li^^l Logs are carried on roads of snow to the streams. ice. Some of the sledge loads are enormous, comprising forty or fifty logs sixteen feet long, containing many thousand feet of fine lumber. The sledges are drawn by teams of four, six, eight, and even more horses. When the loads reach the streams the logs are rolled out upon the. ice, where they remain until spring. As the warm weather comes the ice melts, and the freshets carry the logs down to the rivers and lakes, where they are formed into rafts and floated or towed to the market. OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY 8 1 The men who go with these rafts sometimes live in rude shanties which they build upon them. They are very expert, and run over the logs as they bob up and down and roll about in the water. They know just how to get the logs apart if they should pile up in one place, and how to keep them from jamming together as they are carried over the rapids or falls. When a jam occurs, one or two logs often form a key, which when pulled out releases the whole mass. The drivers, as they are called, understand where these keys are and drag them out with cant hooks. Such work is dangerous, and the men engaged in it are some- times caught and crushed by the flying timbers, or dragged under the water and drowned. In the southern forests the logs are taken to the streams by engines over the railroads or by wagons drawn by long teams of oxen or horses. They are put together in rafts, upon some of which the lumbermen and their families live as they float down to the seaports. The trees of the Eastern forests are much smaller than those of the Pacific Coast, and most of the logs can, if necessary, be handled without the aid of machinery. Nevertheless the amount of timber cut is enormous. Dur- ing the ten years from 1880 to 1890 it has been estimated that enough logs were floated to the markets from Minne- sota, Michigan, and Wisconsin to have made a solid pile four times as wide as the average country road and as high as a four-story house, reaching across our continent from New York to San Francisco. We enjoy the life of the lumber camp. The air is fresh, and flavored with the rich smell of the pines and the saw- dust and chips of the newly cut logs. The lumbermen, CAKP. HOUSES — 6 82 OUR LOGGING INDUSTRY although rough in many ways, are full of good nature, and they make us at home. They show us their shoes, the soles of which are studded with sharp spikes which dig into the bark as they walk over the great logs and give them sure footing. We go with them to the camp and eat at the long pine table around which they gather at meals. Our plates are of tin and we have tin cups and bowls and tin spoons and steel forks. The food consists of soup, corned beef, potatoes, and canned goods of sev- eral varieties. We have excellent bread and cakes made by the camp cook, baked beans which remind us of Boston, and end our meal with mince pie hot from the stove. We are told that this diet is often varied with venison, squirrels, wild birds, and other game, shot in the woods. We stay overnight with the loggers, sleeping on straw ticks in the wide bunks, built in tiers around the walls of the rude log house in which they live. Before going to bed one of our friends brings out a fiddle, and we laugh as we see these grown men dancing together. We turn in very early, for we are tired after our long day in the forest. By nine o'clock the lights are out. We fall asleep almost immediately, and do not wake until morning. There are hundreds of such lumber camps in the Cas- cade Mountains, and a vast number very similar to them in Cahfornia and in the Eastern forest regions of the United States. All together we have several hundred thousand men engaged in the lumber industry, and the business is so extensive that its product often sells for more than a half billion dollars a year. ^ FROM LOG TO LUMBER 83 9. FROM LOG TO LUMBER WE have left the woods and have come by train to Puget Sound to see the logs turned into lumber. We are about to visit one of the sawmills for which this region is noted. Its buildings cover more than fifty acres, and it has a water front big enough to load several "At the docks are vessels taking on cargoes." steamers at the same time. At the docks are huge ves- sels taking on cargoes of beams, rafters, flooring, and boards of all kinds, while upon the railroad, near by, the cars are loading for the lumber markets of the Mississippi Valley and other parts of the country. Some of the ships are bound for Alaska, China, Japan, and even South Africa. Others are taking on lumber for San Francisco and the Panama Canal. There is a sailing vessel just loaded starting out for Manila, and that tramp steamer 84 FROM LOG TO LUMBER coming in will leave within a short time, carrying its cargo of boards to the Hawaiian Islands. Some of the Pacific Coast lumber is exported to Europe, South America, Aus- tralia, and indeed all over the world. But come with me to the other end of the yard. We are looking down upon a bay or inlet with a narrow strait leading out to the Sound. The surface of the bay is covered with logs, floating about, awaiting the saws. Some of the logs are thirty or more feet in length, and many are as big around as a hogshead. Several men are moving about upon them, pushing them, one by one, to a great chute which extends from the water up to the mill. In the lumber yard. As the logs near the chute, they are caught by steel hooks on the ends of thick chains, and are dragged by the engines to the floor of the mill. They move as though they were alive, looking like gigantic snakes, as they crawl out of the water and on up the trough. There comes one FROM LOG TO LUMBER 85 Sawmill in California. now. It is five feet thick, forty feet long, and it weighs many tons. Nevertheless it flies aloft as though it were no more than a broom handle, and drops like a stick on the floor. Now great iron arms rise out of holes on each side of it. They catch it with their steel talons and roll it upon a truck which rests upon wheels on a track. One of the mill men pulls a lever, and the truck, moving for- ward, carries the log against a band saw, the teeth of which cut through it as though it were cheese. See, a great slice has been pared from one side! It flies back, and another slice drops off from the side opposite. Now a steel arm with a talon at the end rises out of the floor and turns the log, so that the cut sides lie beneath and on top, while four other arms reach up and arrange it in place on the truck. The two remaining sides are sliced off in the same way, and our log has become a square 86 FROM LOG TO LUMBER timber, each side of which measures four feet. A motion from the head sawyer and a pull at the levers, and the machinery cuts this timber into flooring. The boards pass on to other machines in which they are again cut, and finally come out in just the right widths. They are now carried on to the drying rooms, and later to the planers, where they are smoothed and tongued and grooved. Other kinds of lumber are cut in the same way, the machinery doing so much of the work that the log is scarcely touched by man's hand from the time it leaves the water until in its finished state it is piled upon the steamers or cars for shipment to market. We must keep our eyes open as we go through the mill. It is so noisy that, scream as we may, we cannot make our friends hear. The screeching of the saws is such that the men who do the work are directed by signs. They are all under the head sawyer, who might be called the brains of the machinery and who is paid very high wages. He stands under an electric light in about the center of the mill with his hands upon the levers which control the sawing. He motions the men at the trucks to touch such other levers as will so cut the logs as to produce the most and best lumber, and a few mistakes might cost his employers hundreds of dollars. Now look at the saws. They are different from any used by our ancestors when they built the board houses of colonial times. Then and for a long time thereafter, most of the building materials were sawed out by hand. One method was by the pit saw operated by two men. The pit sawyer stood in a pit over which the log was placed and pulled the saw down, while the other, known as FROM LOG TO LUMBER 87 the top sawyer, standing upon the log, drew it back in the opposite direction. The first circular saw was invented in England about 1777, but was not employed in America until many years later. Such saws are used now in the smaller mills of our country, but the great band saws Interior of mill with a band saw. and gang saws, such as we see here, are common only in the larger establishments. The band saw is an endless strip or belt of steel, with teeth on one or both edges, so made that it can be fitted over two large wheels, one high above the floor and the other below it. The wheels are moved by engines, and as they go the steel belt flies around rapidly, its teeth cut- ting through everything that comes against them. One of the band saws of our mill is eighty feet long, and it rapidly cuts its way through the great logs as they are shoved against its sharp and fast-moving teeth. 88 FROM LOG TO LUMBER The gang saw consists of a dozen or more circular saws parallel with each other, and so fastened to a spindle that they fly around at the same time. The saws can be so graduated that boards of any thickness desired are cut by them. The great log moves against them, and their teeth saw out a dozen or more boards at once. Among the other machines used in our lumber mills are steam planers, which smooth the wood ; lathes, which turn it into all sorts of shapes; and finishing machines for mak- ing moldings, panels, window-sash, doors, and woodwork of all kinds. Every large lumber mill has its blacksmith shop where the breakages are repaired, and a department in which the men do nothing but file saws. There are also great kilns lined with steam pipes to dry the lumber, and special machines for carrying it out and loading it upon the steam- ers and cars. The United States has many sawmills with machinery much hke that in the one we have visited. It has hun- dreds in or near the Pacific Coast forest, and in our north- ern and southern forests. There are also many smaller mills scattered throughout the timber regions. Altogether we have more than eleven thousand lumber mills, which in some years cut twenty or thirty billion feet of lumber, board measure. We have hundreds of mills that make lath and other cheap lumber, and more than two thousand whose product is shingles. Indeed, a large part of our nation sleeps under shingles from the Pacific Coast forest, such roofing selling for miUions of dollars a year. In the shingle mills the logs go in as bolts, and pass through machines provided with a series of knives which cut many shingles at once. FROM LOG TO LUMBER 89 In our travels through the timber regions we may learn something of the kinds of wood most used in our houses, and the places from whence they come. The greater part of it is yellow pine, including therein all the pine lumber cut in the eastern half of the United States, excepting the white and Norway pine. This yellow pine comes chiefly from Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Alabama, and in lesser quantities from Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia. After it we have the white pine, the annual product of which is often several billion feet. This is from the northern forests, and especially from the states about Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, Next come the Douglas fir and Oregon pine, of which we saw something in our Washington lumber camp, and after them the hem- lock, of which Pennsylvania cuts most, and then the spruce, cypress, white oak, and other hard woods. In addition to the wood used for building, a vast amount is needed for other purposes. Our railroads consume many millions of ties every year. We use an enormous quantity for furniture. We require millions of telegraph and telephone poles, and many acres of trees are cut down to make staves for barrels. The toothpick is little more than a splinter, but there is a single factory in Maine which makes a half billion of them every year ; and we have othei establishments which turn out lead pencils, clothes- pins, and wooden spools by the hundreds of millions. Several hundred acres of virgin forests are used annually for matches, and more than three tliousand acres of hard wood trees are, it is estimated, cut up into shoe pegs. There are also vast quantities of hard wood used for 90 WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS carts, carriages, and cars of all kinds. A great deal of soft wood goes into buckets and baskets, to say nothing of the other soft wood trees which are annually cut down to be ground into wood pulp for the making of cardboard, and the paper which we use for wall coverings and for our newspapers and books. oJ»Co lo. WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS OUR travels this morning begin in Burma. We are opposite our own homes on the other side of the globe. It is now evening in the United States, and our friends there are getting ready for bed. Here the sun is In the teak forests of Burma where elephants draw the logs. just rising in the eastern heavens, and day has begun. Perhaps some of us can tell why this is .'' But our business here is to find out how woodworking is done, and to see whether it is really true that elephants help the Burmese build their houses. To do this we shall WOODWORKING IX OTHER LANDS 9 1 first go to the great forests of teak which cover a large part of the peninsula of Farther India. The teak trees are tall, straight, and beautiful, and they make excellent lumber. They grow in tropical parts of the world and therefore there is no snow or ice on which to sledge the logs out. Much of the forest stands in the swamp and it would be difficult to lay railroads upon it or even to drive over it with carts. For these reasons elephants are used to drag the logs to the streams. Teakwood is heavy, and the trees are girdled several years before they are cut. This causes the leaves to wither and the trees to die ; the sap goes out of them and they become so light that they will float. They are now cut down with axes and saws, and chopped into logs. Then chains are wrapped around them, and one by one they are taken off to the streams. This is done by ele- phants, which are hitched by chains to the logs. After a time the paths become troughs, into w^hich the water oozes and makes them so slippery that the logs slide along more easily. Now and then a log catches its end in the mud, whereupon the elephant stops and lifts it out with his tusks, and then moves it onward. The elephants push the logs apart when they pile up in the water; they also pull them out with their trunks and tusks, and lift them over the shoals. Only strong elephants are used for such work, the best logging animals being thirty, forty, or even more years of age. We shall now suppose we have left the forests and have come to the lumber yards of the port of Rangoon near the mouth of the Irrawaddy River. Here many logs are sawed into lumber for use in house building, and also to 92 WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS be exported to other parts of the world. Teak is one of the best of all woods for ships, and it is also valuable for making fine furniture. The yard we visit lies on the banks of the river. It has sawmills and planing mills, and we can see its great piles of timber before we come to it. Entering, we find a score of elephants aiding the workmen; or we might bet- ter say that the men are aiding the elephants, for it is the huge beasts which do the heavi- est labor. They lift the great logs upon They lift great logs upon their tu^Ks. their tusks and carry them from one side of the yard to the other. They pile the lumber; and, when one of them cannot raise a timber to the place where it should be, he will often rest one end on the top of the pile and then lift- ing the other with tusks and trunk, give it a kick with his hind foot, which shoves it into its place. The elephants gather up the scraps of lumber and lay them so that the workmen can rope them into bundles. After this they WOODWORKING IN OTHER LAJSDS 93 will thrust their tusks through the ropes and take the bundles as they are told. They drag the logs to the saw- mills and carry the boards to the steamers. Each of the great beasts has a man on his back, who directs him with a goad, at the end of which is a sharp hook. The ele- phant knows just what each touch of the goad means, and if he does not obey, the driver jabs him in the ear with the hook. The elephants are intelligent. They know the hours during which their work is done. They grow restless as noonday approaches, and at twelve o'clock, when the whistle sounds, they will drop whatever they have on their tusks and bolt for the feeding sheds. It is the same when work stops at night. We talk with the drivers and are told that the great beasts must be handled just so. Each has his bath twice a day, ajid, after this, is curried all over. The elephant is a sensitive creature. It cannot endure certain insects, and if the smallest bug creeps under its saddle, the huge beast will not work until it is removed. The largest elephant will tremble at the sight of a mouse, for fear, perhaps, that the little animal may run up its trunk. We say good-by to the drivers on leaving, and throw them some coins. They rub the elephants' heads with their heels, whereupon the huge beasts raise their trunks high into the air and give us a royal salute. These elephants are valuable animals. A full grown one will bring as much as a thousand dollars, and a prize worker several times that. They are caught in the forests of upper liurma. The wild ones are often captured in pits or corrals, being enticed there by tame elephants trained 94 WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS for the purpose. When a wild herd is found, the tame beasts are let loose and allowed to mix with them. The latter follow the commands of their masters, and lead the herd into the corrals. The men then rush in and close the openings, after which the wild elephants are easily caught. Traveling northward from Burma we cross over the mountains and spend some time in moving about through the great empire of China. This is one of the old lands of the world. The country has been thickly populated for ages, and the most of the forests have long since disap- peared. There is no saw milling industry, such as is found in our country and Europe, and the methods of woodwork- ing are crude. Boards are usually sawed out by hand, and the planing is done by the carpenters, who, block by block, work every bit into shape. Making boards in China. The sawing of lumber may be seen in all the Chinese cities, and we pass many log yards as we walk through the WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS 95 streets. The logs are stood upon end instead of being laid flat as with us, and each is marked with a Chinese char- acter which tells what it is. In turning a log into boards it is laid upon the ground with one end raised a little higher than the head of a man, and the sawing is done by two workmen with a cross-cut saw. One of the men I stands above the log, and the other beneath it, and they pull alternately, thus sawing the logs. The work seems costly, but we learn that the wages here are so low that it is almost as cheap as though done by machinery. Such lumbering methods are employed here and there all over Asia. They are in use in many parts of Africa, and also in other places where civilization is backward, labor cheap, and machinery comparatively un- known. The next stop in our travels is Japan, a country which now has sawmills and planing machinery, although much of its woodwork is still cut out by hand. We find the houses beautifully built. The Japanese are among the most skillful of all the world's workmen, and even the common carpenter is a cabinetmaker. We visit temples which are masses of carving, and observe that the walls of the buildings move back and forth as easily as the drawers of a bureau. We spend some time watching the carpenters. Japanese carpenters at work. 96 WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS observing that their methods of doing many things are just the opposite of ours. When a man planes he pulls the plane towards him, and in using the drawing knife he pushes it from him. We begin our houses on the ground, and work up to the roof. The Japanese makes the roof first. He then puts it together upon a scaffolding of poles, and fills in the framework beneath. This method of roof-making is not confined to Japan. In Java the people often build the roof, which is of palm leaves and bamboo cane, on the ground, and then carry it to the framework of the house, where it is raised into place. In such cases the men bearing the roof walk in- side it, so that the roof seems to be crawling along like a centipede, on numerous legs. The bamboo is a favorite wood for buildings of many kinds in both Japan and China. It is cultivated for the purpose, and Japan has forests of well-kept bamboo trees which are cut and sold for timber. The Chinese use bam- boo for more purposes than any other wood. It forms the scaffolding, inside which they build their houses. They tie the poles together, forming a framework more solid than though it were put up with bolts. They use bamboo for furniture, making chairs, tables, stools, and couches of it. It forms the carrying pole of the coolie, the ribs for the sails of the boatmen, and the rain hat of the farmer. It is the staff of the small-footed old woman, and the stick upon which the blind beggar leans. It is the measuring rod of the carpenter, and the handle of his tool. It is also largely employed in making toys for children, pen handles for scholars, cages for birds, and coops for chickens. The Chinese boy often sleeps on a bamboo bed, resting his WOODWORKING IN OTHER LANDS 97 head on a bamboo pillow, which is a framework that fits under his neck. The Japanese use this wood for making paper, and it is also employed for medicine, while the young bamboo shoots are eaten for food. Another wood of many uses is the palm. This does not grow to any extent in either Japan or China, but it is the 'The men bearing the roof walk inside it." chief building wood of some tropical lands. It is of many varieties, and is employed in all sorts of ways. It is the principal timber of the Desert of Sahara, and the houses of the oases, which are composed largely of mud, have their doors and windows framed with the rough boards cut from the date palm. The coconut palm thrives in the warm islands of the Pacific, where it is used for CAkl'. HOUSKS — 7 98 AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS building. It is more valuable, however, for its nuts and the thick husks which surround them. The nuts arc sold for making oil, and the fibers of the husks, loosened by soaking them in water, are twisted into yarn, from which is woven the coarse carpet or matting known as coir. The leaves of the nipa palm take the place of shingles upon many of the houses of the Pacific Islands. They are sewed together with fiber, and tied to the bamboo rafters. They are also employed to cover the walls. The betel palm has a nut which is chewed by the natives of Siam, Malaysia, and the islands of the Dutch East Indies, much as some people chew tobacco. The carnauba palm has not only a fiber which the natives of Brazil use for hammocks and other purposes, but from its leaves oozes forth a wax which makes excellent candles. In some years milUons of pounds of this wax are sold for house lighting. II. AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS OF THE PAST THE next field of our travels relates to stone as a build- ing material, but before visiting the great quarries from which it comes, we would see something of how it was used in the past. It was ages after the half-naked savage built his hut of rough stones that mighty structures were erected o( marble and granite. These were first made, not as homes for the living, but as tombs in honor of kings, or as temples for the worship of gods. Some of the oldest of such monuments are in Egypt on AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS 99 the banks of the Nile. Let us visit the Great Pyramid. We are standing on the sands of the desert about five miles from Cairo. The green Valley of the Nile running north and south lies between us and the city, but skirting it and extending back from it on all sides as far as we can see is a vast plain of gray sand and rock, out of which rises a mighty pile of stone so wide and high that as we stand close beside it it seems a wall to the sky. Its base covers thirteen acres, and it is laid up in terraces or steps of huge blocks of stone, some of which are as high as a table and many feet long. It has four sloping sides, which narrow as they rise and end at the top in a platform big enough to make the foundation for a good sized cottage. We hire several black-skinned, white-gowned Bedouin boys as our guides, and climb up. The stones are so big that we have to be pulled and pushed from one terrace to another, and it is some time before we get to the top. The blocks are piled up in layers, fitted so closely that at first the whole seems one mass of stone. In descending, we make our way around to a little hole on the thirteenth terrace in the northern side of the structure, and find there a narrow, slanting pas- sageway, up which we crawl on our hands and knees to the two large chambers within. They are as dark as night, and bats fly past us as we enter. We have elec- tric lamps in our pockets and by pressing a button get enough light to see well about us. The chambers are floored, walled, and ceiled with granite, polished as smooth as a mirror, and so closely laid that we cannot in.sert a knife blade in the cracks. These rooms were made about five thousand years ago to contain the bodies of King A _' -1 -f the Great Pyramid of Cheops. "The blocks are piled up in layers." (100) AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS lOI Cheops and his wife. They lay there for ages, but from time to time the pyramid has been torn open by treasure hunters. The mummies and the things buried with them have long since disappeared, and now only a huge granite sarcophagus or cofifin remains. This pyramid was more than twenty years in construc- tion, and it is recorded that one hundred thousand men worked upon it during a great part of that time. The Greek historian, Herodotus, relates that the onions, garlic, and radishes furnished the laborers cost almost two million dollars and that it took years to make the road over which the materials were carried. The stones of the pyramid numbered more than two milHons, and of those that wall the king's chamber, single blocks weigh sixty tons. It is estimated that the structure contains so much stone that if it could be split into flags four inches thick, it would be enough to pave a road two feet wide over sea and land clear around the globe. Traveling up the Valley of the Nile, we see other pyra- mids standing here and there in the desert, and after some days on our steamer reach Luxor, near the site of Thebes, an ancient city which had more than a million people. Thebes had walls so thick that chariots drawn by a half dozen horses could easily pass as they galloped around Ihem. It had one hundred gates, and its temples and palaces were among the world's wonders. The homes of that day have long since passed away, but the ruins of some of the temples are still to be seen. We visit one at Karnak about two miles from Luxor, the huge stones of which, ranged about courts of enormous extent, cover many acres. In one court the roof was upheld by immense I02 AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS columns of sandstone sixty feet high and from thirteen to fifteen feet thick, many of which are still standing. These Temple of Karnak with obelisk in the rear. columns are beautifully carved. They were erected, it is said, by King Menes more than forty centuries ago. The temple contained statues of gold and ivory studded with AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS 103 jewels. It was for about two thousand years one of the most sacred places in Egypt. Among the other things here are two obelisks, great shafts of stone like that which was brought from Egypt to New York and now stands in Central Park. The obelisks were quarried by ancient masons from hills of granite not far north of Luxor near Assouan, and some of them were carried down the Nile on rafts or boats to Alexandria, on the Mediterranean Sea. Others were set up at Thebes and some at Heliopolis, and at other cities along the great river. Our own obelisk stood for centuries at Alexandria. When it was loaded for its long trip to New York a hole was cut in the bow of the steamer in order to admit it, and it was dragged through that hole into the ship. Some years before that another of the obelisks had been taken to London, being transported there in an iron water-tight cylinder which was carried to Egypt in pieces and built around the huge stone as it lay on the shore. After being encased, the great cylinder was rolled into the sea and a steamship towed it to London. Is it not wonderful that these men who lived four thou- sand years ago could make such beautiful things out of stone, and could carry such heavy masses far down the Nile.? It seems still more wonderful when we remember that they did this ages before man discovered how to use steam or electricity, and many centuries before he had invented machinery to aid in his building. Returning southward to Alexandria, a fe\y days by steamer takes us across the Mediterranean Sea to Athens, where, on a great hill of rose-colored limestone, stood I04 AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS Parthenon. the Parthenon, one of the most beautiful marble temples ever erected. We drive to the foot of the Acropolis, as this hill is called, and wind our way to the top. We. are now five hundred feet above Athens, with magnifi- cent views of the mountains and the blue Mediterranean and its numerous islands. All about us lie huge broken columns and other pieces of marble beautifully carved. The ruins of temples stand here and there, and upon a marble platform, covering almost half an acre, are some of the columns which once upheld the temple in which stood the gold and ivory statue of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. This temple was the Parthenon. It was made of white marble, from the quarries of Mount Pen- telikon not far away. The marble blocks were laid up without mortar, the columns being of cylindrical sections roughly hewed and finished after they had been placed in position. The front of the Parthenon was covered with AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS 10$ carvings, many of which have been broken off and carried to the British Museum at London. Some still stand, and some are now in the Museum at Athens. We shall find other great works of marble built by the Romans in Italy, and also in northern Africa and Asia Minor, where they had colonies before the Christian era. In Rome itself they had magnificent structures formed of the marble which came from the mines of Carrara not far away. These buildings consisted of palaces, temples, and open-air theaters. The chief of the last-named was the Colosseum, a massive circus of stone and brick, inside which lions, elephants, and tigers fought together before the eyes of the people. They fought also with the glad- iators, and the latter fought each other. In this place were held real sea fights, made by flooding the arena, and chariot races, and many other entertainments. The Colosseum had seats for more than eighty thousand specta- tors. It covered seven acres, comprising an arena or show place level with the ground and a series of galleries running around it ex- tending upward in ter- races until it reached a column oi me Parthenon. I06 AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS the top of the walls at the back. The walls \.ere one hundred and sixty feet in height, and when the sun was hot, an enormous canvas was stretched over them as a roof. The building contained many rooms, including cages for lions, tigers, and elephants. A bit of marble carving from the Temple of Baalbek. Traveling from Rome to Naples by train we take ship there and steam to Beirut in Syria, from whence a few hours' ride upon the railroad carries us over the first range of the Lebanon mountains to the famed ruins of Baalbek. These are the remains of a mighty temple of marble erected by the Romans to the worship of the heathen god Baal. The temple was built when the Roman Empire was in the height of its glory, and it was beyond description mag- nificent. Inside it was a solid gold statue of the god, rep- resenting a young man clad in armor and accompanied AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS lO/ by two golden bulls. He held a whip in his right hand, and a thunderbolt and some ears of corn in his left. The temple had also statues of many others of the gods of the Romans, including INIercury and Venus. The stones of this temple are gigantic. Some of the marble columns are as big around as a hogshead, and fifty or sixty feet long. They are put together in sec- tions, and their capitals are exquisitely carved. In the foundation are great blocks of stone thirty-five feet long, twelve feet wide, and thirteen feet thick. Some of them are estimated to weigh more than fifteen hundred tons each ; but notwithstanding their great size and weight they were carried over the hills from the quarries and placed in the walls without breaking. Such feats of engineering would be considered wonderful by our builders to-day. As we look at the structure our guides ask us to visit the quarries, and see a stone which was cut out for the temple but which for some reason was left where it lay. We go with them and take measurements of it. The great block lies on the ground just outside the quarry with one end half buried in the earth. We climb up and take a run up and down it. It is just fourteen feet thick, and so wide that two automobiles could be driven abreast upon its face without falling over the sides. The length is seventy feet and if it were stood upon end, it would be as high as a six- or seven-story house. This huge mass is one solid stone, which was cut out for the temple. It is just like others which were carried there from this quarry and lifted to place. Traveling on around the world we stop now and then I08 AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS to see other famous structures built by the people of cen- turies past. At Agra on the banks of the Jumna River, in the heart of India, we visit the Taj Mahal, which is perhaps the most beautiful marble building ever erected. Travelers have called it a poem in stone ; and one has said that it would be as easy to tell how the birds sing or the hlacs smell as to describe it. It is an ivory white mosque or tomb, covering acres, rising to a height one third as great as that of the Washington Monument, and ending in a dome which seems to float in the sky. The Taj Mahal is of the purest white marble, and the dome looks like a silvery bubble which might have been blown from the mouth of the heathen god Atlas, who, the an- cient Greeks imagined, held up the skies on his shoulders. "The Taj Mahal is of the purest white marble. AMONG THE RUINS OF SOME GREAT BUILDINGS 109 The Taj was inlaid with jewels, and in it are screens of marble latticework in patterns as exquisite as beautiful lace. It was built by a Mohammedan sultan, who was born just one hundred years after Columbus discovered America, and it was erected by him in memory of his wife. Near it stand other temples and palaces, includ- ing a building of marble so beautiful that those who made it engraved in Arabic letters upon its walls : " If there is a Paradise on earth, it is this! It is this! It is this!" In the interior of the island of Java, we find a stone monument or temple which was erected to Buddha so long ago that the natives cannot tell when. It covers an area more than one half as large as that of the Pyramid of Cheops, rising in terraces decorated with statues and won- derful carvings in great profusion. I once counted eight carved figures on the stone walls in a space a yard square ; and it is estimated that all the carvings if stretched out in one line would extend three miles. The statues about the monument number hundreds, and some of them are giants in stone. Going northward to Peking in China we visit the Temple of Heaven, another mighty structure of marble. It con- sists of a great platform upon which the Emperor kneels when he sacrifices and prays for his people. In our own hemisphere in the wilds of Yucatan are the ruins of stone cities built by the Indians with their stone tools long, long ago. Moreover, scattered throughout Europe are magnifi- cent cathedrals of stone built during the Middle Ages, and here and there are the ruins of stone castles in which the kings, knights, and barons of those days held their no A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES We visit the Temple of Heaven. courts. Indeed, the massive stone structures of the past are so many that it is impossible to visit them all. O>»{0 12. A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES — MARBLE, GRANITE, AND SLATE " Little I ask ; my wants are few ; I only wish a hut of stone (A very plain brown stone will do) That I may call my own ; And close at hand is such a one In yonder street that fronts the sun." TO-DAY we shall learn something more of stone as a building material. We have seen how it was em- ployed for the temples, cathedrals, palaces, and other costly A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES III Structures of the past. It is so used to-day. Our finest public buildings are made of granite or marble ; and the brown stone mansion which Oliver Wendell Holmes jok- ingly refers to in the verse which begins this chapter is often spoken of as the home of the rich. We have, how- ever, such a wealth of building stone in our country that it forms a large part of the dwelHngs of the people who are not wealthy; and by machinery the cost of fitting it for buildings has been so reduced that the stone house is within the purse of many men. Moreover, stone is used in all sorts of dwellings in combination with wood, brick, concrete, or steel ; and we have few cottages so poor that they are not built upon stone foundations. Indeed, the demand for building stone is such that getting it out and preparing it for the market has become one of our chief industries. We have vast sums of money invested in quarries, and their annual product sells for more than fifty million dollars. Thousands of men are kept busy taking out the stone and in cutting and preparing it for use. Other thousands are engaged in transporting it to the markets, and still others in laying it up in the various forms needed for building. Before visiting the quarries, we should know something of the various kinds of stone most used. We have seen some of the.se in our travels among the ruins of the past. We found granite in the great temples at Thebes, marble in the Parthenon at Athens, and sandstone in some of the cathedrals and castles of medieval Europe. The best building stones are those which are strongest, most durable, and most easily worked. Of all, granite is perhaps the nearest perfection, although it crumbles under intense 112 A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES heat. It has been used for ages, and is found to last the longest of all. It is very hard and it contains minerals of several kinds. Cutting columns of Maine granite. Our chief granite beds are in Maine and Massachusetts, although we have extensive deposits in many other parts of the Union. Granite is quarried in every state border- ing on the Appalachian Range, and also in California, Colorado, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Missouri. The New- England granite is chiefly gray in color, although there are red and pink granites, and, indeed, some of nearly all colors from light gray to black. Fine red granite is quar- ried in Nova Scotia, Scotland, and Sweden. The red T,rranite of Assouan near Thebes is close grained, and it takes a beautiful polish. We all know what sandstone is, although perhaps not many of us could tell every kind of stone which goes by that name. All sandstones are composed of rounded or angular grains of sand cemented together by other materials so as to form a solid rock. The cementing materials are certain forms of iron, lime, and siUca, and the color of the stone A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES 113 varies much according to the cementing mixture and also as to the size of the grains of which it is composed. Some sandstones are gray, others blue, yellow, brown, drab, pink, or red. The red and brown sandstones of New Jersey are much used in the finer homes of New York, while many of our larger public buildings are made of the Berea sandstone from northern Ohio, which is almost white. Nearly every locality has its own sand- stones, and we have many cities which are largely built of them. Another building stone which we all know well is slate. We have all used slates and slate pencils, and many of us sleep under slate roofs and have slate mantels in our own homes. This stone is composed of a clay which has so hardened throughout the ages that it lies in a series of thin planes one above the other, and can be split off in great sheets. We have extensive slate quarries in Maine, Ver- In an Ohio sandstone quarry. CARP. HOUSES — 8 114 A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES mont, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Georgia, as well as in other states. In mining slate the stone is cut by machinery and taken out in blocks. It is then split into sheets of the thick- ness desired. The roofing slates are cut from thin sheets, and laid on like shingles. The slate used for table tops and mantels is often two or more inches in thickness. School slates are thin sheets ground and cut by steel saws, ten inches in diameter, which go round at the rate of two thousand revolutions a minute. After this the slates are smoothed by machinery or hand, and then dyed. The dye soaks into the slate, and makes its color uniform. Next to granite, Hmestone is the most durable of all building stones, and it is about the most used. It consists of carbonate of lime with various impurities which give it its color; so that it is found in all shades and tints from white to blue, green, yellow, pink, red, and black. It is of many varieties, from the coarse stones used for paving to the pure white marble from which statues are cut, or the alabaster or onyx of our clocks, vases, table tops, and man- tels. Limestone is also burned to make lime. It is used in the smelting of iron and lead and in glass manufacture, so that you see in one form or another it has a great deal to do with our homes. Among the most beautiful of the limestones are the marbles. These are fine crystals so combined that in its purest form the white stone will sparkle and flash in the rays of the sun. Marbles are of different colors, made so by the other substances mixed with the hme. We find them pink, red, yellow, or brown, and often drab, green, and black. The same stone may have numerous colors running in veins A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES I i 5 and otherwise through it, and we have some localities where there are beautiful marbles of many hues. This is espe- cially true of those from Tennessee and Georgia, while those of Vermont range from snow-white to green or dark blue. Some of the finest and purest marble ever discovered came from the Greek island of Paros. It was from that stone that the ancient Greeks made their most beautiful statues. The marble of the Parthenon came from Mount Pentelikon not far from Athens, and a large part of that employed in the Forum and the palaces at Rome was from the quarries of Carrara, which have been mined for thousands of years. The emperor Caesar Augustus said it was due to them that he was able to transform Imperial Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. The Carrara marble mines lie on the slopes of the Apen- nine Mountains. They are close to the town of Carrara, and five miles from the little port of Avenza on the Medi- terranean Sea, They are situated near the railroad be- tween Pisa and Florence, and can be easily reached. Comfortable steamers leave New York every week for Gibraltar, Genoa, and Naples, and from the two latter ports we can easily get to Carrara by rail, or by a small coasting steamer can land at Avenza. We shall do the latter. As we step out upon the wharf, we see many boats taking on marble, and long teams of horned oxen, bringing great loads of the white stone down to the ships. The marble is in blocks of all weights from forty tons downward, and it glistens in the sunlight as it lies on the quays. We wind our w^ay in and out among such blocks as we ii6 A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES go to the Station, and our journey to Carrara is through a country of marble. The railroad track is ballasted with it, and the train now and then passes through tunnels cut out of the white rock. On all the sidings are trucks loaded with marble and the very streets of Carrara are snow-white from the marble ground into them, while marble dust fills the air. The town of Car- rara has thirty thou- sand inhabitants. At first sight it seems to be one vast marble workshop. In every street we hear the chiseling, sawing, and grind- ing as the tools cut the white stone. In this shop they are making mantels for fireplaces, in that Quarrying at Carrara. ^^^^ ^^^ carving out tombstones and statues, and on the other side of the way is a building where the sculptors are making the decorations for a palace in France. We put on dark glasses to shield our eyes from the glare all around us, and go out to the hills where the men are blasting the rock. The country is all solid marble. The quarries extend far up the mountains and there are There are large marble quarries near Rutland where the stone is got out by machinery." Il8 A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES workings all the way up. The men begin at the foot of a hill and blast down the rock, cutting out great amphi- theaters. There are several hundred quarries now work- ing, and in them about seven thousand men are busy year in and year out. The annual product is often two hundred thousand tons, and this is carried to all parts of the civilized world where the finest and purest of stone is required. The men work carefully. They understand just what holes to drill, and where to insert the dynamite to break off the marble in pieces of the right shape. They know how to lower the blocks, using ropes as big around as our ankles in moving the stones down the mountains on sleds of beech wood. When they get to the bottom the marble is raised by jackscrews to the wagons or trucks, and carried away by engines or oxen to Carrara or Avenza. But suppose we return to the United States and see our own quarries. We use something like twenty-five million dollars worth of marble a year, and almost the whole of it is produced in different parts of our country. More than half comes from Vermont. There are large marble quarries near Rutland where the stone is got out by machinery, and handled much better than in the mines of Carrara. The chief quarries there are under what was once a hilly sheep pasture and a swamp which adjoined it. The land was for- merly worth so little that it was refused as security for a few hundred dollars; and in 1836, when William Barnes offered an old horse valued at seventy-five dollars for it, the owner was glad to sell. Barnes had noticed the marble rock jutting out of the earth, and he bought the place with the idea of burning it to make lime. He started his kiln; but soon after began to manufacture tombstones of marble, A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES 119 and thus unearthed this treasure vault of beautiful stone. In time Rutland became a great marble quarry, and the stone mined there and in other parts of Vermont now annually sells for several milHons of dollars. In the quarries of Proctor, drills have been sunk to a depth of two hundred feet through this solid white lime- Vermont marble quarry. Stone, and tens of thousands of tons of marble are annually mined. The water power of Otter Creek is used to gener- ate the electricity which runs the machinery for sawing and cutting the stone and for turning and smoothing it for the market. The blocks are moved about by electric cranes, and by the same power are sawed into slabs of the shapes and sizes required. The cranes lift the marble as though it were feathers, a thirty-ton block being carried hither and I20 A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES thither by the turning of a lever in the hands of a work- man. It is interesting to see how the sawing and cutting are done. A machine called a channeler is used. This con- sists of a row of long chisels so set in a framework that they move up and down as they go over the face of the mar- ble ledge, cutting deep into the rock. After that cross chan- nels are cut. Then wedges are carefully driven into these cuts, and the block splits apart without otherwise breaking. In preparing the stone for the market it is cut into slabs and other shapes by sand saws, which are blades of soft iron without teeth, upon which a stream of water mixed with sand is poured. The sand does the cutting, grinding out the stone asit rolls over it, pressed down by the saw. This method of cutting marble was known to the ancients, but its use in our American quarries came from the invention of Isaac Markham, a boy of ten years, who saw the marble workers grinding or smoothing their slabs with water and sand, which they rubbed over them with flat stones held in the hand. Young Markham made a model of narrow strips of steel so fixed in a ' A machine called a channeler is used. A VISIT TO THE QUARRIES 121 frame that it could be moved back and forth by a crank. This was first used in the quarries of Vermont, and from it came the machine sand saws, moved by steam engines. In many of our quar- ries the stones are forced out of the beds where they he by plugs and feathers. Is it not strange to think of feath- ers being used to split apart these hard stones .-' Yes, but not so much so when you understand just what the quarry man calls "feathers." By this he means wedges which are flat on one side and half round on the other, the plug being another wedge with plane faces. In splitting the stone, round holes are drilled along the line where the breaking place is desired, and in each of these holes are placed a plug and two feathers. The round sides of the feathers with the sharp end of the plug or wedge between them just fit the holes, and as the plug is driven down it forces the feathers apart, exerting an intense i)ressurc. At the same time the other holes are similarly treated, the combined force being so great that the hard rock breaks away. Marble staircase of Congressional Library. 122 ARTIFICIAL STONE Some of our largest buildings have walls of marble and some have marble staircases and halls where the stones are beautifully carved. This is especially so in the Con- gressional Library at Washington, one of the most beauti- ful structures of modern times. o>»jo 13. ARTIFICIAL STONE — CONCRETE, CEMENT, AND PLASTER THE building stones we have so far seen are those made by nature, working throughout the ages. Some of them, such as the sandstones, are composed of grains of sand similar to that of the seashore, glued or cemented together by other materials and by pressure transformed into rock. The marbles are of white crystals often col- ored by the cementing materials, the sandstones receiving their colors in the same way. All such stones formed by nature have to be cut into the shapes and sizes desired for building, and there are many places in our houses in which it is difficult to use them. For this reason man early began to look about for something which would take the place of stone. He found one substitute in clay, of which he made bricks, burning them so that they became as hard as stone, and another in concrete, which is really an artificial stone made by man. By studying and experimenting it was discovered that a cement could be formed, which, if mixed with water and poured over grains of sand, stones, and other materials, would, as it dried and hardened, bind them together almost as strongly as the cementing materials of nature bind the ARTIFICIAL STONE 123 grains of sand in the sandstones. This cement, in many parts of Europe, is known as Roman cement because the Romans used something like it in their building construc- tion. In our country it goes by the name of Portland cement or hydraulic cement because it is one of the rock cements which will harden to stone under water. There Concrete house under construction. are other hydraulic cements, but the Portland cement is most commonly used in making concrete or artificial stone. This Portland cement consists of rock containing lime- stone and clay, or marl and clay, which is ground so fine by means of machinery that the grains of dust thus made will pass through a sieve which has ten thousand holes in each square inch of its surface. When the proper rock has been found it is blasted or dug out, and then re- duced to a powder. The mixture is run into driers, which 124 ARTIFICIAL STONE are long cylinders of steel from six to eight feet in diame- ter. They are lined with fire brick and are heated red hot. They are turned around by machinery, and are so inclined that, as they turn, the cement mixture gradually rolls down over the hot brick until all the moisture has been removed from it. It is now again ground, the work being so care- fully done that the materials of which the powder is com- posed are of just the proper proportions. In making concrete this powder is mixed with sand and broken stones, and water is poured over it. The mass is turned over and over by machinery or by hand until every grain of the sand and every fragment of stone are covered with a film of the cement paste. The whole is now packed together in blocks or molds of the shapes desired, and when it hardens it has all the qualities of stone made by nature. It is in fact stone cemented together by man. It is of such stone that a great deal of our modern build- ing is done. Of it foundations are made, great columns erected, and the pillars which support our mightiest bridges are built. The streets of many of our cities are paved with it and our concrete floors, if they were all brought together, would cover thousands of acres. The cement employed is in such demand that millions of barrels are annually sold and its use is rapidly increasing from year to year. In- deed, some of our new homes are now being built of con- crete throughout, and not a few of them have walls of solid concrete. Ornamental work of this material is largely used, the buildings so finished looking as though they were decorated with stone carvings. Another form of artificial stone is the mortar used to unite brickwork and other masonry. This may be com- ARTIFICIAL STONE 125 posed of certain amounts of sand and lime mixed with water in such a way that it can be spread over the stones or thrown in between them ; or it may be of sand and Port- land cement and in some cases of plaster, which is really a form of lime. The lime-and-sand mortar is not so hard as Lime kilr.s. San Juan D. Puget Sound. sandstone and is less durable. Cement mortar is, if prop- erly made, equal to stone ; whereas plaster is much softer and is used chiefly in fine work and in places not exposed to the weather. Mortars and rock cements of various kinds have been used for building as far back as man can remember. The hufje blocks on the outside of the Great Pyramid were laid in a mixture which contained _^ypsum or plaster of Paris, and the Colosseum was largely of concrete. 126 ARTIFICIAL STONE As to plaster of Paris or burnt gypsum this was a part of most of the mortars used by the ancients. Later on it was employed in Europe, and a curious story is told in connection with the vast beds of gypsum which lie not far from Paris as to how a Frenchman discovered its value as a cementing material. One night a shepherd of that region cooked his supper upon a fireplace, which he made out in the open, of blocks from these gypsum beds, mixed with the other rocks lying about. His fire burned the gypsum to plaster of Paris, and, as he was about to leave, a rain came on, so wetting the plaster that it melted and cemented together the other rocks of the fireplace. In this way gypsum was found to be valuable, and the Paris deposits are now mined, roasted, and ground for shipment all over Europe. They are largely employed in cements, and in making plaster casts, including statuary of all kinds, and also in decorating the interiors of buildings. In burning gypsum rock to make plaster of Paris, the furnace is made of the blocks as they come from the quarry, the fuel being put in while the furnace is building. Wood, coal, or coke may be used, the smoke going off through passages made for the purpose. The roasting lasts for ten hours, after which the burned pile of rocks cools for five or six days, when it is ready to fall into powder. It is sometimes beaten fine on the ground, and sometimes run through steel mills which grind it to plaster of the fineness required. Excellent gypsum is now found in many places. France produces a great deal, but still more is mined in the United States, especially in New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa. BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY 127 14. BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY "And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. " And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar ; and they dwelt there. '• And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." WE have all read the story of the Tower of Babel, of which these verses from the Bible are the beginning. It was started by the Sons of Noah and it is related that they expected to build it up to Heaven, when they were suddenly stopped by the confusion of tongues. You may read all about it in the Book of Genesis. That was more than four thousand years ago, and we thus see that man had even then learned how to use bricks of burnt clay as a building material. The walls of the great city of Babylon which stood on the Euphrates not far from the site of this Tower were made by some of the descendants of these builders. Herodotus, the oldest Greek historian, tells us that they were composed of the clay dug from the trenches outside, and that they were burnt bricks. He says that the walls were fifty-five miles long, three hundred and forty feet high, and eighty-five feet in thickness, inclosing a city of wide streets with houses of three or four stories and many temples and palaces. For centuries Babylon was the greatest city of the world. It was the capital of King Nebuchadnezzar, who cast the three Hebrews into the fiery furnace and who afterwards went mad and ate grass. Its doom was fore- told by the handwriting on the wall during the days of 128 BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY Belshazzar, who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar. A little after that the city was conquered by Cyrus the Persian and Xerxes robbed the temples of their golden statues and treasures. It gradually fell into ruins, and became buried from sight by the dust and dirt of the ages. Within recent times, however, men have dug down under the soil and found some of the bricks and other materials which once formed a part of the city. Many of the bricks were glazed in the burning and their colors are red, yellow, and blue ; they are as bright as when they were made. Some of the burnt ones are thirteen inches square and three inches thick, or more than six times as large as the common red brick of our buildings. The Babylon bricks, used for the corners of the walls, were tri- angular in shape, and wedge-shaped bricks were employed for the arches. Some of those found have the signature of Nebuchadnezzar stamped on them, and from the marks on others we can tell the dates of many of the temples and palaces of that great city. The bricks were laid up in clay mud, lime mortar, and bitumen, and some in hot asphalt. Only the outside of the walls was composed of them, the interior being filled with sun-dried brick consisting of wet clay kneaded together with finely chopped straw. Bricks made of sun-dried clay were probably employed for building long before man learned how to burn bricks. Going back to the Bible we find that the Israelites were forced to make such bricks in the days of Pharaoh. In the first chapter of Exodus we read : — " And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor : " And they made their lives hitter with hard bondage in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field." BRICK STRUCrURES OF ANTIQUITY 129 A little farther on it is related how Pharaoh required them to gather their own straw from the fields, and not- withstanding this to make as many bricks a day as when the straw was furnished them. One passage is : — " Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick as hereto- fore : let them go and gather straw for themselves. "And the tale [number] of the bricks which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them." The only brick material in Egypt is the mud of the Nile ; and the Israehtes used this mud, mixing it with straw and turning it out in molds or shap- ing it up with their hands in much the same way as bricks are made in Egypt to-day. The houses of the common people are still com- posed of such ma- terials, and should we go to Egypt we might find here and there along the Val- ley of the Nile shallow pits filled with mud through which water buffaloes are being driven back and forth. Some straw is thrown into the mud, and after a time this goes through it so that when it is taken out and shaped in the molds, the straw aids in holding the mud together. The bricks are put out in the sun to dry, and are then laid up in mud mortar. CARI', HOUSES — 9 * "The oniy orick material m Egypt is the mud of the Nile." I30 BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY Similar brickmaking goes on in many of the oases of the Sahara, in Persia and Arabia, in India, and in other parts of the globe where the rains are not frequent and building materials are scarce. We find houses of sun- dried bricks in Mexico made of adobe, and the remains of adobe houses still exist in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and California which are centuries old. Some of them are more than three hundred years old, and nevertheless are still used. But suppose we cross the Pacific Ocean and take a look at some of the brick buildings of China. Out in the coun- try we shall find huts of sun-dried mud, and in the cities vast numbers of buildings made of bluish-gray bricks, be- ing roofed with tiles of the same material. Almost all of the cities are surrounded by brick walls. Peking has a wall which is fortv feet high. It has towers at the corners and here and there along the great structure ; and all are composed of brick. Standing upon this wall we look over a city containing more than a million people, the most of whom live in brick houses ; and off at one side, inside other brick walls, are the palaces of the Emperor and his family, the roofs of which are of yellow tiles, as smooth as china, which shine like gold under the sun. From Peking we take the railroad which goes northward through the Nankow Pass into Mongolia to see the Great Wall of China. After a few hours' ride we come to a mighty wall made of these same blue bricks, only of a larger size. The wall is as high as a three-story house and twice as wide as the ordinary city sidewalk. We see it climbing the mountains and going down into the valleys, extending on and on as far as our eyes can reach. It begins at the BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY 131 sea and runs over mountain and plain along the border of North China for a distance greater than from New York to the Mississippi River. It was put up as a defense against the savage people who lived on the other side of it, some parts having been built about two hundred years before Christ came. The Great Wall is a mass of earth and stone mixed to- gether, and faced on each side with gray or slate-colored brick, the material between being so packed that the whole is in most places as solid as stone. We climb to the top of the wall and, walking along it, find a place where the mortar has crum- bled away and the bricks have come loose. T lift one of the bricks. It weighs twenty pounds, or about as much as some of our baby sis- ters ; and measuring it we find that it is fifteen inches long, seven inches wide, and over three inches thick. The greater part of the wall is made of such bricks and it is said that they were often burned at clay beds miles away I lift one of the Lik 132 BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY and carried on the backs of sheep, goats, and donkeys up the hills to the masons on the wall. Going on with our journey, we at last come to Italy, a country where bricks were made ages ago. They were in use in old Rome and the ruins of that city still contain many thin bricks of red clay. If we would see these bricks in the buildings we can do so best by going to Naples and out to Pompeii. We are now right under the volcano of Vesuvius, out of whose top the vapor is rising in clouds from the brimstone fires which are boiling and seething within. It is more than nineteen centuries since the little city in which we are standing was as alive as any of our towns of to-day. The carpenters, stone cutters, and masons were working away. New houses were building, and the people were living in comfortable homes of brick, stone, and marble. Chariots drawn by horses were going on the trot through the stone-paved streets, the wheels running in ruts which are still to be seen. Here and there in parts of the city the children were playing and in other places they were going to school. The life of a thriving town was in active operation, when, all at once, Vesuvius burst forth, throwing out streams of molten lava which in floods of fire rolled down the sides of the mountain. At the same time the air was so filled with ashes that the sun became dim, and the people believed an age of perpetual night had set in. The ashes fell on Pompeii, and continued to fall until it was buried from view. Such of the people as could escape did so, but over two thousand were buried. The city was so covered that no signs of houses, theaters, temples, or other buildings were left. It was so far under the ashes that as time went on its very BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY 1 33 existence was forgotten, and it was not until many centu- ries later that men began to dig the earth away and find what was left. Since then a great part of Pompeii has been uncovered, and we can now tell just what kind of houses the people of that time had and how they were built. We stroll in and In Pompeii, Vesuvius in background. out through the dwellings, finding brick walls here and there. Many of the homes were plastered, and upon the walls are paintings in the brightest of colors. There are bathrooms made of brick, and a brick bakery, in the ovens of which were found loaves of bread, when the earth was dug away. Some of the finer houses were floored with tiles and not a few with mosaic, the vestibule of one having the picture of a dog tugging at his rope and trying to get loose. Under the picture are the words: " Cave Canem !" meaning, " Beware of the dog ! " Crossing from Naples to Algeria in Africa, and making 134 BRICK STRUCTURES OF ANTIQUITY our way south through that country, we find not far from the Desert of Sahara a half -buried city which was larger than Pompeii. This was Timgad, a thriving colonial town of Imperial Rome, which was deserted, allowed to fall into ruins, and finally buried by the sand and dust of the desert until the greater part of it had disappeared. The covering is now being taken off and we find brick houses there much like those of Pompeii. There are also tem- ples and dwell- ings made partly of marble, a marble theater and forum, and an enormous bathhouse of burnt brick. The latter covered almost two acres, and was heated by fl ues which ran under its floors. It had large swimming pools and hot and cold plunges, as well as courts where the bathers wrestled and played games of various kinds. We sit down on the marble seats running around the hall, and try to imagine how the little boys of Timgad enjoyed them- "This was Timgad, a thriving colonial town of Imperial Rome." OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS 1 35 selves here when Europe was covered with woods and our ancestors were living in huts and sleeping on straw. It was the Romans who first carried the art of brickmak- ing into Germany and Great Britain ; but the people there seem to have forgotten it as soon as the Romans left. It was not until well along in the Middle Ages that England began to build houses of brick, although it is said that a few bricks were molded under the direction of Alfred the Great. During the reigns of Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth, there were many brickyards, and from then on the English employed bricks as a building mate- rial. They were using them when our country was first settled ; and some of the richer of the colonists brought burnt bricks across the Atlantic Ocean to America and built houses of them. 15. OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS WE need not travel from home to find out how bricks are made. Our own country uses such vast quantities of them that nearly every town has its brick- yard. There are more than twelve thousand such factories in the United States, and they turn out altogether some- thing like twenty-five billion bricks every year. There are single yards which make one million a day, and others which have machines that will turn out one hundred thou- Loading brick clay with a steam shovel. (136) Brick kilns, St. Louis. OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS 137 sand bricks within twenty-four hours. There is an estab- lishment in New England which loads its clay with steam shovels and has huge traveling cranes to carry the bricks from one place to another. Its brickmaking machinery is moved by electricity. The bricks we make are of about one hundred differ- ent varieties. They are of all shapes and sizes, some hard and some soft. They are of many colors, and often beauti- fully glazed. Some kinds are used for pavements, and others in mantels and ornamental work. We have pressed brick, fire brick, and vitrified brick. The fire brick is used in our large buildings of many stories, being put in between the beams and joists to make them fire- proof. Vitrified bricks are employed in street paving as well as for other purposes. They are made by grinding up hard materials, such as quartz, spar, shale, and fire clay. Common brick is composed of clay of various kinds, the character of the product as a building material depending largely upon the clay used. The clay must be freed from Hydraulic brick press. 138 OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS lumps, and ground up and thoroughly mixed. If the material is of a hard nature, it is first ground, and after Molding bricks by hand, Mexico. that passed through a screen into a pug mill or mixer. This contains knives by which it is cut and mixed with water until it is just right for bricks. The clay goes from the pug mill into the brick machines, from which it comes to the cutting tables through a die, in the shape New York water front. More than half of the visible building material is architectural terra cotta. OUR AMERICAiN BRICKYARDS 139 of clay bars. These bars are cut into bricks by fine steel piano wires, working automatically. The bricks are then carried on a traveling belt to other machines, which square their cor- ners and edges, make them smooth, and print upon them any lettering desired. If they are intended for rough brick, they are now carried on to the drier, which is a series of tunnels built of brick, and heated by a furnace, or by steam pipes or a blower. These tunnels are about four feet wide, five feet high, and one hundred and twenty feet long. The mud cubes are taken into them on little cars, and they remain there for twenty-four hours, when they are thoroughly dried. Each Terra cotta building. of these tunnels will hold about five thousand bricks at a time. I40 OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS When the bricks come from the tunnels, they are ready for burning. This, in the large yards, is done in ovens, each ten or twelve feet high and thirty feet in diameter. After the bricks have been piled up in the ovens an intense heat is admitted by blowing in the air from the furnaces, which are so hot that the draft bathes the interior of each TTJ 1 -y .^-)f The Witch Doctor (terra cotta). School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh. oven with a solid sheet of twisting flames, turning the clay to a red or white heat. The bricks are kept under this heat for from a week to ten days, when the fires are with- drawn, and they are allowed to cool. In other brickyards where the clay is of a different na- ture it is first o:round and mixed with water. It is then pressed into wooden molds, and from them goes on to the driers and the kilns. In the smaller brickyards the clay is sometimes mixed in a pug mill moved by horse power It OUR AMERICAN BRICKYARDS I4I is then molded by hand in rough wooden molds of the size and shape of the brick desired. Such bricks are often dried out in sheds and then placed in kilns for firing. After ten or fifteen days the fires are allowed to go down, and the bricks are ready for the markets. In the ovens wood or coal or even oil may be burned. It is in much the same way that the terra cotta employed for ornamenting our buildings is made, save that the mix- ing and burning the clay must be more carefully done. In making tiles the clay comes out in thin bands which are cut by wires and then pressed into any shape that may be desired. Curved roofing tiles are often formed by bend- ing the clay by hand over a leather saddle, the nail holes being punched in by hand. The tiles which are so beauti- fully glazed are taken out when half burned, and dipped into a mixture which, when they are fired again, gives the beautiful glass colored effects that we see in fine roofing. The tiles for mantels, hearths, and for the walls and floors of bathrooms are made in much the same way. The fronts of buildings are often decorated with tiles. Some of the finest of such buildings are in Italy, one of which, known as the Hospital of the Innocents, has a decoration of round tiles, each of which represents a beautiful baby. This design was made by Andrea della Robbia, who was alive at the time America was discovered. Much terra cotta is now similarly used in ornamenting our public buildings, great figures like that of the Witch Doctor on the University of Pittsburgh being made of it. The ovens or kilns for terra cotta and tiles have an in- tense heat, the hot air coming in at' the top and going down through the clay. In some of the ovens the tem- 142 IRON perature is said to reach twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, a heat so intense that we cannot comprehend it. Indeed, the fuel used in brick and tile making costs many times as much as the clay itself, while the other ma- terials which are sometimes mixed with the clay often cost more than the clay. A tile from the Hospital of the Innocents, Flor- ence. i6. IRON HAVE you ever thought what an important part iron has in our homes } It forms the basis of the whole build- ing industry. From it are made all kinds of machinery, and every sort of hand tool. It gives us the ax and saw of the lumberman, the hatchet and plane of the carpenter, and the hammer and trowel of the mason. From it come the nails and screws which hold our dwellings together, the hinges upon which the doors swing back and forth, and the locks which close them at night. Many of our homes are roofed with sheets of iron, coated with tin or zinc. Some of them are plastered on iron lathing, and some have steel ceiUngs and floors. Moreover, the largest of our city IRON 143 buildings, as we shall see later, are almost altogether of steel. They have a framework of steel, and contain Httle else than things made of that metal, excepting the stone, brick, and plaster used as a coating to keep out the weather and preserve the iron from rust. We warm ourselves over iron stoves, or perhaps over iron radiators through which steam or hot water flows from an iron boiler on the floor below. Our meals are cooked ■ upon iron stoves fed with coal by iron shovels and stirred with iron pokers. The water for our baths is made hot by such stoves, and in many of our dwellings it is carried through iron pipes to a bathtub of iron, coated with a white enamel, which makes it look like china. We sleep at night upon steel springs, and that we may rest the bet- ter screen our windows with iron wire cloth to keep out the flies and mosquitoes. Can you imagine a world without iron ? If we had none at all, machinery of all kinds would soon disappear, our oc- cupations would change, and all sorts of mechanical labor, as we know it, would vanish. We should have to go back to hunting with bows and arrows ; to plowing with forked sticks ; or to grazing sheep and cattle for a livelihood. If we wished to travel on land we should have to walk, or ride upon horses, donkeys, or mules, or on carts drawn by them ; and if we went by water, it would be in dugouts, canoes, or saiHng ships, although it is doubtful whether ships could be made without this metal to put them to- gether. Our houses would dwindle to huts roofed with thatch or to the other rude shelters dwelt in by half-civi- lized peoples. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive how [)()or a world without iron would be. 144 IRON It is, therefore, no wonder that the mining of iron ore and the making of iron and steel and the things derived from them have become about the most important of in- dustries. They are more or less carried on in all civilized lands ; and especially where the people have the m? • The Hanyang iron works in central China. terials and skill needed for them. In this respect the United States is ahead of all other countries. We have vast iron deposits in many parts of the Union, and also the coal and limestone needed to mix with the ore for making pig iron. We have more than fourteen thousand different establishments, which are engaged upon the various manufactures of iron and steel, and our capital IRON 145 employed in such industries amounts to several billions of dollars. We have about one million men who are always working upon such manufactures. They are paid every year something like five hundred million dollars in wages, and their annual product sells for over two billion dollars. We may appreciate these amounts better when we con- sider that the money paid for wages is enough to give each man, woman, and child in the United States a pres- ent of five dollars every Christmas ; and that if we had to buy an equal share of the iron goods made in one year we should need twenty dollars apiece to make the purchase. But before we go to the mines, let us have a little talk as to how iron was used in the past. We cannot tell when it was discovered ; but from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we know that Tubal Cain, who lived several thou- sand years before Christ, was not only a worker in iron, but that he taught others how to make things of iron and brass. All through the Bible iron is mentioned. It was used for plows, swords, and chariots ; and for tools of va- rious kinds, including those employed in house-building. We know that the ancient Egyptians had some knowledge of the metal, for a piece of iron has been found in the Great Pyramid, and Herodotus tells us that iron tools were used in making that structure. The Greeks had iron long before the Christian era, and the Romans had various tools of that metal. During the Middle Ages and especially at the time of the Crusades, steel, which as we shall see later is only one form of iron, was so well known that lances and armor for both men and horses were made of it. The warriors went to battle clad in iron and some wore, under CARP. HOUSES — 10 146 IRON their armor, shirts of fine steel links, so skillfully joined that they fitted the body as though knitted together. As to Asia, we find that the people there have been ac- quainted with iron so long that they cannot tell when it first came into use. Near Delhi in Hindustan, I have seen one of the oldest of all iron monuments. It is an Iron dome of the Porcelain Pagoda now used as a fountain. iron column which is supposed to have been erected as a pillar of victory by some warlike people who fought in India over two thousand years ago. It is as big around as a flour barrel ; it rises twenty-three feet above the ground and is sunk many feet below it. It is in the mosque known as the Kutab Minar, You may have read of the Porcelain Pagoda which the Chinese built during the same century that Columbus dis- IRON 147 covered America, It was situated at Nanking, near the Yangtze River. That tower had a dome of cast iron. The structure below the dome was of porcelain bricks as smooth as the finest of china. It had eight sides and nine stories and it rose to a height nearly half that of the Wash- ington Monument. At every one of the stories were little metal bells hanging to the rafters, which extended beyond the walls in such a way that they tinkled when sway;ed by the wind. The iron dome, plated with gold, could be seen for miles up and down the valley of the Yangtze River. The Porcelain Tower was thrown down at the time of a great rebellion and its beautiful bricks have disappeared. The iron dome is still in existence, and I photographed it during one of my recent visits to China. It is now used as a fountain, having been turned upside down and set into a foundation of marble. That mass of iron is so large that it would cover the biggest haystack, and it might make a fine bathtub for an elephant. It is interesting to know something about the first use of iron in our own country. When our forefathers landed, the Indians had no tools or weapons made of this metal, and it is probable that they were not acquainted with its value. The white men, however, soon began to prospect for ores, and as their settlements increased iron deposits were discovered here and there not far back from the coast. They began to use the iron, and erected little fur- naces and smelting works, as well as rude forges and mills. In these they made tools and building materials of various kinds, although England forbade them to do so, as she wanted them to buy all such things from her. After our War of Independence the iron industry rapidly 148 IRON Iron works. Pittsburgh. developed, and in 18 10 we produced over six million dol- lars' worth of iron of various kinds, of which about one third came from Pennsylvania. At the same time we began to make steel, and from then on our production of these articles was so rapid that we soon became one of the leading iron countries of the world, and within recent years have far surpassed any of the others. But what is this metal that has so much to do with our shelter, and with almost everything that we make or use.'' Iron ore exists in many minerals and rocks, and sometimes gives a red or yellow color to the soil. The earth washings often contain so much iron that they discolor the streams. The water takes up small particles of the ore just as it takes up salt or sugar, and as it goes on through the earth it drops some here and there. It is from such droppings that the iron deposits which are mined have been formed. IRON 149 As to the metal itself we shall have no trouble in finding good specimens of it. It is kept in every hardware store or blacksmith shop in the shape of things made of cast iron, wrought iron, and steel. Each of these is composed chiefly of iron but all differ in many ways, according to the treatment the metal receives after it is taken out of the ore. Cast iron is hard, and breaks easily. It can be melted but not bent, forged, or welded. A broken stove lid or any other casting will show us its nature. Wrought iron is comparatively soft, and it can be twisted and bent again and again without breaking. It may be welded and pounded or forged, but it will not melt except under great heat. This is the character of the horseshoe which the smith shapes so that it will just fit the hoof, or of soft wrought iron wire, which bends so easily that one can tie it into a knot. Steel can also be welded and forged. Moreover, it can be melted, and, by tempering, can be made hard or soft as desired ; it can be made so hard that it will cut through wrought iron with. ease. From cast iron, wrought iron, and steel, and combina- tions of them, tools, machinery, and build- ing materials are made. They all come from the ore, being produced through different methods of in a blast furnace, Pittsburgh. ISO MINING IRON smelting and of treating it, after it has been mined. We shall learn more of this as we visit the mills and the furnaces. oj<«o 17. MINING IRON THE first of our journeys will be to see the ore in the mines. Where shall we go ? We have beds of iron ore scattered throughout the Union, and the mineral exists to a greater or less extent in all of the states. It is com- mercially mined in twenty-six or more states ; and we have some re- gions where it is found in such abun- dance that thou- sands of men are kept busy taking it out of the earth and loading the cars and ships which carry it to the smelters. The richest and most extensive of these deposits lie around the southern and western sides of Lake Superior, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. They are found in little ranges of mountains from fifteen to one hundred Inside of a Michigan ore mine. MINING IKON 151 miles back from the lake and so high above it that the ore can be taken by gravity down to the vessels. For this purpose railroads have been built, and the ore cars from the mines are carried out upon trestle works, connected with which are huge bins or pockets into which the ore is dropped. These pockets are high above the decks of the ships as they anchor for loading, and by opening them the ore falls through chutes right into the holds. The steam shovel is really a great dipper. Some of the ore about Lake Superior lies near the sur- face, being covered only with a thin skin of earth and rock. In such places the earth is taken off by steam shovels, and hauled away on the cars. The ore itself is then broken and loosened by blasting, and great shovels do the loading. This is open pit mining, and it is an interesting sight. The steam shovel is really a great steel dipper or scoop fastened to a long arm or handle attached to a steam engine on wheels. The dipper is about as big around as a hogshead. 152 MINING IRON It has big steel teeth on one side of its rim which cut into the ore, and its bottom is so arranged that it can be dropped, allowing the contents to fall out. The engine raises and lowers and moves the shovel about as the engineer wills. The engineer pulls a lever and the great teeth go down into the ore, taking a mouthful of five tons at one bite. Another lever is pulled and the arm rises and carries the ylpad around until it hangs over the car on the track. A third motion and the bottom or underjaw of the shovel drops, and the ore falls into the car. The work is so rapid that one shovel can do as much as several hundred men, laboring without it, and a car of fifty tons can be loaded within a very few minutes. A single shovel sometimes loads two thousand tons in one day. Different methods must be employed for ore which lies far underground. In such mines shafts or pits are sunk through the earth to the ore beds, and tunnels are dug and blasted out into them. The miners take up the ore and load it upon little steel cars which are carried to the surface on elevators or by wire ropes and dumped into other cars which take it down to the steamer. The finest of machinery is employed in such mines. They are lighted by electricity, and compressed air and steam work the pumps, drills, and hoists. The transportation of the ore from the mines down the lakes to the places where it is turned into iron and steel is another great industry. It employs so many vessels, dur- ing the eight warmer months when the lakes are not frozen, that the tonnage they carry in that time is greater than that which comes into any ocean port of the world in a whole year. MINING IRON 153 The vessels are built especially for the traffic, and some are of great size. To give an idea of their loads I may say that if you should fill a business street fifty feet wide, for four hundred feet, or almost one block, up to the tops of the second story windows with solid ore, it could not hold more than one big steamer's cargo. Some of the ships take twelve thousand tons at a time, and altogether the amount carried down in one season weighs tens of Cleveland ore docks. milUons of tons. A large part of this ore goes through Lake Michigan to Chicago, Gary, and Milwaukee, but the greater part goes to the ports of Lake Erie, or to places in the interior where the furnaces and smelting works are. But why is the ore taken such long distances before it is smelted ? One would think it would be cheaper to make the iron right at the mines. It might be- so if nothing more than the ore were needed in the manufacture of iron. It is necessary, however, to have two other ingredients to mix 154 MINING IRON with the ore in the furnaces in order to get the iron out of the ore. These are coal and limestone. Now there are no great coal beds near the Lake Superior mines, and it has been found cheaper to carry the iron down the lakes to the coal than to carry the coal to the iron. There are great coal deposits in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, and plenty of limestone as well, so that in those states the smelting can be done cheaply. Therefore large smelting and iron manufacturing industries have grown up in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and at other cities which are within easy reach of the coal and limestone. For similar reasons Milwaukee and Chicago have large smelting works. We have, however, some places which have extensive deposits of iron, with coal and limestone hard by. Such, for instance, are the conditions about Birmingham, Ala- bama, where great smelters have been built for reducing the ore. The iron, there, lies close to the surface of the earth, and is taken out through tunnels which are driven into the sides of the mountains. Suppose we enter one of the mines. There is a railroad running down into it, and we get on the car with a group of sooty miners going to work. As we step out at one of the levels our guide hands us candles, and shows us the bed or vein of ore they are mining. It is a sandwich of gray iron stone between walls of slate and other rock. It ranges in width from eight to twenty-four feet, and slants as it goes downward. As we move along we hear the boom, boom, boom of the blasting powder. The miners are drilling holes in the rock, and putting in dynamite sticks, to which long fuses are fastened. As they light the fuses the men warn us MINING IRON 155 to run, and we barely reach a safe place before an explo- sion occurs. The earth shakes and the air so quivers that it blows out our candles. Returning we find that a great mass of ore has been loosened and broken in pieces. It will now be loaded on the cars, and in a short time will be on its way to the surface. But before leaving the mine let us take a look at the ore. It is sometimes called iron stone, and seems just Hke stone save that it is heavier than any rock we have handled before. It shines where it has been broken and is of a silver-gray color. In other mines the ore is red, brown, or of a yellowish hue. In some of the iron deposits the ore lies in the shape of nuggets or lumps, and in others in the form of a powder or in beds of black sand. We might collect all the varieties together, and if we knew nothing about the processes of getting the iron out of the ore we could not use it for building. It is true we might be able to pile lumps of the iron stone one on top of another, and b^' using mortar or cement put them together in walls, or we perhaps might mix the black sand with cement in making concrete, but otherwise we could do nothing. Iron is never pure as it lies in the earth, although in Greenland a ledge of almost pure volcanic iron is known to exist, and some of the meteors which have fallen upon our planet are of iron and nickel. The iron from the mines is always mixed with rocks and other minerals, and often to such an extent that it would cost too much to extract it. It is only through the machinery and pro- cesses of taking the metal out of the ore, which man has discovered, that iron has become of value to us. 156 IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS 18. IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS WE have left the mines and are about to visit the great smelting works where the metal is taken out of the ore and reduced to pig iron. On all sides of us are huge furnaces, great black pipes of iron lined with fire brick. They rise upward for a hundred or more feet and where hottest are surrounded by chambers through which cold water flows. They have machinery for hoisting and filling them, on their sides and their tops. Connected with each furnace are gigantic stoves through which the blast of air passes before it is blown into the furnace to increase the heat of the coke burning within. There are also tall smokestacks, almost kissing the clouds, which furnish the draft ; and shedlike buildings through which the blazing stream of molten iron flows as it comes out to be molded to pigs. All about the furnaces are huge heaps of ore, limestone, and coke. The coke has come from coal which has for days been so roasted in ovens that the gases and other impurities have been cooked out of it, and it is now of the right nature to furnish the intense heat needed for smelt- ing. Coke is much lighter than coal. We can find some at any gas works, the gas having been taken out of the coal that it might be used for lighting our houses. As we look at the furnaces we hear the din of machinery. Cars and other conveyers are traveling to the tops of each huge pipe and dropping their loads into its mouth. They are taking up masses of the iron ore, limestone, and coke, and letting them fall so that they lie in the furnace one on top of another. The men know just how much of each to IX THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS 157 use, and just how all should be fed. Additional supplies are put in every few moments, so that about six hundred tons of these materials are consumed every four hours. In this time one hundred tons or more of pig or cast iron are made, the larger furnaces often producing as much as six hundred tons in one day. The furnace is not allowed to grow cool from the time it is lighted. The great heat is main- tained day and night all the year through, and running water is kept flowing through the hollow chambers about it to prevent the heat from melting the walls. The tem- perature is so high that the iron ore and limestone soon melt into a fiery molasses- Tapping a like mixture, and the whole mass turns to a fluid, which blazes and seethes and boils as the hot blast rushes through it. After a short time gravitation begins to pull the different elements of the liquid apart. The iron is the heaviest, and gradually it sinks to the bottom, while the other ma- terials, comprising the limestone and everything which is not iron, float above. By and by the iron has all settled in the lowest part of the furnace, and the slag, which is the name given to the other materials, lies on top. 158 IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS The furnace is now ready for tapping. The first opening is a hole just above the level of the liquid iron, in order that the slag may flow off. It comes forth in a blazing torrent of yellow, sputtering and sending out sparks, and falls down upon the deep sand of the furnace floor, where ■' See the golden stream of molten metal come out." little ditches have been cut at such a slope that they carry it off. Now the slag has disappeared, and another hole at the bottom of the furnace is opened to let out the iron itself. See the golden stream of molten metal come out. It blazes and bubbles and sends up sparks like a skyrocket as it runs down through the sand. It is so hot that it almost blisters our faces, and we step back for fear the IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS 159 sparks may fall on our feet. It continues to flow, winding its way through the channel made for it, until it enters a great bed or garden of sand. This is cut up into short ditches, each a little more than three feet in length, three or four inches wide, and of a little less depth. They are the molds for the pigs. After the iron flows into them it rapidly cools ; it grows darker and darker ; and its color changes, until it finally turns a blue gray. It hardens as it cools, and after a time, when the heat is all gone, the pigs are taken out and piled up until needed for the mak- ing of steel or for shipment to the markets. The manufacture of pig iron is now carried on in many parts of the world. It has long been one of the chief in- dustries of those countries of Europe which have iron deposits, and within recent years extensive smelting works have been erected in Japan, China, India, and in some other parts of Asia. In the United States, the industry is greater than anywhere else, and we are now smelting about half of all the pig iron produced by the world. We make so much every year that it has been estimated that it would take a train of cars reaching halfway around the globe to carry the load, and that if it were all made into telephone wire it might form a line from the earth to the sun. Tens of thousands of people are engaged in the industry, and the annual product has a value of several hundred millions of dollars. Pig iron is the raw material for making all other iron and steel. It is hard and brittle, and it may be used for rough castings, such as stoves and other things which are to receive hard usage and which can be easily made by running the liquid iron into molds. l6o IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS As the pig iron comes from the furnaces it contains many impurities, which must be taken out before it can be made into wrought iron or steel. In these processes, if the pig iron has been allowed to cool, it must be melted, and so treated as to drive the carbon, silicon, and other impurities out. In the great estabUshment where we are now, the cost of melting again is saved by taking the pig iron in the molten state to the steel works. In doing this the golden stream from the furnace is run out through a spout into five brick-lined tanks called ladles. Each ladle rests upon car wheels, and the five are joined together in a train, which so moves upon a track that they can be brought one after another under the spout of the furnace. Each ladle holds twenty tons, and the five will contain one hundred tons, or the amount of molten pig iron drawn off at one time. We watch the blazing mixture as it pours into the ladles, and follow the train as it moves on, bubbling and boiling, over the track through the works. The iron first goes to the mixer. This is a huge kettle which holds perhaps two hundred tons. Here the ladles, one by one, are lifted by great cranes and their contents poured in, the idea being to render the whole of a more uniform quality. The metal is now ready to be turned into steel. The old methods of doing this were slow, laborious, and costly. To-day, by the inventions of Bessemer and others, they have become so rapid and cheap that steel has largely taken the place of cast iron. All our tools are of steel, our modern buildings are of steel, and steel is employed for everything where toughness, strength, and elasticity are required. In making it, it is necessary to take the impuri- IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS l6l ties out of the iron. In the Bessemer process this is done by blowing air through the molten metal in such a way that the sulphur, silicon, and other impurities are driven off, and some carbon is added, so that as the metal flows forth it is steel ready to be cast or forged into any shape that may be desired. There are other processes of mak- ing steel which yield much the same results, but the Bessemer process for a long time produced most of our building materials of this nature. Now suppose we go to another part of the works and see the steel actually made. The molten metal as it comes from the mixer is emptied by machinery into an enormous iron receptacle shaped like an egg. It is perhaps the big- gest egg ever made, and far bigger than the famous roc Qgg described in the Arabian Nights in the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor. This egg or converter is made of wrought iron, lined with such materials that the molten metal cannot affect them ; and it is so arranged that when the iron has been poured in, a blast of air can be blown through it in from one hundred and fifty to two hundred different streams. As the air rushes through, the various gases and other elements of the melted iron combine and the stuff boils and seethes. A mighty volume of blazing gas and fire now spurts out of the top or mouth of the con- verter, and falls in a shower of sparks and fragments of molten slag, making most beautiful fireworks. These fire- works continue for about ten minutes, or until all the im- purities have been burnt out and only the pure iron remains. It is now too pure to make steel, and so a little other iron containing carbon and manganese is added, and at the CARP. HOUSES — 1 1 1 62 IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS end the metal comes out as steel of just the for tools, machines, and structural materials, use in building. The steel is now run off into great molds, in which it hardens in the shape of huge blocks called ingots. These ingots may be allowed to cool and be carried elsewhere for right such nature as we Making steel by Bessemer process. ' The steel is now run off into great molds." Steel manufacture. Or they may be taken, as soon as they have become solid but still hot, and run through the rolling mill, being drawn thin- ner and thinner, and kneaded and rolled this way and that until they are reduced to the shapes desired for making railroad tracks, bridge materials, IN THE FURNACES AND ROLLING MILLS 1 63 and buildings. Sometimes the steel as it comes from the furnace is cast into the forms desired. That used in our large buildings is generally rolled out into various shapes. It is sawed with steel saws, and is sheared and planed to the exact forms required for the structure. In making wrought iron the pig iron is put into furnaces of a different character from that in which the iron is smelted. The wrought iron furnace is usually long and low, so that the iron can be stirred about or puddled, bringing every bit into contact with the air. As this is done, some of the impurities go off in gases. Sometimes iron is added which contains the other elements needed ; and at the close the mass more or less pure is taken out in the shape of a ball or lump, or a bloom as it is called. This is put under steam hammers and pounded and kneaded, or it may be run through rollers until it is of the texture required. It is now of such a nature that it can be bent this way and that, or rolled out into sheets or plates or pounded to shape. Indeed, the machines for making and handling iron and steel are of so many kinds that we cannot describe them. If you should go into a large hardware store you might find forty or fifty thousand different articles of iron or steel, and each would have been made by machinery somewhat different from that which produces any of the others. It will be enough for us to say that some of the machines are so strong that they will knead or roll an iron ingot weigh- ing a ton as easily as our cooks knead dough for bread ; and others arc so delicate that they will draw out the steel into the hairspring of a watch or the needles our mothers use in mending our clothes. 164 NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES 19. NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES HOW would you like to have a museum ? We can each make one as we go on with our travels. We might entitle our collection "The Museum of House Building," and in it put all the pictures and other things we can find that will illustrate how our homes are made and the various materials in them. To do so we should go back over our travels, and col- lect photographs or drawings of the first shelters man used. We might get views of the tent dwellers, and of the savage homes of grass, cane, and leaves, and after that the log cabins and other houses of our colonial days. It will not be hard to find pictures of the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, the Colosseum at Rome, and of the great Chinese Wall or of the buildings now standing in the once buried city of Pompeii. We can easily collect building materials. Any lumber yard will give us pieces of pine, oak, and other woods, and the stone-cutting establishments will furnish bits of marble, granite, sandstone, and slate. We have brick all around us, and many of us live near the materials used for mak- ing iron and steel. Coke is to be had at every gas plant,', and if we have no iron ore near we can get some by writ- ing to teachers or others in the towns at the mines. For instance, take nails, which form one of the objects of our travels to-day. Let each of us collect as many kinds as he can and bring them along. I doubt, how- ever, whether, all taken together, we can make the collection complete. There are more than three hundred NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES 1 65 different kinds of nails used in building and they range in size from spikes as thick as our fingers and half a foot long, down to the little tacks in the carpets. Nails are made of many materials, although for the most part they are of iron or steel. There are copper nails, brass nails, and nails of zinc and galvanized iron. The wrought iron nail will bend easily, and the same is true of the nails with which the blacksmiths fasten horseshoes. Horse- shoe nails have big heads and are sharp ; they are so soft that the ends can be pinched off and pounded down where they come through the hoof. Most nails are made by ma- chinery, but horseshoe nails are often forged upon anvils by hand. It would be interesting to know who made the first nail. For a long time, we may be sure, men fastened their houses together with wooden pins, and to-day many of the shelters of uncivilized triljes are pinned together with wood or tied into place with fibers of one kind or another. This is true of the houses of the poorer of the Filipinos, whose roofs of palm leaves are tied or sewed to the rafters, the framework being fastened together by splints or strips of rattan. Many of the first houses of our country were built without iron, wooden pins and pegs taking the places of nails and spikes. President Jefferson made nails for sale on his estate at Monticello, and there were many other small nail factories in Virginia and Maryland. The ancients used nails of bronze and some made of that metal have been dug from the Pompeian ruins. His- tory tells us that a century or so ago every large town in Europe had its nail makers, who worked at that trade l66 NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES alone. Each man had his own little anvil and forge and he cut off and shaped the nails by hand one by one. There were certain places near the iron mines in England where whole villages did nothing else. Not only the men, but the women and children as well, worked at nail- making, and httle boys and girls heated the thin rods of iron red-hot and cut and shaped them into such nails as the market required. In Birmingham, England, sixty thousand persons were so employed, and they used two hundred tons of iron a week. At that time nail rods of the right thickness were rolled or cut out of wrought iron bars or plates. They were sold in bundles to these blacksmiths, who heated the rods and cut them into the right lengths for nails. Then each length was put into a steel vise with a bit of the iron projecting, and a few blows with a hammer flattened this end into a head and another blow or so made the nail sharp. Tacks and brads were made in much the same way. Such methods were still in use everywhere in our colo- nial days; but ten years after we declared our Independ- ence of England, a Massachusetts man, Ezekiel Reed, invented a cut-nail making machine. Soon after this other machines were invented and within a few years nails were everywhere made by machinery. We have now many nail factories, and some of them are making eight thousand tons of nails in a month. We have single ma- chines which will cut out a thousand nails in one minute and others which make round or wire nails of drawn steel at the rate of five hundred per minute. In the manufacture of nails of steel wire, the pig iron is NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES 167 run through the Bessemer converter and then cast into billets about a yard long and four inches square. These are heated and drawn through one great pair of rolls after another, until they come out in long wire rods only three fourths of an inch thick. They now go through ten or more other rollers, growing thinner and longer until at last they are rods of steel almost twelve hundred feet long and only f? "F T T W W T T f V Wire nails. a quarter of an inch thick. During the drawing the rod moves faster and faster until when near the end of its jour- ney it is traveling at the rate of thirteen hundred and fifty feet per minute, or almost fifteen miles an hour. It is done rapidly that the steel may not grow too cool during the process. After this the rod is drawn by powerful machinery through holes in stout blocks of cast steel, the holes being the exact size of the nail wire required. It is now annealed, or heated to take out the strain, and is then ready to be 1 68 NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES made into nails. It goes to the nail machine, entering it as wire and coming out in a stream of finished nails at the rate of from one hundred and fifty to five hundred per minute. The machine cuts the nails from the wire, points them, and pounds on the heads ; all being done more rapidly than one could imagine. The threepenny TTTTTT Tacks. fine nails come out at the rate of five hundred a minute, and the very large ones at one hundred and fifty per min- ute. As soon as the nails drop, they are thrown into big revolving iron cylinders, where they are rolled over and over against each other and the sides of the cylinders, Wire screw hooks. until they receive the bright polish of the nails sold in our stores. They are now packed up in one hundred pound kegs, and shipped off to the markets. As we go through the factory we ask what the word penny means when used in connection with nails; for the men always speak of nails according to size as three NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES 169 pennys, four pennys, six pennys and so on up to sixty pennys. They show us that the nails grow larger with the numbers, and we learn that the penny has come from the word pound, and that they were originally called three oound, four pound, five pound nails, according as it took Screw eyes. a thousand of the nails to weigh so many pounds. For instance, it took one thousand fourpenny nails to weigh four pounds, one thousand tenpennys to weigh ten pounds, a thousand sixtypennys to weigh sixty pounds, and so on. In time the sizes of the nails became fixed, and the actual numbers were not counted. Another interesting article used largely in fastening our houses together is the screw, which is now made of steel Machine screws. in many different sizes. In such manufacture the wire is first drawn, and then cut, headed, and threaded by machinery so that it has the spiral point which enables it to work its way through the wood. After this the screws are polished, and packed up in cardboard boxes for sale. But it will be impossible for us to examine every variety of iron that goes into our houses. There are so many that it would take weeks of travel to study them all. There 170 NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES are some iron things, however, which are found in every house, and among the most important of these are hinges and locks. The original hinge was probably a piece of vine or fiber put through holes made in one side of the door to tie it to the framework so that it could be swung back and forth. Later on leather was used in much the same way. Doors were also made with pivotlike projections at the top and bottom, which fitted into holes of the framework, and they were thus moved back and forth. An Italian cathedral which was built in the eleventh century has shutters of stone slabs which are hung by such pivots. During the Middle Ages many curious iron hinges were wrought on the forge. To-day aM sorts of hinges are cut and cast out of iron and steel, and also from brass and other combinations of metals. NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES 171 In our colonial days, when iron was so hard to get, many of the log cabins had doors with leather hinges aa much like the strap iron hinge of the present tacked to the framework. To-day hinges are sold at a little more than the cost of the iron which goes into them. They are made by the millions, and we can find many kinds for our museum if we decide to collect them. A more interesting article, however, is the lock, which has hundreds of shapes, including many curious contrivances to puzzle the stranger. The lock is intended to keep one's things safe from thieves, and sometimes from the gaze of curious persons who wish to learn about matters con- cerning which they have no busi- ness to know. Therefore it must be of such a nature that it cannot be easily opened, and the more complicated it is the better it serves the purpose for which it is made. Locks have been used as long as man can remember. The Greek poet Homer, who lived ages ago, speaks of them ; and Pliny, an ancient Roman writer, says that keys were invented about seven hundred years before Christ. The old-time Egyptians hung their 1/2 NAILS AND SCREWS, LOCKS AND HINGES doors upon hinges of bronze, and they kept their jewelry in bronze caskets fastened by locks. The Romans had bolts and locks on their doors, and their money chests and jewel caskets were guarded in the same way. Some of their locks were so large that the key had to be supported while turning it, and others so small that they were mounted as finger rings. The Chinese have locks which work on the principle of the screw, and may be screwed open or shut; and in some of their locks a bell rings as the key turns, so that they can tell by the sound if anyone is trying to open the door. We have locks containing tumblers and springs and other contrivances on the inside which make it almost im- possible for one who has not the right key to move them. We have time locks which cannot be opened except at the minute and hour fixed for doing so ; and combination locks in which one must turn the key this way and that just so far and no farther each time. Sometimes the combination is composed of figures and sometimes of letters, so that one must spell out a word on the dial before the lock will spring open. We have also spring locks, sliding door locks, night latches, and dead locks in which no knob is used, the key alone being required. Some locks are arranged so that they can be locked from the inside but not from the outside of the door, and some in such a way that one key will unlock a whole series of locks, but the individual keys will not open any of the others. Indeed, locks are now of all sizes and shapes, embracing a great variety of curious inventions. In the past they were wrought out almost altogether by hand. They are now made by machinery. TIN AND ZINC 1 73 20. TIN AND ZINC ''"T'O-DAY we are to investigate the use of certain water- 1 proof metals. We may call them such, for they are used to protect other metals, and especially iron and steel, from the weather, much as our rubber coats protect us from rain. It is strange to think of putting overcoats on such tough, strong, and durable metals as iron and steel for fear they may grow sick through wet weather. But that is really the case. Iron and steel rust or oxidize when exposed to the moisture and air; and, if not protected, they will in time become weak and scale off so that they will iinally fall into pieces. It is therefore desirable to have some sort of weather- proof clothing to put over them. Now there are several metals which air and water do not affect so rapidly as they do iron and steel ; and these are employed to cover the latter. Among the chief of such metals are tin and zinc, which we shall examine to-day. We use tin for roofing and spouting, and for cups, pails, and pans of all kinds. Bathtubs are often lined with tin and the canning and certain other industries depend largely upon it for the vessels or boxes in which goods are kept until sold. There must be a vast deal of the metal, must there not ? Indeed, at first thought, one would think this the case, but it is not so. There are only a few places where tin has been found in large quantities. We shall see where these are farther on. All the tin mined on the globe in one year is only about one hundred thousand tons, while the iron and steel amount to much more than a thousand times 174 TIN AND ZINC that. The tin, however, is seldom used except as a coat- ing. The metal is such that it can be pounded out into sheets so thin that one thousand of them laid one on top of another would not be thicker than this book we are reading. Tin foil, such as is sometimes wrapped around cakes of sweet chocolate, will serve as a specimen of this for our house-building museum. Roofing plates are of iron with an even thinner coating of tin, and tin cups and pans are only iron, tin-plated. We shall learn that zinc is used in much the same way. But let us take a rapid trip over the world and examine the tin ore as it lies in the earth. We shall find it in nuggets, grains, and dust, much like the placer gold that is washed out of the beds of the streams in some parts of our West. It also exists in lodes or veins in rocks, which must be pounded to powder to get the tin out. Our first journey is on an ocean liner across the Atlantic to Wales in Great Britain. We go to Cornwall, where are tin mines which have been worked for two or three thou- sand years. The early Phoenicians knew of them, and both they and the Romans sailed out through the Strait of Gibraltar and across to Great Britain for cargoes of tin. Much of the Cornwall tin is mixed with copper. It lies in faults or breaks in the granite or slate rock, some of the veins being no thicker than sheets of paper and others many feet thick. In places the tin ore lies in large masses, and at one point we are shown a great bowl almost a mile in circumference and several hundred feet deep, from which about a million tons have been taken. The earth of that mine is soft, and much of the ore was washed out. In other mines the workings are now half a mile under- TIN AND ZINC 175 ground, comprising miles of tunnels in which pumps are kept going to take out the water. The ore when it comes to the surface is sorted and ground to a powder. It is then washed to remove the earthy materials, and after that roasted and smelted and run off into bricks. The grains of tin, or stream-tin as they are called, are Tin mine in Malay Archipelago. much like big grains of gunpowder, whereas, that found in the veins looks like silver or lead ore. The smelted bricks shine like silver. From Cornwall we might cross the English Channel and take a run into Saxony and Bohemia, both of which produce tin ; or if we had some months to spare we could go back over the Atlantic to South America and travel on the Amazon to its source high up in the Andes, not far 176 TIN AND ZINC from which are large tin deposits. I have visited some about Lake Titicaca on the high plateau of Bolivia. That region has mountains in which tin, copper, and silver lie close together. The tin is in veins which range in thickness up to six and eight feet and in depth to more than six hundred ,feet. The ore is taken out by the Indians. It is some- times carried to the trains or the smelters on the backs of llamas, queer little animals which have wool like a sheep and necks and heads not unhke a camel. Each llama will carry only one hundred pounds of ore at a load, and if more is put upon him he will lie down and spit a sour, biting liquid at any man who tries to force him to move. The most important of all the tin mines are in southeast- ern Asia. The total annual product of the world, as I have said, is about one hundred thousand tons. Of this perhaps one twentieth comes from Cornwall and three times as much from the Andes. Of the remainder seven thousand tons are produced in Australasia, and the balance, which is almost seven tenths of the whole, comes from the southern end of the Siamese Peninsula near the Strait of Malacca and the two little islands of Banka and BilUton lying between that Strait and Java. The mines on the penincula now yield more than half of all the tin used. This product is known as Straits tin. It is found in grains, beds, and veins, and is often so mixed with earth and gravel that it can be mined by throwing streams of water against it through a hose worked by a pump. The gravel is then washed, in which process the heavy tin sinks to the bot- tom. It is now gathered up and carried to the furnaces, where it is smelted with charcoal and limestone and run TIN AND ZINC I/f off into pigs or bricks of the size of a pound loaf of bread. The same sort of smelting is done in other tin regions. As the tin comes from the smelters it is mixed with im- purities. It often contains arsenic and iron, copper and other materials. It must be remelted and run off into re- fining basins, where it is stirred with sticks of green wood. As the wood moves about through the boiling metal, its sap is cooked out in steam, and this aids in separating the impurities from the tin. By and by, the other metals, inasmuch as they are heavier than the tin, sink to the bottom, and the molten liquid above, now almost pure tin, is drawn off into molds, where it cools. The tin is now known as block tin, and is ready for making tin plate. In the meantime the iron must go through many pro. cesses before it is ready for its tin overcoat. The pig metal has already been smelted, and reduced to the right sort of iron for the plates. It has been passed through one set of rollers after another until it has reached the size and thickness of the plates to be used, and it has now to be so cleaned, smoothed, and poHshed that the tin will spread evenly over its surface. In the first place, it must be perfectly clean. We have often heard of pickling cucumbers in vinegar. The tin makers tell us that they have to pickle the iron before the tin is put on. This is to take off the rust and scales. In this process the plates are bathed again and again in hot sulphuric or hydrochloric acid, being taken out between- whiles and washed clean and heated and cooled in just the right way to make them of the soft and pliable nature in- tended for roofing, or for bending them to the shape of tin cups and other such things. They are run through chilled CARP. HOUSES — 12 178 TIN AND ZINC iron rollers, are polished with emery and oil, and then scoured with sand until they are white, clean, and bright. After they are ready for the tin, each sheet is dropped into a pot of melted grease and then taken out and plunged with other sheets into a bath of melted tin coated with grease. Some of the molten tin sticks to the iron plate, and the plate then receives a second tin bath in which the metal is purer. The tin-plated sheets are now wiped off with a brush, and put into the washpot. If there is too much tin on them, some is removed by giving them a bath of tallow and palm oil, the liquid being just hot enough to allow the surplus tin to run off. The sheets are next passed through troughs containing bran and meal, and are rubbed with flannel until they shine like a mirror. They are now ready for shipment to the markets. Zinc is another waterproof metal largely used to protect the iron we employ in our dwellings. Many of our roofs are of galvanized iron, and in parts of the world where wood is scarce, whole houses, large and small, are com- posed of sheets of iron so covered. In making such iron the sheets are coated with tin by what is known as the gal- vanic process, and are then plunged into a bath of fluid zinc and certain other chemicals by which the zinc is left on the metal. The term " galvanized iron " is also used for iron which has been dipped in a bath of melted zinc, mixed with certain chemicals, which cause the zinc to fasten itself to the iron. Vast quantities of the iron pipes used for plumbing are coated with zinc, and the same is true of spouting and fixtures of various kinds. If the zinc is put on thickly it forms an even safer protection against rust than tin. It TIN AND ZINC 179 is largely employed in coating fence wire, and in all iron structures where painting is not desirable on account of the cost. Zinc ore is more common than tin ore. It looks like lead ore and is often mixed with it. It is found in certain countries of Europe, and in great masses in Central Africa. View in lead and zinc mine, Kansas. It exists in many parts of the United States and especially in Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin. The center of the zinc-mining industry is Joplin, in southwestern Missouri. About that city great zinc deposits have been found, and more than one hundred million dollars worth taken from them. There was no city at Joplin before zinc was dis- covered, and that mineral is really the cause of the growth of the city. The common term for zinc ore used by the l8o LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS miners is "jack," and so "jack" has built up the city. We have all heard of the " House that Jack Built," but Joplin is the tozvn that "jack" built. 21. LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS "Oh that my words . . . were graven with an iron pen and lead iii the rock forever." THIS sentence comes from the Bible, and it was uttered by Job, thousands of years before Christ. It shows us that lead was already in use at that time and that the people knew much about it. The ancient Romans covered the bottoms of their ships with sheet lead which they fastened on with bronze nails. Their warriors used leaden bullets which they threw with shngs. They had lead water pipes in their houses, and they made lead paints, which the great ladies used to color their cheeks. To-day white lead, made by corroding lead in acetic acid, is the most common form in which lead is employed. Such lead, ground in oil, forms a waterproof coating for almost all our frame houses, and it is often employed to protect iron from rust. It combines readily with linseed oil, and is the basis of some of the best paints which have yet been discovered. We use lead in its metallic form for water pipes, joints, and plumbing of various kinds. In solder it aids in joining tin plates together, and it is also employed in the manufac- ture of glass. Lead is one of the most flexible and durable of metals. LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS l8l It can be bent or pounded into all sorts of shapes. It does not rust, and is therefore valuable in waterworks and their fixtures. It can be easily melted ; and had we the right molds we could pour some lead into them and make toys of all kinds. You have heard of Hans Christian Ander- sen's story of the little tin soldier. I am pretty sure, how- ever, that soldier was made of lead or had lead in him. Some of the verses of our nursery days remind us of one of the uses of lead. " There was a little boy And he had a little gun And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead. He shot John Sprig Through the middle of his wig And knocked it off his head, head, head." Lead is stillused for small shot and bullets. Our pioneer forefathers made their own bullets, melting the lead in iron pans over the open fires, and pouring it into molds, where it hardened to shape. But where does lead come from ? We find the ore in different parts of the United States, and it is common all over the world. For a long time the chief source of supply was Spain, and a great deal came also from Great Britain. When our country began to be settled, the first mines worked were in Virginia, Connecti- cut, and Massachusetts, and from them came some of the bullets we used in our wars with the Indians, and also with the British. As the pioneers made their way west- ward they found richer deposits of lead in the Mississippi basin, and especially in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The city of Dubuque was named after a Frenchman who 1 82 LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS bought lead mines near there from the Indians about 1780; and long before that, the Indians of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa were smelting lead and selling the ore to the French traders. The Frenchmen wanted furs, and therefore they sold the Indians firearms and taught them how to handle the lead and make it into bullets. The In- dians smelted the ore in rude furnaces made by digging holes in the hills, and they ran the metal off into leaden pigs which their squaws carried to the trading posts. After a time the ore became so valuable that it was used as money in the upper Mississippi basin, the rate of exchange being a peck of corn for a peck of ore. Lead ore in its most common form usually contains more or less other metals. In this form it is known as galena. We have two towns in the United States named Galena, one in Illinois and another in Kansas, both so called from the lead deposits near by. We have towns farther west which were also named from mines of this metal about them. We have all heard of the city of Leadville, Colo- rado. It is situated almost two miles above the level of the sea, high up in the Rockies, and is built over veins and beds of silver and lead, while great mines producing these metals lie all about it. The lead of the Rockies is much mixed with silver, and in the smelting both metals are saved. In the mines about Joplin a great deal of zinc is mixed with the lead. Altogether we produce several hundred thousand tons of lead every year, the value of the product sometimes amounting to many millions of dollars. Another metal largely employed as a building material is copper. Great structures are roofed with it, and the most beautiful doors of some of our public buildings have LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS 183 been made of a combination of it and other metals. This is so of the huge bronze doors which form the entrance to our Capitol at Washington, and of those made by Ghiberti in the Baptistry at Florence. These doors have been cast to represent historical scenes, the figures of men and In a copper smelter. •horses standing out upon them as though carved in the metal. The Crawford door which leads in from the portico of the United States Senate Chamber has panels repre- senting the death of General Warren at the battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington on his way to his inau- guration as President in 1789, and the laying of the corner stone of the Capitol in 1793. Inside the Capitol are bronze stairways ; and the Library Building, not far away, 184 LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS has a bronze fountain in front of it and. bronze doors of remarkable beauty. Copper is found in all articles made of brass, and we fre- quently have it in door knobs, and on the spigots and other iixtures connected with plumbing. We use it for the wires In an Ohio brass foundry. which run through our homes to the telephones, and also in those which carry the current for the electric lights. We have brass beds, copper and brass lamps, and, indeed, many beautiful things made of copper and brass. In most of these articles the copper is mixed or alloyed with other metals. Sometimes the chief sister metal is zinc, and the two when melted together form brass. In other cases tin is combined with the copper, and in the past this alone was called bronze. Now an alloy of copper and LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS 1 85 aluminium is also called bronze, and the distinction between brass and bronze is not so sharply made as it was in the past. Both metals are now formed by mixtures of copper, zinc, tin, and aluminium, different proportions of the vari- ous metals being employed for making different things. Copper is one of the oldest of metals. Indeed, some people think it was the first metal used by man. It lies in the earth in ores of different colors, being often mixed with rock and various metals. Red oxide of copper is reddish ; malachite, which is carbonate of copper, is green ; and copper pyrites is yellow. We have vast quantities of copper. It is found here and there throughout the Appalachian Range. There are enormous deposits of it about Lake Superior in the northern peninsula of Michigan, and we have a great deal in Montana, Arizona and other parts of the Rocky Moun- tain Highlands where the ore is found in great masses. There are also large deposits in Alaska and California. Our annual product often amounts to hundreds of mil- lions of pounds, and it is worth far more than our product of gold and silver. Indeed, copper comes next to iron in the value of the metals we take from the earth. Our mines are so rich that they now yield the greater part of all the copper used m the world, although there are large deposits in Canada and Mexico, and in South America, Africa, Australasia, and Europe. About the oldest copper mines known are those of the Spanish Peninsula. They have been worked since the :inic of the Romans, and thousands of miners are labor- ing in them to-day. The most famous are the Rio Tinto 1 86 LEAD, COPPER, AND BI^SS mines, which lie about forty-six miles northwest of the city of Seville. They cover a space large enough to make fifty farms of one hundred acres each. The Rio Tinto ore lies near the surface, and it is dug and blasted out and carried on trains to the smelters. There are more than sixty miles of railroads in those mines, and thirty Casting brass. locomotives are kept busy taking out the ore. The copper is mixed with iron and sulphur, and it must be smelted in order to make the bricks or pigs which constitute the metal of commerce. An interesting story is told of the discovery of the Calu- met and Hecla Copper Mines of the Michigan Peninsula. They lie about five miles from the shores of Lake Supe- rior, and are among the richest of their kind in the world. LEAD, COPPER, AND BRASS 187 Many millions of dollars' worth of ore has already been taken from them, and more is mined every year. The ore is largely in masses, some of which weigh many tons. Almost a half century ago no one knew that copper lay there, when one day a pig in wandering about through the woods happened to fall into a hole. He tried to root his way out, and thereby un- covered some of the ore and thus brought this great treasure vault to the eyes of man. In making brass the copper is melted and the zinc grad- ually added, the two metals being so treated that they are thoroughly mixed, after which they can be run out into molds forming the castings desired. Brass is soft, and can be easily bent. It is rolled in thin sheets, and drawn out into wire. If we would see how the rolling is done, we may do so by a flying journey to the great works of the Naugatuck valley in Connecticut. The Naugatuck River rises in the hills in the northwest- ern part of that state and flows rapidly down to the Pouring brass into molds. 1 88 A TRIP TO FAIRYLAND Housatonic, its mouth being at Derby. Between the towns of Derby and Torrington the fall is about six hun- dred feet, and this gives a great water power which is used by the brass makers. Most of the rolled brass of the United States is made there, and thousands of men are employed in the business. There are many large mills for melting and rolling the metal. They use copper and zinc, putting them together in the proper proportions for the material desired, and then running the product through rolling mills which turn them into plates of just the right size. They make sheets of all thicknesses down to some for eyelets, so carefully rolled that they do not vary more than half the breadth of a hair of your head. Some brass has ninety parts of copper and ten parts of zinc. This is red brass, and has a copperish tinge. There are other combinations which contain sixty parts of copper and thirty of zinc. This brass is yellow, and looks some- what like gold. Bell metal is more than three fourths copper, the balance being tin ; and gun metal usually con- tains one hundred parts of copper to ten parts of tin. o>». ITiat tlie said premises are free from incumbrances. JOUrtb. That the party of the first part wCa exeeuie or procure any fuHher necettary assurance of the- title to said primises. Iflftb. That the said Charles A. Drake, ■ _____^.^__ part y of the first part, will forever warrant the title to said premises. In MitneSS MberCOf, the said pan y of the first paH hae hereunto set his hand and seal the day and year first alwve written. In presence of oM^Udif^ (234) "Records are kept of every tract." BUILDING A HOME 235 nouse at a fixed price or on a commission. If this is done, the builder will buy the materials, hire the workmen, and agree to deliver the house to us completed within a certain fixed time. He is under the superintendence of the architect, who sees that the plans are carried out in all of their details. As to the construction of the house, this depends so much upon its location, character, size, and the materials of which it is built, that the description of any one dwelling will not give us a rule for all others. The building conditions differ greatly in city and country, and the house whose founda- tion is on the sand re- quires things not needed by that which stands on a rock. Houses of wood are not built Hke houses of brick or stone, and the great steel structure is unlike any other. In- deed, each of our dwell- ings is to a certain extent of its own kind, although it has many things which are common to all. First every house must have its foundation, its walls, and its roof. The foundation must be firm and evenly fixed in the earth or the house may sink or lean like the great Tower at Pisa, and perhaps topple over. The foundation may be on firm ground or if the house must Building a skyscraper. 236 BUILDIXG A HOME Stand where the earth is not firm, piles may be driven down to make a foundation. This is the case in Amster- dam, where Erasmus said the people lived like birds on the tree tops. In our own country, buildings in marshy or swampy places are often erected upon foundations of concrete and iron. This is so in parts of Chicago, where on the soft ground near the lakes, steel rails are laid down and filled in with cement, and other rails laid above crisscross or at right angles, similarly filled, until a great solid block is formed upon which the house rests. Even greater precautions are required for the heavy steel struc- tures called skyscrapers, as we shall see later on. And then the walls of our houses ! They vary from those in our massive stone buildings, two feet or more in thickness, to the tall office structures, which often consist of a framework of steel with only a thin veneering of brick or stone to keep out the weather. We have walls of wood, stone, brick, and concrete, and even sheet iron. It is the same with the roofs. They are of many ma- terials, each made and put on in its own way. Thousands of our buildings are covered with shingles from Oregon and Washington, and other thousands are protected by tin or galvanized iron. We have roofs of boards, slate, and glass. We have some of terra cotta tiles, glazed like fine china ; and roofs of paper covered with asphalt or pitch upon which have been sprinkled pebbles or sand. Indeed, the manufacture of roofing materials alone forms an important industry, employing and supporting a great many people. But the foundation, walls, and the roof are merely the shells of our dwelling. They aid in keeping out the rain and sun, but alone they would not form a much better BUILDING A HOME 237 home than that of the cave men. Indeed, we require so many things in addition that our houses are very- beehives of invention. They must have floors and ceil- ings, windows and doors, stairways from story to story, and arrangements of various kinds for cooking, heating, and lighting, as well as for the water supply. All these things should be provided for in the plans; and in the cities or towns each class of house building is done by men who will do little else. The foundations and brick or stone walls must be laid up by masons, the wood- work is put together by carpenters, and if the roofs are of metal, they will be laid on by tinners and roofers. The piping of the house for gas, heat, and water will be done by the plumbers; while if we have electricity in any form we shall need electricians to wire the structure in such a way that it may not take fire. And then the paint- ing is to be done by another class of laborers, the lathing by another, the plastering by a third, and so on, each class having a place of its own. In the larger buildings the work is still further subdivided, until in the great office structure the laborers form a small army of many com- panies, each of which is skilled in one form of construction, and will do nothing else. Indeed, the work of house building becomes more compli- cated from year to year. New inventions bring forth new materials and new tools. Stone is now planed and carved by machinery; wood moldings which were once laboriously cut out by hand are now made at the mills, ready to be fitted into the houses ; and wire cloth sometimes takes the place of lath. We shall learn more about such features of build- ing construction as we go on with our travels. 238 THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS Erecting the 31st story of the Whitehall Building. 28. THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS SOME years ago a little black boy whose home was a thatched hut in the wilds of Africa was taken by a missionary to the city of New York. The voyage was made upon a steamer and the little fellow was interested in the mighty engines fed by coal which carried him over the oceans, and in the other strange things he saw upon shipboard. He was even more surprised at the wonders on land. He stayed for some months in America, and was then carried back to his people, who came together from far and near to hear what he had seen. The little fellow described the doings of steam and electricity. He told of the magic of the telephone, of the wagons without THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS 239 horses which flew over tracks of steel, of the automobiles which ate oil and had a bad smelHng breath, and of the electric light through which, by touching a button, man could turn night into day. As he described these and other miracles, his black friends opened their eyes and mouths in amazement, half doubting whether what he said could be true. At last he began to tell of our houses and especially of the great structures of steel where a whole tribe of families dwelt in apartments one over the other, riding up and down to their homes in elevators which he called little cages of iron. He said that these buildings were so tall that the strongest and most skillful bow- man of Africa, standing upon the ground, could not shoot an arrow as high as their roofs. Upon that the whole crowd gave a shout and would hear nothing more. They talked the matter over together and concluded it could not be true and that the boy's stories must be lies from beginning to end. We know, however, that the little fellow was well within bounds in such a description; and that we have many build- ings so high that the strongest archer could not shoot over them. The home of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York is more than one hundred feet higher than the Washington Monument; other buildings there have forty or fifty stories, and some of those planned Park Row Building. 240 THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS for the future, will be taller still. The Woolworth Build- ing is 750 feet high. The Whitehall Building is higher than the Great Pyramid and it covers more than a half acre. It has office ac- commodations for four thousand people, who are lifted to its thirty- one floors by twenty- nine elevators, eight of which are expresses that do not stop to let passengers off or on until the twentieth story is reached. The build- ing is heated by the aid of twenty miles of steam pipes, and its machin- ery is more varied than that of many great fac- tories. The Park Row Build- ing, opposite the New York Post Office, if we measure it from founda- tion to roof, although it is not so high by several hundred feet as some steel structures which A scaffold suspended in mic have been erected since its completion, is almost as tall as the Washington Monument. It weighs forty million pounds, and is supported by four thousand piles, driven forty feet THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS 241 down through the sand to bed rock. It has thirty-one stories, and in these there are nine hundred and fifty- offices. It has seventeen hundred doors, two thousand windows, and seventy-five hundred electric lights. But let us go to New York and take a look at some of these huge office structures. There are many which have long been completed and others are rapidly rising to accommo- date the great population which in- creases each year. Such buildings are required because those engaged in the many busi- nesses of the metropolis can transact their affairs more rapidly if they can be close together Therefore, as the space in the busi- ness centers is limited and the build- ings cannot be spread out, they have arranged to have them go up. Some of the land in lower New York is now worth a million and more dollars an acre, and only buildings of immense height will make it possible to earn a rent which is in proportion to its great cost. The more stories a building has the more offices and tenants it can accommodate, and the more CARI'. HDISIS — 16 Singer Building. I It u'h'hi I'U 1 II »»» ' J „ I ittlMi I Times Building. 242 THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS rent it will bring in. By the invention of steel construc- tion it has been found that story can be added to story, with safety ; and, by flying elevators, the people can ride up and down, so that the man who lives higher up than the top of the tallest fir tree of the Oregon woods is carried to his office more quickly than the pioneer could climb the rude ladders which led to the loft of his cabin. , The modern office building is often called " the sky- scraper " because, as one stands on the ground beside it, its roof seems almost to scrape the sky. It has been described as a steel bridge upon end, with passenger cars running up and down within it. It is made of steel, hke that used in bridge building, the beams, joists, and rafters being rolled into shape at the mills and bolted together with hot rivets. Every piece in the great structure must be exactly right be- fore the work of erection begins, and the whole is put into shape like a gigantic puzzle, where each block has its place. After the framework has been joined, the huge skeleton must have its steel bones covered with a coat of brick, tile, or other material. Then the plaster is spread on the me- tallic lathing, and the floors laid. In the famous buildings of the past it was the walls which supported the floors and upheld the roof. In these steel structures, the walls serve merely as curtains to keep out the weather and are themselves supported by girders which project at the level of the floor. In the old buildings the walls were laid first. In the new ones the steel frame is erected and the walls are put on afterwards, the upper stories being sometimes walled in before the lower ones. During the construction the plumbing and wiring go on^ and great furnaces, engines, and dynamos are installed in THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS 243 the basement. I give on pages 244 and 245 pictures of the MetropoHtan Building while in construction, and on page 246 one of Madison Square, showing the tower completed. One of the most interesting features of the skyscraper is its foundation. The larger buildings are composed of steel, stone, and brick, and one may weigh thousands of tons. Indeed, a single building, with its contents, often weighs so much that, if it were taken apart and placed upon wagons, one hundred thousand horses all pulling at once could not haul the load. For such a structure, where the ground is not firm, an excavation must be made to bed rock, and concrete columns erected ; or a great raft of steel rails laid crosswise and filled in with cement may form the base, in order that if it should sink the settlement will be even throughout. Under many of the New York buildings are hundreds of trees in the shape of piles which have been driven down into the sand for forty or more feet. These piles are in rows under those parts of the building which need most support. After they were driven far down into the earth, the sand was cleared away to a depth of a foot or so from the surface and concrete poured in, until it formed a great block of solid rock over the whol,e build- ing site securely upheld by the trees. On this concrete base, huge blocks of stone were laid, and upon them were erected the brick piers capped with granite to which the steel framework of the structure was fastened. The variety of things required in such building is so great we cannot mention all. A single large office structure reminds us of a little city under one roof. It may have its own gas and electric plants, and its own waterworks system fed perhaps by an artesian well 244 THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS sunken hundreds of feet below its founda- tion. It sometimes has a restaurant on its top floor, and such con veniences in the way of stores, Ubraries, news stands, and telephone and telegraph connec- tions in the various III III n» m M> "• - mnn" in «L»w TflWtf! Ill in ni i:s III III III 111 III III HI Ml HI III [|] >'•' itj III Th th iH m n M (t\ iU ih • M III lit m H I i ■ HI m iR I I ■ « iii III ill ■ i November, 1907. Metropolitan Building. January, 1908. Stories, that one could supply all his needs from one year's end to another without going out. It often contains a bank and safety de- posit vaults. These buildings re- quire a large force to take care of them. THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS 245 Each has its superintendent with a host of employees, many of whom are in uniform. It has its engineers and electricians, its boys who run the elevators, and also messengers of one kind or other. It must have women to sweep and scrub, and men to clean the windows. The latter wear belts which are fastened by straps to hooks on the outside of the windows, so that if they should lose their footing on the sill, they might not fall from the great height to the ground. The business of a large office building sur- passes description. Its visitors are numbered by thousands, and so many go in and out in a day that it has been estimated that if they could be all collected and packed side by side like sardines in a box, the structure would be only just big enough to hold them. til III ,.. " > 1 1 iTi"r,'Y !" »ii III "Wf ' I. !"'»« tl ? ** €, July, 190b. Metropolitan Building. 246 THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDINGS Of much the same nature are the apartment houses now to be found in all our large cities. In some of these scores of families dwell under one roof, being supplied by the heat, light, and water which come from the basement. Each family has an apartment or flat, consisting of several rooms connected together and all on the same floor. It will have its own kitchen, dining room, and parlor, with enough Madison Square. bedrooms to accommodate its members. The family use the elevator to reach their home, and the provisions are brought up on a dumb waiter or freight elevator. Heat and light are obtained by turning a valve or switch; and the gas stove of the kitchen has no ashes to be taken out. In many of the apartment houses are restaurants in which one may eat his meals or not as he chooses, and in some of them are playgrounds for the children, high up on the roof. In addition to these large apartment houses there are IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 247 many small ones. Such are to be found in all the towns of the country, and I doubt not some of the boys and girls of our party may be able to tell us just how they are con- structed and all about the life of these homes. 29. IN A NEW YORK HOTEL THE hotel is the home of the traveler. It is there he eats and sleeps, there he receives his friends, and there he rests when not going about on business or pleas- ure. We have many families who live in hotels all the year round, and we have so many hotels that it takes several million people to run them. They are numbered by thousands, and billions of dollars are invested in them. The American hotel is so arranged that it gives one most of the comforts he has at home. This is not so of the native hotels or inns of some other lands. In China, India, and northern Africa they are little more than sleeping places for men and beasts. When the Arab travels upon his camel, he carries much of his food with him and does his own cooking wherever he stops. Great caravansaries or stableUke inns are to be found in such cities as Damas- cus, Fez, Tunis, and Cairo. There the traveler sleeps on the straw, with his camel or donkey near by. In China the country inns are often one-story structures with win- dows of paper, built about courts in which the donkeys and horses are stabled at night. One is lulled to sleep by the crunching of the cattle as they chew their cuds, and he is often awakened by the donkeys which bray in concert from time to time during the night. 248) "We now have some of the best hotels of the world." IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 249 The Japanese have neat hotels in both city and country; but at the native inns one must expect to sleep on the floor, and eat at low tables before which he kneels or sits cross- legged on cushions. He uses chopsticks; and the tea, rice, and other food will be brought to him on trays by little Japanese girls, who bump their heads on the floor in salutation as they come in to serve him. In a Turkish hotel the guests are often crowded into one or two rooms, many sleeping together. At dinner a roast sheep may be brought in whole; and the party may sit around this and each carve for himself. The Turks eat without forks and in taking up bits of meat from a stew they bend a piece of bread between thumb and finger and use it as pincers. Other nations of Asia and Africa have customs equally curious; and it is only the white race that has the modern hotel, with its separate room for each guest and its many conveniences. The first hotels of our country were known as taverns or inns, and each had a swinging sign which bore some such name as "The Red Lion," "The Black Bear," "The Eagle," or perhaps "The Kings" or "The Queens." After the Revolution, some of the latter signs were changed to "The Washington," "The Franklin," or "The Lafayette" in honor of the great men of that day. When General Washington visited Boston he stayed at the " Bunch of Grapes" tavern; and at Trenton he lived at " The True American Inn." As the United States grew in wealth and population, hotels began to spring up in the cities; and after railroads came increa.sing the travel they grew larger and finer, until we now have some of the best hotels of the world. 250 IN A NEW YORK HOTEL There are many such in New York, and it will pay us to visit them. The one we select is known all over the country, and, in- deed, we might say throughout the world. It has twenty- five stories above the ground and five stories below it, and the area of its floor space is such that if it were all on one level it would cover a good sized field. Its rooms are more than fifteen hundred in number, and when it is full, which is often the case, it contains, counting both servants and guests, more than three thousand people, its kitchens and The roof garden where one can sit among the flowers and trees. dining rooms being large enough to feed them all. This hotel has sufficient machinery in its basement to run a big factory. Its parlors are as beautifully furnished as the pal- IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 251 ace of a king ; and on its roof, which is far above the tall- est church steeple, is a great garden where one can sit " He leads us into the office." among the flowers and trees and watch the fountain play- ing while he listens to the music of the band. The hotel has more than iifteen hundred servants, and of these about one hundred are boys who run errands, show the guests to their rooms, and carry messages of various kinds. Each boy receives twenty-five dollars a month for his work, and in addition has many tips or presents from the guests. But let us suppose we have landed at the station and have ridden in a motor cab to the front entrance of this great establishment. Mere we are met by the porter. He wears a gorgeous livery with brass buttons and has 252 IN A NEW YORK HOTEL a tall hat on his head. He takes care of our baggage and leads us into the office. This is a great room like a bank with a counter at the rear, behind which stand the clerks. The messenger boys conduct us to the counter, and a clerk gives us the visitor's book in which we write our names and the towns from which we come. He then assigns each a room, saying that he will put us all on the twelfth floor. Before going up we walk around to the post office of the hotel and ask for our mail, stopping at the tele- graph desk to send word home to our fathers and mothers that we have safely arrived in New York, We next go up in one of the elevators and ask to be let off at the twelfth floor. Now we have entered our rooms. Each has a comfortable bed, a table or so, and some easy chairs. It has a bureau and wardrobe, and also a closet, inside which is a box which opens out into the hall. The boy tells us we can put our shoes there at night, and that they will be blackened by 'che time we awake in the morning. Connected with each room is a bath, with a large porcelain tub, and tiled walls and floor. The room has also a telephone, so that we can talk to people in New York and, by being switched on to ihe long distance lines, even chat with our friends at home. The telephone also connects us with the office of the hotel, Now we have entered our rooms. IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 253 and if we want pens and paper, or ice water, or almost anything else, we can call up the office and ask that it be sent to our rooms. Every floor has its own employees, and it will not be long before our orders are filled. We shall now go out and take a stroll through the hotel. The elevator carries us up to "the roof, and we spend a while there in the garden. After that we go down from one floor to another, until at last we reach the one just over the office. This contains a great ballroom, an art gallery, and many beautiful parlors. It has the state banquet hall, a music room, and other gorgeous apartments. Descending to the main floor we stop to look into the dining room and restaurants, where hundreds of men women and children are eating their meals. They sit about little tables and are waited upon by men in black clothes. We are shown the bill of fare. It contains almost every eatable under the sun, and it seems to us the whole world has been working to supply food for these tables. There is fruit from everywhere ; melons from Canada, oranges from California, and bananas from the West Indies. There are apples from Missouri, peaches from Georgia, and grapes from New York. There are meats and game of all descriptions, and vegetables of the tropic and temperate zones. As we look the manager tells us that the hotel consumes sixty thousand dollars' worth of fish every year, and that its poultry alone costs twice as much. It uses about one hundred thousand dollars' worth of fruits and vegetables, twenty thousand dollars' worth of coffee, and eighteen thousand dollars' worth of flour. It annually spends eighty thousand dollars for butter and eggs, and a f|iKirter of a million dollars for meats. 254 IN A NEW YORK HOTEL He asks us if we would not like to go down into the lower stories and see the supplies, and also visit the kitchens and other departments. We gladly accept his invitation and, entering the elevator and dropping five stories, find ourselves about fifty feet under ground. If the hotel were taken away, a four-story house could be dropped into the excavation, and with its ground floor where we are now its In. a hotel kitchen. roof would not reach the sidewalk. Nevertheless it is as light as day. There are hundreds of electric lights blazing away. The floor is of white tiles, and the walls and ceilings are white. We are in the machinery department. Over there at one side are the furnaces which keep the rooms warm. There are a number of them, each connected with an enormous boiler. They consume a hundred tons of coal in a day, and more than thirty-five thousand tons every year. They supply, not only the heat, but also the power IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 255 for the machinery and that which generates the electricity. They not only light and heat the hotel, but they cool it as well, for they run an ice-making factory where water is frozen in great blocks half as large as a library table. In this department there are many mechanics. There is a locksmith who makes keys for the rooms and keeps the clocks of the hotel in order. There are carpenters and cabinet makers, and electricians and engineers. We have now again entered the elevator, and ascended two stories to look at the kitchens. They cover almost an acre, and this space is taken up by stoves, broilers, great coffee urns, and kettles as big around as a hogshead, steaming with soup. There is one kitchen range which is as long as a city lot and half as wide as a schoolroom. Upon it food of all kinds is cooking away. Here at the right is a bakery. That man in the white cap is the baker, and he can bake four thousand loaves of bread in a day. As we come up, he opens the oven. Its floor is as big as that of a parlor, and is covered with biscuits and rolls being cooked to a turn. A little farther on are the butchers, some of whom cut nothing but steaks and chops all day long, and others dress only poultry and game. In a hotel like this each man has his own kind of work. The cooks who roast meat pay no attention to vegetables, and those who make the ice cream do not bother with the pastry. The hotel often consumes three hundred gallons of ice cream in one day, and it keeps several men busy freezing and molding it into the. odd shapes in which it is served. The cooks are dressed in white with white caps. They are well paid and their chief has a big salary. 256 IN A NEW YORK HOTEL Leaving the kitchens we cross to the other side of the basement where the dishes are being washed. This is done by machinery. The plates, knives, forks, and spoons are put in wire baskets and dropped into a vat of boiling soap- suds, from which they come out clean and ready to dry. The drying is done by the heat which the plates get while in the water. This is so great that the moisture evaporates as soon as they are exposed to the air. We are now tired with our trip through the basement, and we go back to the dining room. The waiter hands us the bill of fare and we begin to select the dishes we want, but are amazed at the prices. This is an expensive hotel, and one order of almost any sort of meat costs a dollar. We are therefore careful as to what we select. The portions are large, however, and as each is enough for several of our party we divide the orders among us and thus make out a good meal. When we have finished, the waiter hands us a. bill on which is marked the price of each thing we have eaten, and we pay this before going out. Moving about through the hotel we are more and more surprised at its wonders. It has a safe for valuables, a bank at which one can have his checks cashed, barber shops for both men and women, and a photograph gallery. It has a news stand and a drug store, and places where they sell candy and flowers. In addition to the great hotels like this, there are thou- sands of smaller ones, including commercial hotels and those devoted to families. Every village has its home for the traveler, and there are hotels at the seashore, in the mountains, and at our winter resorts. Some of these are in use for only a few months of the year. FIRE 257 30. FIRE TO-DAY we are again on the wing. We have taken an airship and are sailing about over the earth, stopping now and then at the homes of some of our httle brothers and sisters on other parts of the globe. We want to learn how the world's houses are warmed and the many ways man has for cooking his food. To do this we shall first examine the heating arrangements of some far-away lands whose homes have less comforts and conveniences than ours. After that we shall look at the fires of colonial days, used by our ancestors when they were chopping their rude homes out of the woods, and then shall study our methods of heating to-day. But first let us ask what fire is, and how man learned to make it. These questions are hard ones to answer. The ancients believed fire to be one of the four elements of which, as they thought, all things were composed. These were earth, air, fire, and water. We now know that earth, -^ir, and water are each made up of other elements or things, and that fire is the visible heat or light which comes from certain bodies in the process of combustion or burning. The ancient Greeks believed that fire came down from Heaven. Certain tribes of the Pacific Islands have a tradition that it was brought up from the lower regions where the great god, Maui, learned the secret of making it by rubbing two sticks together. Among the natives of the Tonga Islands the god of the earthquake is also the god of fire ; and some of our Indians had a story that the first fire came to man from the buffaloes, which in gallop- CARP, HOUSES 17 A Filipino feast. (253) Filipinos cool^ing rice. FIRE 259 ing over the prairies set them ablaze by the sparks from their hoofs striking the rocks. The ancient Grecian tradi- tion is that Prometheus, one of the gods, stole fire from Heaven, brought it to earth in a hollow reed, and gave it to man. This made Jupiter, the chief of the gods, very- angry and he condemned Prometheus to be chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle ate at his liver, which grew as fast as it was consumed and thus made his torment perpetual. The Greeks greatly honored Prome- theus. They had a temple in Athens where he was wor- shiped, and in celebration of his present of fire an annual festival was held, one of the features of which was a torch race from his altar to the city. The Scandinavian god, Thor, held a mallet in one hand and a flint in the other and with them made fire ; while the ancient Peruvians believed that thunder and lightning came from one of their gods hurling stones with a sling. The Greeks called lightning flashes the thunderbolts of Jove, but the Peruvians thought they were the children of their god. But however fire first came to be known — whether it was from a volcano which overflowed and in blazing streams of molten lava ignited the forest, or whether from the lightning striking the dry grass or trees — man .soon learned its great value and was able to produce it himself. There are many savage tribes in Africa who start their fires by rapidly whirling one stick around in a hole inside another. In this the friction makes the wood hotter and hotter and by and by it bursts into a blaze. The Indians of this continent were making fire in much the same way when our forefathers came. They also used 26o FIRE pieces of flint, which they struck upon other flint and thus got sparks which they caught on dry punk. This is still the custom among some of the tribes of Canada, the flints being an article of merchandise sold by the fur traders of the Hudson Bay Company. Our pioneer forefathers em- ployed flints to kindle their Making fire in Africa. i , i- , ^^i j fires and to light the powder of their guns, and it is only of late years that man has had matches or percussion caps. As to the burning glass, that was known to the Greeks — as we learn from the story of how Archimedes set fire to the ships of the enemy at Syracuse by using a mirror. Moreover, the Chinese are said to have used such glasses ages ago. Some nations have made fire an object of worship. The Persians did this, and also the Parsees, who are descended from them. The Parsees, who now live in India, have temples at Bombay in which are fires that are said to have been burning for hundreds of years. The Egyptians kept fires in their temples, as d.id the Romans in their Temple of Vesta, a goddess who was represented by the holy flame. To-day fire is even more important to man than when he made it an object of worship. It not only lights and heats our houses, but, through the inventions connected with steam and electricity, moves the cars over the rail- roads and the steamships over the oceans. It forces the automobile to its speed of a mile or more a minute, and in flying machines enables us to go as swiftly as a bird «*^-'a);^ >:':ii' I lit^ •■nat»f" Konia:i uains ^re-.ioraUun;. yZbl) 262 FIRE through the air. It gives us all kinds of manufactures. It is the father of iron and steel, and, in some way or other, is the most necessary servant of civilized man as to all that he eats, drinks, and wears, as well as to his various comforts and doings all the day through. Chemists tell us that fire is the rapid union of oxygen with other substances. When the union is gradual, we usually call it oxidation. Iron and oxygen unite and form iron rust, while hydrogen and oxygen unite and form the commonest of all substances, water. In this book, however, we are chiefly concerned with fire as it relates to warming and lighting man's houses, and this alone is the object of our journey to-day. Our airship is ready to start. We get in and are soon high up in the clouds, flying at great speed towards the north. We shall visit the coldest lands first, warming our chilled blood at the fires of our Eskimo cousins. The winds aid the speed of our vessel. They shriek and whistle as they blow through its rigging, and the earth below seems to be mov- ing fast towards the south. Now we have crossed our northern boundary and are passing over British America. We are almost on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, when we drop down among a score of what at first seem small mounds of snow, but are really igloos or Eskimo homes. Each is a little domelike building made of blocks of ice so fitted together that it has the shape of half an egg- shell. Over the ice, snow has been spread, and the only entrance is by a hole in the ground. We leave the flying machine and crawl in, pulling our coats tight about our necks in order that the snow from over the doorway may not drop down our backs. FIRE 263 Now we are inside. The house is so low we can hardly stand upright. Only a moment ago Jack Frost seemed everywhere. He pinched our cheeks, bit our noses, and we had to rub our ears to keep them from freezing. In- side the igloo it is so warm that some of our Eskimo friends have almost no clothing. The heat comes from that lamp of fish oil which stands at one side of the room. See, the flame is melting the roof ; its heat has cut its way between the ice blocks and made little chimneys, as it were, which, with the draft from the doorway, give the house a certain amount of fresh air. Oil is used here for fuel, and in this small dwelling a very little is enough to keep out the cold. We tarry awhile with our Eskimo friends and then fly on to the westward and drop down in Korea. Here the houses are largely composed of mud and stones, thatched with straw. We enter one, and are asked to take a seat on the floor. We do so, crossing our legs in Korean style. It was cold without, but it is warm and pleasant within, and we look about for the stove. There is none to be seen. After a time we grow uncomfortably warm, and, placing our hands on the iloor, find it quite hot. It is covered with oiled paper stretched as tight as a drumhead, and it almost blisters our fingers. Upon our asking from whence the heat comes, the Koreans tell us that they have a net- work of flues under the floor, so made that when the fire is built in the kitchen the flames pass through them and heat the whole building. As we go out into the street we ob- serve the smoke pouring from a clay pipe which is fitted into the wall of the house at about the height of our waists from the fjround. More smoke is coming from similar 264 FIRE pipes in the other houses near by. There is so much that it has turned the air blue. The village is cooking its sup- per, and at the same time warming up for the night. Crossing the Yellow Sea we travel among our slant-eyed little friends of northern China. Here the houses are heated in much the same way as in Korea, save that " These stove ledges are the resting places of the family." the flues pass under the kang, a ledge about as high as a chair which fills one half of each room. These stove ledges are the sleeping and resting places of the family. They are heated chiefly by the fires used for cooking. In the larger houses there are similar arrangements which may be used for heating alone. With many of the Chinese, however, the cost of fuel is FIRE 265 SO great that they use only the surplus heat from the kitchen, relying upon clothing to keep themselves warm. Here in the north we see some who are dressed in furs, or in sheepskins with the wool turned inward. Farther south the people wear wadded cotton, putting on additional suits as the winter comes on. As the thermometer approaches zero they seem to fatten, and those who are naturally fleshy then grow so big, through their abundance of clothes, that it is almost impossible for them to pass through the doors of their homes. The little boys are so padded that they look more like balls than anything else, and should they fall down on the side of a hill, the chances are that snowball-Uke they would roll over and over, clear to the bottom. We find the weather milder in Japan than it was in northern China, and the houses less tightly built. The thin walls slide in and out, and the air blows through the cracks. The buildings are made of wood and paper which quickly take fire, and hence kangs and flues are not safe. Most of the houses are poorly warmed by little fires of charcoal built in brass-bound boxes called hibachis, partly filled with ashes or earth. As winter comes on the people add more and more clothing, warming their feet and hands over these coals. There are no stoves to speak of, and only the palaces and large public buildings have heating plants. As we stand upon the hills to take a bird's-eye view of a city we look in vain for the chimneys, so common to every American town. There are but few such in Japan, most of the cooking being done in square boxes of charcoal, at one end of which is a coj)per-lined fire hole. It is also done on little clay stoves. The water for 266 FIRE Japanese hibachi. bathing is heated by a charcoal fire built in a funnel- shaped stove in the back end of each bathtub. The stove has a pipe which passes up through the water, and makes it so hot that when we get into the tub we quickly jump out. Our skins are now as red as a lobster, fresh boiled. Every Japanese house has its bath- tub, and the larger ones have bathrooms. In all of the cities there are public bathhouses, where hundreds of men, women, and children take a hot plunge every day. Our next stop is at the Philippine Islands. Here the cities have some large houses with stoves such as we have at home ; but out in the country and in the villages, where the people live in houses of bamboo cane thatched with palm trees, the cooking is done in Httle clay stoves, which often rest upon a platform covered with earth. Sometimes such platforms are built under a shed or lean-to, adjoining the house. We are now in the tropics, and no heat is needed on account of the weather. How would you Uke to live in a land where Mother Earth does the cooking ; where, year in and year out, the boys do not need to bring in wood or kindle the fires ; and where there are no ashes to carry away ? This is the con- dition among certain tribes of Maoris whom we shall visit at their homes in northern New Zealand. We face our airship towards the southeast, across the Equator, and are soon soaring above the great island of New Guinea. We FIRE 267 then move on in the same direction over the Pacific Ocean and finally come to New Zealand. As we land we see steam coming out of the earth. There are great pools of boiling black mud here and there, and geysers are spurting showers of hot water and steam high into the air. We are in the hot springs region, not far south of Auckland, where in many places the steam is always pouring forth from the earth. The Maoris, who have built their log houses near by, cook their meals in the steam. They use wooden boxes open on top and having only a network of cords stretched over the bottom. They place their food on the net and cover it with a cloth. They now rest the box upon or in the steam hole, and the hot vapor cooks the food quite as well as that of our steam cookers at home. In this way the Maoris boil eggs and potatoes, and stew and boil meats; they even make puddings for their holiday feasts. Some of them are excellent cooks, and we delight in the meals we eat with them on the hillsides, taking the food hot from the box. In this same region are many warm springs, where one can have a delightful bath at any hour of the day without the trouble of heating the water. Almost directly north of New Zealand are the Samoan Islands, where the weather is so warm that no heat is needed except for preparing the food. There and in others of the islands about the natives have no stoves, and they sometimes do their cooking by building fires in holes in the earth lined with stones. This makes the stones so hot that any food placed upon them is rapidly cooked. .Such holes are also used as steam ovens. A whole pig may be roasted, or meats and vegetables i:)!aced there in 268 FIRE layers and covered with grass or green leaves. After that some earth is spread over the top and a little water poured in ; or the steam from the leaves and the vege- tables may suffice for the cooking. We taste some of the food prepared in this way. It is so delicious that we decide to make an oven ourselves the next time we go fishing or picnicking at home. Leaving the South Seas we journey on to other parts of Asia and Africa, finding strange fire-making methods among the wild peoples. In Africa much of the cooking is done out of doors. In India, as we have seen, the chief fuel is the manure of cattle mixed with earth. We now go to Europe, where fuel is more plentiful and the houses are warmed much like our own. We begin our travels in the great empire of Russia. This is a cold country, in parts of which it is winter for five or six months of the year. The houses are large, and those of the rich are heated with great stoves of porcelain built at one side or in a corner of each room. Every stove has many chambers inside it, and it is so easily heated that a comparatively small amount of fuel will keep warm a large room. On account of the severity of their winters, the Russians build thick walls for their houses, and fit them with double windows and doors. The poorer people live in log huts thatched with straw. Their chief fuel is wood, and as in China the fires used for cooking serve also for warming the house. The stove of the peasant home is usually connected with a great chim- ney which takes up one side of the living room. Out of this chimney wall a ledge is made in such a way that the fire runs under it, keeping it warm. This ledge FIRE 269 usually forms the common sleeping place of the family, where the father and mother, brothers and sisters, grown- ups and children all sleep at night, as it were, on the top of the stove. " The father and mother, brothers and sisters, grown-ups and children all sleep at night, as it were, on the top of the stove." One feature of every Russian village is the bathhouse, a large building or steam oven in which the people go for baths. They think it is desirable ti perspire a great deal, and sometimes whip themselves with twigs to make the sweat come. Crossing over to Germany, we travel through the various countries of North Europe, where the climate is much like our own. Here the people have s*"oves and grates, and the larger houses are often heated by steam or hot water. The German stoves are usuall\' f)f brick and porcelain made like those of the Russians. They have also stoves of iron, cast into shapes similar to those of our country. 270 FIRE As we go southward the heating arrangements are poorer, and in the lands along the Mediterranean we find ourselves suffering more from the cold than in Sweden and Norway, where the weather is bitter cold a great part of the winter. The reason is that the homes of southern Europe are by no means well heated. The summers are long, and even in winter it is compara- tively warm in the sun, although chilly inside and quite cold at night. We find, however, that the methods of Piling up peat for fuel in heating of nearly every locality vary with the fuel near by. Europe has a great deal of coal, and this is especially so in England, where the houses are warmed much Hke our own. Germany and Ireland have vast beds of peat, a fuel which might be called unripe coal. It is usually found in low, swampy land. It is dug out and laid upon the firm ground to dry. It burns with a dull glow, and gives out a great heat. Of the whole world, however, there is no country which has more or better fuel of all kinds than our own, and none which has so many inventions for warming its homes. As to these things we shall learn more in our travels to come. WARMING OUR HOMES 2/1 31. WARMING OUR HOMES — FIREPLACES, STOVES, HOT WATER, AND STEAM THE delightful fires of colonial days are well described by Whittier in his beautiful poem " Snow-bound," which I advise every one of our party to read. It pictures the home life of New England in the depths of mid-winter, when the whole family gathered around the great open fireplace and cracked nuts and ate the apples they roasted over the coals. " Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost line back with tropic heat ; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed." This is followed by a jiicture of the scenes about the fire: — " The house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head ; The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger's seemed to fall ; And, for the winter fireside meet. Between the andirons' straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow. The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October's wood. What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north wind raved? Blow high, blow low, not all its snow Could quench our hearth fire's ruddy glow." 2/2 WARMING OUR HOMES In another place in the same poem, Whittier tells how the fire was laid : — - " We piled, with care, our nightly stack Of wood against the chimney back — The oaken log, green, huge, and thick, And on its top the stout back stick ; The knotty fore stick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush ; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam. Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flowerlike, into rosy bloom." Such fireplaces were common in our colonial times. Then every family had more wood than it could use, and fuel cost comparatively nothing. To-day the great fire- place is to be found only in our forest regions, or on the farms where wood is still plentiful. In most localities, however, the colonial firejDlace, so large that whole logs were rolled into it, has disappeared and in its stead we have our boxlike stoves for wood, the base burners which eat anthracite coal, the petty grate, the hot air furnace, and the radiator or coil of A Colonial fireplace. . r^^^ ^ • ^ pipes filled with steam or hot water from a boiler in the cellar below. These and other inventions have given us much better and WARMING OUR HOMES 273 cheaper arrangements for warming our homes; but at the same time we long for the delights of the fireplaces of the past, and wish we could be back at the hearths of our fore- fathers roasting potatoes in the ashes or popping corn over the coals. The change from the fireplace to the stove, the furnace, and the hot water plant has come, as far as the practical use of these things is concerned, within the past century. Furnace room. Stoves of cast iron were first made at about the time Columbus discovered America, but they were not in general use until centuries later. In 1744 Benjam.in Franklin made an iron lining for a fireplace which threw the heat out into the room, and a little later he invented a box stove of cast iron for the burning of wood. Shortly after the beginning of the last century, stoves, with drums in the rooms overhead, were emi)loyed by the Pennsylvania Ger- CAKP. HOL'SES — 1 8 274 WARMING OUR HOMES mans, and at an early time cast-iron boxes were built along one side of a fireplace so that the other end of the box projected into a room in the rear, thus heating that room. Bedroom with radiator. In those times churches were not heated, and each per- son had a little box stove which he took with him to keep his feet warm. These foot stoves were sheet-iron pans about six inches square in which hve coals were placed. The pans were inclosed in casings of metal with holes in the top and bottom; and they had handles by 276 WARMING OUR HOMES which they were carried. Stoves of sheet iron were made in Philadelphia along about 1800; and our first base burners were sold about thirty years later. Our pioneer mothers cooked most of their food in pots and kettles hung by hooks or cranes over the coals of the fireplace. They baked their potatoes in the hot ashes, and sometimes had a brick oven built alongside the fireplace with an iron door leading into it. On baking day a wood fire was started inside the oven, and when it was thor- oughly hot the coals were removed and bread placed on the brick floor. The first cooking stove probably came from making an oven in a box stove, after which the modern stove and range with the holes upon top and ovens at the sides or overhead were invented. As to the furnaces which give us hot air, steam, and hot water, they are now more and more used. The hot air furnace consists of a compartment containing a fire and of iron walls so built about it and so closed in that the air which enters from outdoors through a flue passes between the fire compartment and the walls. It is thus warmed, . and is then conducted to the various rooms of the buildings with which the furnace is connected by means of pipes or flues. The smoke is taken off through a pipe which con- nects with the fire only and is joined to the chimney. The heating pipes pass up inside the walls of the house, and the hot air is admitted to the various rooms through open- ings called registers. It is strange that hot water should have been used for heating long before inventions were made for using hot air. Seneca tells us that the baths at Rome were heated from a coil of brass water pipes around which fires were WARMING OUR HO:SIES 2/7 built ; and we know that a Frenchman employed such heating for hatching chickens, and that an Englishman heated his conservatories in a similar way generations ago. The first steam-heating plant used in America was brought over from England in 1842 by Joseph Nason, and it was several years later that Nason used small wrought-iron pipes about three quarters of an inch thick for warming buildings with steam. The first two steam-heating plants used in our country were in the Eastern Hotel of Boston, and in a woolen mill at Burlington, Vermont. Since then many improvements have been made in house warming, and it is now possible to heat any kind of a building by steam or hot water. In such plants the fuel is consumed in a furnace in the basement, connected with which is a boiler for heating the water or making the steam. From the boiler iron pipes carrying the hot water or steam are run through the building. They are con- nected with radiators in each room, the amount of heat being determined by the size and number of the radiators. The heat may be regulated by the amount of fire under the boiler, and also by the valve which lets the water or steam into each radiator. In some cases several houses may be heated from one central plant, the steam or hot water being conveyed from the boilers in the central station to the various buildings through underground pipes. Among other methods of heating and cooking are those connected with gas and electricity. In most places these are too costly to be used for warming the house, although in and near the natural gas fiekls many villages and some 2/8 LIGHTING THE HOUSE quite large towns are heated by pipes from the gas wells. The pipes are run through the houses, being connected with the stoves, grates, or fireplaces. When heat is needed it is only necessary to put a lighted taper near the open- ings of the pipes, and to turn the valve which admits the gas. After this it will burn until it is turned off, and at the end there are no ashes to be taken away. In such fires the grates are often filled with slag, fire brick, or other materials which, being made hot by the flames, look like real coals. The imitation logs of clay or iron used in the fireplace seem to be blazing wood ; while sometimes the gas plays over asbestos, making us think of sheets of gold leaf burning away. In many cities artificial gas from the public gas works is so used, and in most of the apartment houses the cooking is done on gas stoves. 3j«io 32. LIGHTING THE HOUSE BEFORE we examine the wonders of petroleum, gas, and electricity, let us take a look into the past and see how our forefathers lighted their houses. You may have read how Abraham Lincoln, when he was a boy of ten or twelve, read "yEsop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," and " Pilgrim's Progress " by the light of the pine knots in the fireplace of his log cabin home. The pine knot was one of the favorite lights of our colonial days. It was some- times called the pine torch. It was found almost every- where in the forest. It was burned on a flat stone placed in a corner of the fireplace in order that the dense smoke from it might go up the chimney. LIGHTING THE HOUSE 279 In those times candles were almost universally used. They were made of beef tallow, and also of a wax from the berries of the bayberry bush. Nearly every family made its own candles, and all saved for this purpose the tallow from the beef which they ate. Making the candles for the winter was a special occasion which consumed one Candle dipping. or two days every autumn. At that time the tallow was melted in a great kettle over a fire outside the house. Then two poles were supported on the backs of chairs and upon them the candle rods, small sticks about eighteen inches long to which wicks were attached, were ])laced. In making the candles the rod with its row of wicks was dipped into the kettle. The tallow stuck to the wicks. It 28o LIGHTING THE HOUSE soon hardened, and by dipping again and again each of the wicks was surrounded by enough tallow to become a candle of the right size. This work was slow, about two hundred candles being all that one person could possibly make in a day. In other places the candles were made by running the tallow into molds consisting of groups of tin or pewter pipes through which the wicks ran. There were candle makers who went from house to house carrying such molds, and making the candles for the family at so much per dozen or pound. Candle molds. Another light much used in colonial times came from the oil which was brought by the whalers of New England from the waters about Greenland and other cold seas. The whales they caught were frequently from sixty to one hundred feet long and some weighed as much as two hundred oxen. The oil came from the blubber or fat of the whale, of which there was a yellowish white mass under the skin ranging in thickness from eight to twenty inches. After harpooning the whale and killing it, the men cut off this blubber in large pieces and packed it away in the holds of the vessels and thus brought it home. The blubber was melted and skimmed, and the oil therefrom was burned in rude lamps of pewter and glass. If we could take a rapid trip around the world, we might find many people still using lights like those our LIGHTING THE HOUSE 28 1 forefathers had. In the wilds of Africa are tribes which rely upon burning wood or palm nuts for their Hght, and among the Eskimos fish oil is commonly used. There is said to be one fish in Alaska which contains so much oil that, when caught and killed, one may sink a wick into its back, and when lighted the fish will burn like a candle. In China there is a certain tree called the candle tree, the wax from the leaves of which can be burned, and in Brazil grows a palm tree known as the carnauba, whose leaves furnish a wax which is made into candles and used to the extent of several milHon pounds every year. In some countries coconut oil is used for lighting, and in others olive oil is employed the same way. Candles still form the chief light of many lands. They are used largely in Europe and Asia, and the United States has great establishments which are kept busy manufactur- ing them for our home market. There is a candle factory at Cincinnati which makes one hundred thousand a day ; so many that if they were all molded into one candle of the usual thickness, it would be thirteen miles long. It seems strange that man should have kept on for centuries using such lights as we have described, while all the time Nature was telling him that she had stored under- ground vast quantities of oil which would burn better and furnish more light than anything he had yet been able to make. Five hundred years before Christ, Herodotus wrote of oil wells on the Island of Zante; and during the Middle Ages, Marco Polo, a celebrated traveler, told how he saw oil from near the Casjjian Sea carried on camels through Asia. At about the same time petroleum taken from the surface of a lake in Bohemia was being sold as a medi- 282 LIGHTING THE HOUSE cine ; and a legend is still current in the Russian oil terri- tory that Alexander the Great while traveling through there killed a boy by drenching him with burning water. In our own country, the oil coming out on the surface of the earth had been set on fire long before the first oil well was dug ; and natural gas was lighted many years before any one thought of bringing it into our homes. Scene in the Texas oil regions. To-day the greater part of the artificial light used by man comes from petroleum. The amount taken from the ground every year is several hundred million barrels, or enough, if it were. equally divided, to give more than thirty gallons to every family on earth. The places from which coal oil comes are widely scattered, and new fields are being discovered from year to year. Most of the product is now from Russia and the United States, more than half of all the oil raised coming from our own continent. The Russian oil fields are at the eastern end of the LIGHTING THE HOUSE 283 Caucasus Mountains, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and Europe has other fields in Austria and Roumania. There are extensive petroleum beds in Burma, and in the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. There are also oil fields in northwestern Mexico not far from the boundary of the United States, and in Canada and Alaska. There are some in Africa, Australasia, South America, and in China and Japan. Our oil fields lie chiefly along the western slope of the Appalachian range in New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, in the basin of the Ohio River in Ohio and Indiana, in Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, and California. In all of these places a great deal of oil is produced, and the prod- uct from them not only lights the most of the United States, but it drives the darkness from the homes of many people of every country of the world. But what is the origin of petroleum, and how is it got out of the earth ? The first question is a difificult one, and scientists, who have studied as to how the world is made, answer it in different ways. Some say that it is altogether a mineral, and that it comes from the action of steam and carbon on certain metals which form a large part of the earth. Others suppose that it has come from the action of water on metals, and others that it has resulted through the de- cay of the countless plants and animals which swarmed the seas before the age at which coal was formed. They suppose that these plants and animals were in some way shut in under layers of rock, so dense that the air could not get to them, and that they decayed and formed this gas and oil. 284 LIGHTING THE HOUSE Now there are many kinds of rock, such as the sandstones, Umestones, and others, the grains of which are not very close to- gether, and other rock, such as slate, whose grains or particles are so compact and tight that neither oil nor gas can pass through them. The scientists think that the oil and gas were soaked up by these great beds of porous rock just as water is soaked up by a sponge, and that they are held there by the tight rock above, below, and around them. They are inclosed, as it were, in a prison, until man by boring through the tight rock lets them loose. In such prisons there is usually a brine at the bottom, with oil above, and per- haps gas upon top. When the roof of the prison is broken the gas and oil rush with great force to the surface, or, where the pressure is not so great, the oil is drawn up by pumps. The pressure of these earth- prisons varies in different places. Sometimes there is so much oil in the rock, and it is so squeezed within its prison walls, that when the hole is ■ Petroleum rushes forth, spout- ing high into the air." LIGHTING THE HOUSE 285 made the petroleum rushes forth, spouting high into the air and flowing for days and weeks before it stops. In the Russian oil fields some wells have been dug which spouted from sixty to one hundred thousand bar- rels a day, and in Texas a single well poured out four hun- dred thousand barrels of oil, covering the ground about and forming creeks of oil several miles long, before its force could be checked and the oil saved. The " Star and Crescent," another Texas well, threw a stream of oil six inches thick as high as a twelve story house, and this continued for several days before a cap could be put over the pipe, and arrangements made for saving the oil. One Russian well wasted a hundred thousand tons of oil before it could be capped, and another sent up a column of petro- leum two hundred feet high, which ran off and formed a little oil lake near by. Another spouted forth sand and oil to a height of four hundred feet; and upon the pipe of a fourth a plate of cast iron weighing twenty-two tons was laid, but the stream of petroleum threw it aside as though it were paper. In most of the oil beds the pressure is slight in compari- son with that which produces these great spoutcrs or gush- ers, as they are called. Some wells may not flow at all, and some yield only a few barrels per day, requiring pumps to raise the oil to the surface. Others flow steadily for weeks and months and then gradually diminish, after which the pumps arc put in. Some of the oil territories have continued to produce oil a long time, and in the oldest of them excellent new wells are occasionally found. In others the great flow is soon exhausted, and it becomes less every year. 286 OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY 33. OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY THE first mention made of petroleum on our continent was by a French missionary in 1635, only fifteen years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. He had visited the region under the surface of which the great oil deposits of western Pennsylvania lie, and he wrote of springs and streams coated with oil. Later the early settlers of Penn- sylvania collected the oil for medicine. This was also done by the Seneca Indians, who laid blankets upon the ponds and streams and thus soaked up the petroleum, which they wrung out and sold. After a long time it occurred to some that if there was so much oil on the sur- face more might be found farther down, and in 1854 the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company sunk a well which yielded from four hundred to one thousand barrels of oil a day. For some reason, however, this was abandoned ; and it was not until five years later that the well was sunk which formed the beginning of our oil industry. This was after it was discovered that the oil could be refined and used for lighting. Then E. L. Drake dug a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and at seventy feet struck oil. The yield was not large. The well produced only a few barrels a day, but it showed the people that the oil could be raised and other wells were rapidly sunk. From then on the borings grew deeper and the Empire well was put down. It yielded twenty-five hundred barrels a day, and a month later the Phillips well was producing three thousand barrels. By this time people were almost crazy over the fortunes to be made from petroleum. Hun- dreds of wells were sunk, and new oil fields discovered. OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY 287 The miners bored their wells deeper and deeper, and some of the richest deposits were found at two or three thousand and more feet below the ground. So much oil was pro- duced that it was difificult to take care of it. Great iron tanks, each holding from twenty to forty thousand barrels, were erected in the oil territory, and pipes were laid from them to all parts of the fields to bring in the oil. Oil refinery. As time went on more and more tanks were built, and tank cars were constructed for carrying the oil. Then the pipes were laid to Cleveland and other cities, where works were erected for refining petroleum, and in time extended, over the Appalachian Mountains, to the seacoast, so that the oil from the wells could be pumped there. We have now tens of thousands of miles of iron-pipe connecting our chief oil territories with the seaboard, the markets, and the works where the oil is refined. The pipe lines of Pennsylvania OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY alone if they were placed end to end would reach around the world ; and there are other extensive piping systems in West Virginia, Ohio, California, Texas, and wherever oil is mined in large quantities. These pipes are of wrought iron. They are from four to eight inches in diameter and are usually laid two or three feet underground. There are pumping stations and storage tanks at every thirty miles along their course ; or such stations may be placed other- wheres on the hills or where it is necessary to raise the oil, as it travels over the country. Storage tank for oil. The transportation of American oil to the homes of the other continents is also a great industry. It is now taken over the oceans in tank steamers, one of which, such as the Andromeda, will carry more than six hundred and eighty thousand gallons at a load. The oil is pumped into the hold of the steamer as it lies at our wharves, and rem.ains there until it is pumped out again into the great storage OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY 289 tanks at some seaport of Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, or Australia. There is a great difference in crude petroleum as it comes from the earth. Some has been found which could be used for lighting without refining, but this is uncommon. Most of it is thick and dark colored, and it all contains materials which must be separated from that part of it which we use in our lamps. The crude oil differs also as to the field whence it comes. That of Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia is light amber in color, and is easily refined, while that of the Ohio and Indiana fields is darker and heavier and it contains considerable sulphur. The Kansas and Texas oils are still darker and heavier; and they, like the California oils, are being largely used as fuel on the railroad locomotives and for factories. The latter oils are less easily refined ; they have a disagreeable odor, and, barrel for barrel, are not so valuable as some other oils. But now let us see how the crude oil is treated to prepare it for lighting our homes. As it flows from the wells it is thick and dirty, and mixed with sand and water. It may be of a light yellow color or dark green, brown, or black. Its smell is offensive, and, if burnt, the odor might drive us out of our houses. All this must be changed before it is ready for use. In addition to the oil for lighting, about two hundred other products are made from crude petro- leum, so that it must contain many substances of various kinds. The crude oil first goes to the storage tanks, where the sand and water in it gradually sink to the bottom. It is then pumped through pipes to the tanks of the refinery, CAKF, HOUSES — 19 290 OUR GREAT OIL INDUSTRY which has many iron stills, furnaces, and other machinery. The oil is put into the stills and cooked, as it were, just the right amount of heat being supplied. As it grows warmer and warmer, the lighter particles rise in a vapor and pass out into coils of pipe, kept cold by running them through troughs in which cold water flows, or by their being set in cold water tanks. As the vapor strikes the cold surface of the pipes, it condenses and flows out at the other end of the coil in a stream of pure oil. This stream is very light and thin at the start, but it grows thicker and heavier as more heat is applied to the still. The first oil that comes out is petroleum ether, and the next, a little heavier, come gasoline, naphtha, and benzine. After these, with more heat, comes the kerosene we use in our lamps, leaving in the still a heavy, dark fluid from which lubricating oils, paraffin, and many other things are made. The kerosene is sometimes washed with acid and soda, and is sprayed through the air and treated in other ways to further purify it, in order that there may be no explosive gas left in it. It is important that it should not ignite too easily, and that its flashing and burning points should be high. By the flashing point is meant the lowest temperature at which the oil will give off a vapor which will flash or ex- plode when a flame is brought near its surface. If this is not right, the lamp or can in which the oil is may burst, like a cannon, or break out in flames. If the burning point is too low, it may ignite before we expect it to do so. For this reason there are in some parts of our country laws which require all kerosene to be tested as to the degree of heat at which it will flash or burn ; if that degree is too low, it must not be sold. HOW GAS IS MADE 2QI 34. HOW GAS IS MADE THE path along which we shall travel this morning is lighted by rays from water and stone. It seems strange to draw light from such things, but the world has many cities and towns which are lighted by gas made from coal, which is one form of stone, and from water, which is composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen, when separated from the oxygen and ig- nited, burns with a hot, colorless flame. Of these two gases, that from coal was first used. It is said to have been discovered about two hundred years ago by John Clayton, a bishop of Cork, in Ireland, who made it by distilling soft coal and catching the gas in a bladder. He had no idea of using it for house Hghting, but looked upon it merely as a curiosity for entertaining his friends. He would take the bladder of gas and place it near the flame of a candle. He would then prick a hole with a needle or pin, and the gas, coming out, would take fire and continue to burn until all was consumed. The people were much surprised at this sight, because they could sec no difference between the bladder used by the bishop and one filled with air. It is said that the great Dr. Johnson, the man who wrote "Rasselas," once prophesied that London would be lighted by gas. He had seen a man climb a ladder to light one of the oil lamps then used for the streets. The lamp had just gone out, and Dr. Johnson noticed that the wick caught in a moment from the vapor or gas still rising from it. "Ah!" said he, "the day may yet come when London will be lighted by smoke." 292 HOW GAS IS MADE That remark of the learned doctor was uttered in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was not long thereafter that a company was established for putting gas lamps upon the streets of London, and Paris was so lighted in 1820. In our own country Baltimore began to light its streets with gas in 1821, and Boston the year after that. The first man who is known to have used coal gas for house lighting was a Scotchman named Murdock. He introduced such gas into his own home in 1792, and soon' afterwards into some cotton mills at Manchester, England. But where did man get the idea that gas could be made out of coal .'' It may have come from watching a fire of soft coal where the fuel sometimes melts to pitch, giving forth a gas which bursts into flame. We may see that in almost any fire of bituminous coal as it burns in our grates. We can also test for ourselves the fact that there is gas in the coal. All we have to do is to fill the bowl of a clay pipe with coal dust and cover the top tight with clay. We can then put the bowl in the fire, leaving the stem sticking out. Within a short time the heat will drive the gas out of the coal and it will come through the stem in a thin stream which a match will turn into flame. It is after this principle that all coal gas is made. But we can see the chief processes of manufacturing this light from coal and water by visiting the. gas works of any large city. Suppose we take those of Washington, the capital of our nation. They supply much of the light for more than seventy thousand houses, and some for the White House, the Treasury, and the Capitol Building, although the latter places have electric lights as well. The Washington Gas Works are situated near the banks HOW GAS IS MADE 293 of the Potomac River, not more than a mile west of the Executive Mansion, where our President lives. They con- sist of large red brick structures filled with great furnaces, retorts, massive iron boxes, and other machinery for mak- ing the gas and also for purifying it so that it will furnish a clear and bright light; for according to law it must be Inside the gas works. twenty times as bright as a candle. Outside the buildings rise the mighty round tanks or towers for storing the gas until needed. They remind us of the petroleum tanks we saw in the oil fields, save that they are fitted into a frame- work so that they move up and down in great pits of water. Each tower has a diameter equal to that of the largest circus tent, and at the time of our visit some are as high as a ten-story house. Others are shorter, and the men tell us they rise or descend as the gas goes in or out. 294 HOW GAS IS MADE We smell the gas long before we get to the works. The air has an offensive odor, and we wonder whether it will be dangerous for us to go in. We first visit that part of the establishment where the coal gas is made. At one side of it is the coal shed, an enormous building which will hold fifty thousand tons at one time. It is half full of soft or bituminous coal, for that is the kind used for coal gas. The men are wheeling it in iron cars across the way to the building containing the furnaces and retorts, where it will be cooked until all the gas has gone out. We follow them and are led into a large room almost filled with what looks like a series of furnaces, each entered by a round iron door above which is an iron pipe as thick as a telegraph pole running up to its top. These are the retorts. Each consists of a huge, box-shaped vessel lined with fire clay in which the soft coal is cooked, the gas pass- ing off through the pipe. There at one end we can see the men putting coal in. They load the black lumps into nar- row iron troughs about eight feet in length and shove them in through the round, cast-iron doors. As they do so the flames stream forth, and, looking in through the doors, we can see the coal blazing away. In addition to its own heat each retort has that of a coke furnace beneath it, and the temperature is now about two thousand degrees Fah- renheit, or almost ten times that at which water boils. Now, the men have shut the doors and screwed them so tight that not a bit of gas can come out. The heat is melting the coal, and the gas is going up the pipe to the top of the retorts and from there into other pipes which carry it off to be purified. Now let us take a lump of coal from those they are HOW GAS IS MADE 295 throwing into the furnace and examine it. It seems typical of darkness rather than hght. It is black, heavy, and solid, and it seems almost greasy. It is not at all like this piece of coke which one of the men brings to show us how it will look after the cooking. The coke is light and spongy, and its color is the gray of pig iron. The coal as it goes into the furnace contains, not only the coke and gas, but also tar, ammonia, sulphur, and other impurities. All of these materials, excepting the coke, are mixed with the gas when it flows up the pipes from the retort, and they must all be taken out of it before it can be used. This is done by forcing the gas through certain substances. It first goes through water, where the greater part of the tar and oily parts condense and some of the ammonia is washed out and afterward saved. It is then whirled round and round by fans which, as they revolve, dip into water and thus scrub the gas much as clothes are cleaned in a washing machine. It is by such means that most of the impurities are removed. There are some impurities, however, which require fur- ther treatment. One of these is sulphur, which gives the gas a bad smell not unlike that of bad eggs. In some works this is taken out by running the gas through beds of pow- dered lime. Here at Washington it is done by passing it slowly through great iron boxes in the bottom of which are iron borings or filings, mixed with shavings of white pine. The shavings are used to keep the bits of iron apart, and to allow the gas to come into contact with them. Other- wise they would all sink together into a solid bed at the bottom of the box. As the gas goes through this mixture, the sulphur in it sticks to the iron, and after a time it has 296 HOW GAS IS MADE all gone out of the gas. Other things are taken out in various ways, and at the end the gas is comparatively pure. It is now ready to be taken off into the great towerlike tanks, which, as we have seen, store the gas until it is used. As we' walk through the works we ask the men how they measure the gas, and they show us the big meters, each of which on a dial records the hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of gas which pass through. They tell us that the cubic foot is the unit of measurement, and that gas is of value according to the lighting power it possesses. The standard is the light of a candle, of a certain weight, burn- ing at a fixed rate per hour. Ordinary coal gas has seldom more than sixteen candle power. This is not as much as the laws of the District of Columbia require, and the coal gas is therefore enriched with petroleum vapor, which in- creases lighting power. The men say that one ton of soft coal should furnish about ten thousand feet of sixteen candle power gas, and that in addition it contains fourteen hundred pounds of coke, one hundred and twenty pounds of gas tar, and about twenty gallons of impure liquid ammonia. We col- lect specimens of the coal, coke, and tar, and of the other impurities for our museums, as we go through the works. Leaving the department where this coal gas is made, we move on to the building v/here they are so treating water that it will burn and give forth a bright light. Is it not strange that we can make water burn .'' We have always considered it the opposite of fire and have employed it in extinguishing flames of all kinds. But there is no end to the wonders of chemistry. By a process which in princi- ple is somewhat like smelting, some of the oxygen of watei HOW GAS IS MADE 297 can be removed, leaving a gas that will burn. It will not, however, give a good light without the addition of carbon, and this is suppUed by adding petroleum vapor. In mak- ing water gas, steam is passed over coal raised to a white heat. Some of the oxygen of the steam unites with the coal and a mixture of partly burned carbon and hydrogen, One of these tanks will hold one million cubic feet of gas. called water gas, is formed. At the same time a small stream of oil is let in. This combines with the water gas, forming the rich illuminating gas used in most of our cities. This gas is also purified, being washed and scrubbed just like the gas we saw made from soft coal. It requires about fifty pounds of coal and four or five gallons of oil to make one thousand cubic feet of such gas. In Washington city the water gas from anthracite, naphtha, and water is mixed with that from bituminous 298 HOW GAS IS MADE coal before it is sent through the pipes to the homes of the people. Some other cities use water gas only, and in a few coal gas alone is consumed. All such gas is carried from the works through pipes to the gas towers or storage tanks, and is there kept and let out into the pipes of the city as the demands of the people require. One object of these storage tanks is to force the gas into the homes of the consumers. Each tower is constructed in sections which fit together much like the rings of a tele- scope, and it is crowned with a gigantic inverted cup. The sections are so arranged that the gas cannot escape, and so that the walls and top will rise as the gas flows in. There is water in the bottom of the tank. The gas enters through a pipe at one side and passes out through a pipe at the other, being controlled by a governor which allows it to go just so fast and no faster. One of the tanks' of the Wash- ington plant will hold a million cubic feet of gas, and there is one in London that will hold twelve times that amount. The gas is carried through the city in large iron pipes or mains laid under the streets, and it is taken from them into the houses through smaller pipes which connect by others, still smaller, in their walls, with branch pipes and brackets extending out into the rooms. In addition to gas made in these ways, we have natural gas from the same source as petroleum ; oil gas from petro- leum, tar, and shale oil ; air gas, produced by causing air to pass through the lightest of the petroleum vapors; and acetylene gas. None of these gases, however, is used to anything hke the extent of coal gas or water gas, although acetylene is often employed for houses which stand alone in the country, and for villages and small towns. LIGHTING- BY ELECTRICITY 299 Acetylene gas is made by adding water to calcium car- bide, a material formed by heating coke powder and lime in an electric furnace. This is of such a nature that when water drops on it a gas arises which when ignited, gives a pure, clear, and very bright light. 35. LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY IN one of the fairy stories of the ancient Greeks the light of day comes from a strong and beautiful youth named Helios, who, in a chariot of fire drawn by four flaming horses, rises out of the east every morning and drives over the arch of the heavens to the west, where he is dost in the twilight of evening. It was thus they thought that the gods harnessed the sun and made him give daylight to man. It remained for man himself to harness the light- ning, and force it to serve him at night or at any other hour he commanded. We all know that lightning comes from electricity, and that its flashes are of the same char- acter as the brilliant blaze of the great arc light or the golden glow of the incandescent lamp. It is in this re- spect only that we may speak of man harnessing the light- ning. It would be better to say that he has harnessed electricity ; for the flashes which illuminate the sky are merely exhibitions of that mighty force. It is hard to explain just what electricity is. It is only recently that man has known much about it; and it was not until within a generation or so ago that any one realized that it could be made to give light for our houses and streets. Even now there is a difference of opinion as to (300) Night scene in New York, showing electric lights. LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY 3OI just how it works, and we shall probably discover a great deal more concerning it as time goes on. It is safe to say that it is one of the great forces of nature ; one of the forms of energy which is a general term used for the vari- ous forces that make the wheels of the world go round. It is energy that moves all kinds of matter. Energy causes the sun to shine, the plants to grow, the fires to burn, and the winds to sweep to and fro. Energy makes heat and light. By it water boils and, in steam, it runs our railroads and factories. From energy in the form of electricity we have much the same results. Electric energy moves machinery of a thousand kinds. It turns the wheels of the electric car and automobile. It carries the whisper of the telephone, and through its brilliant lamps we are able to turn night into day. It is a kind of energy which seems more easily carried than any other, and there are certain materials through which it can be sent at lightning speed. Among these are the copper wire and other mediums, called conductors, which we use for telegraphs, telephones, street cars, and the many things operated by the electric current. On the other hand, it is very difficult to force it through certain materials such as glass and rubber, which for this reason are called non-conductors. And so man, by using the right sort of matter in connection with it, can imprison this energy, and carry it where and how he will. Moreover, it has been found that electric energy works in such a way that it will produce an intense heat if it is conducted through just the right sort of material in cer- tain fixed ways. It will create fire ; or if the material is right and inclosed in a glass globe in which there is no air, 302 LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY it will come to a white heat and give out a brilliant light. This is the electric light of the incandescent lamp made by the medium within the globe turned white hot by the elec- tricity going through it. The electricity is carried to the globe by copper wire, and the ends of the threadlike matter or filament within Where electric machinery is made. the globe are fastened to the copper by fine wires of plati- num, another metal that will carry electricity and at the same time withstand great heat. The platinum wires pass through the glass. The fiery thread or medium within the globe which looks gray or black when the electricity is not passing through it, is often made of vegetable fiber, and frequently of bamboo, which has been carbonized or turned LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY 303 to charcoal by a special process. If it were out in the air, the electricity would burn it up at once, but confined in a vacuum or where there is little or no air it grows white hot, and is consumed so slowly that in a lamp of sixteen candle power, with the ordinary current, it should give out light for one thousand hours. In the arc lamps, or glass globes of the size of a foot- ball or larger, which are often used for public halls and street lighting, the electricity passes through two sticks of black carbon as big around as one's finger. These are fit- ted into the top and bottom of the globe in such a way that their ends almost meet in the center, and are so controlled that they are kept just the right distance apart. The elec- tricity flows through the carbons, jumping across the space between them and, as it does so, tearing carbon dust from the ends of the sticks, which the intense heat consumes. In such lighting the points of the carbons must first be brought together for a moment, when the current heats them white hot. After that they are moved the right dis- tance apart and the electricity flows through the hot air across from one to the other. This light is not in a vac- uum, the globe acting merely as a protector for the carbons. But where does this force come from and how can it be harnessed so that it will do what we want .'* It was a long time before man was aware that any such thing existed, and it has been only step by step that we have learned what we now know. Long, long before Christ, a Greek, one Thalcs of Miletus, wrote that amber when rubbed would attract or draw to itself other bits of matter or light bodies placed near it. Several centuries later it was shown that other things would do the same, and as time went on 304 LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY man began to suppose there was in nature some such thing as electricity. Many great scientists discussed it and among them was Sir Isaac Newton, the man who, when he saw an apple fall from the tree, reasoned out the law of gravitation. Benjamin Frank Un thought that lightning was produced by electricity, and he tested it by his silk kite through which he received a shock from the clouds. / A little later men found that electricity could be easily carried by metals of various kinds, and an Italian named Galvani discovered the principle of the galvanic battery. Galvani had laid a machine containing electricity down be- beside some frog legs which his wife had just skinned and was about to cook for the family dinner, when he observed that the frog legs jerked this way and that. At first he thought there was electricity in the frogs ; but he afterwards discovered that the muscles and nerves were sensi- tive to the electric current of the machine and were thus affected by it. To learn more he hooked a pair of frog legs to a kite string and flying his kite with these at the end near an iron raihng discovered that they began to jerk whenever they touched the railing, electricity apparently running down the string from the air although no lightning was flashing. LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY 305 As a result of these and many other experiments men finally discovered that a continuous supply of electricity could be generated. It was found that it might be pro- The 5000 horse power generators that convert the force of the cataract into the electric currents at Niagara Falls. duced by chemical action, and also by means of the dynamo, which consists of two rapidly revolving blocks of magnetic iron about which wire has been coiled. The machinery for generating electricity is complicated, but CAKK HOUSES — 20 3o6 LIGHTING BY ELECTRICITY we can see something of it by going to an)i large electric works such as those that run the street cars and light plants of our cities. It is enough here to say that by means of steam or gas engines, con- nected with such mag- nets, we are able to pro- duce electricity, and that we can do this more easily and cheaply by such water power as is found in many parts of the world. The Ni- agara River at Niagara I'^alls, by means of a great tunnel through which the water drops upon turbine wheels, is able to generate a vast* deal of such energy. The electricity is car- ried to Buffalo and other cities, and it lights their houses and streets. It also moves the street cars and forms the motive power for machinery of a hun- dred kinds. Metropolitan Building at night. LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE 307 Many of the cities and towns c5f the United States are now lighted by the waterfalls near them. Among the most remarkable of these is Spokane, Washington, where the Spokane River dashes down over the rocks with great force as it flows on towards the Columbia. Connected with the Spokane Falls huge spouts or pipes have been set into the bed of the river, and the force of the water falling through these is carried to dynamos, which generate a current that lights thousands of homes. Seattle is lighted largely by the force of the Snoqualmie Falls, which are forty miles away; and Los Angeles gets its light from the aqueduct that brings water to it from Owens River, a stream in the Sierra Nevada 240 miles distant. This long aqueduct is made up of canals and tunnels, and in places a drop of several hundred feet is utilized for water power. The electricity used in San Francisco is also carried a long distance, and if we should travel over Europe, we should find many cities and towns which are getting their light and power from the waterfalls near them. 36. LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE THE light from oil, gas, or electricity depends largely on the lamps through which the light comes. In electricity we have various inventions which greatly in- crease the illuminating power of the current. The Nernst lamp uses a small rod instead of a thread, and the light is not burned in a vacuum. The rod is a combination of magnesia and certain rare earths, and it gives out a brilliant 308 LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE light. Another strong light is produced by using a metal called tungsten in place of the thread of carbon, and other electric lights are made by other materials. In gas lighting the flame is largely governed by the jet or burner through which the gas flows. This in the ordinary light is a short brass tube an inch or so long, and about as thick as a lead pencil. Inside it is a little strainer made of wire netting to catch any impurities in the gas, and at the top is a tip of fire clay or perhaps of aluminium, pierced by a little hole through which the gas comes. The intensity of the flame is often increased by various burners, or by mantles which fit over the jet. The mantle, for instance, is a little white hood to be used inside a chimney. The hood is made of a net of cotton thread soaked with the oxides of certain metals. When the gas is lighted the cotton burns out, and leaves a skeleton network of these metals, which being heated white hot by the flame greatly increases the light. Such mantles are largely employed in street lighting, and also in public halls and houses where much light is desired. The story of the lamp goes back to the beginnings of things. Homer, the ancient Greek who wrote for us the fairy tales of Ulysses, refers to the festival of lamps' which was held in his day, almost one thousand years before Christ. Bronze lamps have been found which were used by the lake dwellers of Switzerland, who lived so long ago that we know little about them ; and in the pubHc museums are hundreds of lamps of stone, clay, and bronze which have been dug from the ruins of the great cities of the past. We have terra cotta lamps which were used in Babylon ages ago, bronze lamps which came from Roman candelabrum (a) and lampstands {h, c). Roman lamps. (309; 310 Lamps and burners, how matches are made Athens, and clay lamps from Carthage. I remember once while traveling through Egypt near the site of old Mem- phis, I bought a clay lamp which my guide said dated back to the times of the Pharaohs. It was dug from one of the tombs and the man who sold it offered me the little finger of a mummy which had been found near the lamp. The first lamp was probably a shell filled with fat, with a bit of dried moss as a wick. Later came lamps of clay, and later still lamps of bronze, iron, and other metals. The Greeks and Romans made beautiful lamps stamped on the bottom with the name of the maker; and iron and brass lamps of many kinds were in use during the Middle Ages. The light from all of these lamps was pale, smoky, and flickering, and it was not until modern times that man began to study how to increase the brilliancy of the flame. The first great improvement, which was made only a little more than a hundred years ago, was the flat, woven, ribbon- like wick, fitted into a frame so that only a small surface could be burned at a time. Then came the round wick or Argfand burner, named after the Swiss who invented it, and later still the student lamp, made by a German. Argand used an iron chimney for his light, with an opening through which the flame could be seen ; and it was one of his workmen who first suggested chimneys of glass. This man was trying to heat a bottle over the lamp when the heat cracked off the bottom. At the same time the glass grew very hot, and he dropped it over the flame. The result was that the flame shone out through the glass, and gave a steadier light than could be produced by the sheet iron chimney. It was in 1800 that Carcel made a lamp LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE 31I with a clockwork attachment by which the wick was raised bit by bit as the clock ticked ; and later still small hand lamps were made of tin, brass, and pewter. The first lamps used in the United States were those brought over from Europe by our colonial forefathers. The Indians then lighted then wigwams with pine torches, Colonial lamps. and the only tribes which had lamps were the Eskimos, who used shallow vessels of stone, bone, or clay in which they burnt the oil of the seal, walrus, or whale, with dry moss as a wick. Such lamps arc to be found in Alaska to-day. The chief lamps of the Pilgrims were known. as Betty lamps. They were made of forged or cast iron, and were often of a pear shape witli a place for the wick in the 312 LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE top. Others were like candlesticks, with a vessel on the top and a saucer to catch the oil if it dripped down or ran over. The first of the Bettys were imported from England, but later on they were manufactured at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newbury, Massachusetts, and, for this reason, were known as Portsmouth or Newbury Bettys. We have already seen how Benjamin Franklin gave us some of our first knowledge of electricity through flying his kite, and how he invented one of the stoves of our colonial days. We are also indebted to him for an early improvement on lamps. Franklin's father was a candle maker in Boston and when Benjamin was a little boy he had to cut the wicks for the candles and fill the molds with the melted grease. He did not like the work, and when he grew to a man, he planned a lamp which would Colonial lamps. Lii-MPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE 313 give out more light than several of the candles he had made as a boy. This lamp had two round tubes through which two loosely braided cotton wicks ran, extending down into a tube of whale oil. Franklin did not patent this invention, but it came into general use, and proved to be better than any lamp employed up to that time. After this many other improvements of more or less value were made, but they were all for lamps which burnt lard or fish oil, and it was not until the great lighting value of coal oil was discovered that we had the lamps which give the brilliant light of to-day. For these we are in- debted largely to Samuel Kier, a druggist of Pittsburgh, who was one of the first men to refine coal oil and employ it for lighting. In the latter process he surrounded the flame with a glass chimney, using an Argand burner, thereby producing a beautiful light. Kier did not invent the chimney, for as we have seen that had already been discovered by the man who was working for Argand, but he adapted it to the coal oil lamp, and it soon came into general use. Now let us shut our eyes, and for the moment suppose that we are little children living two hundred years ago. Let each imagine that his parents have told him to light the fire or the candle and wonder how he is to go about doing it. He cannot use matches, for such things have not yet been invented. He takes up a splinter and starts towards the fireplace. But alas, the fire has gone out, and there are only ashes and dead charcoal on the black hearth. The only ways in which he can get light are by the methods of fire making then known. He debates for a moment whether he shall take a flint and strike it on steel, so that 314 LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE the sparks will fall on some dry tinder or kindling, which he can then blow into a flame ; or whether he shall roll one stick of wood rapidly around in a hole made inside another, and by friction gradually bring smoke and a blaze. Either way is difficult, and as he has had no experience he will probably fail. Indeed, the light which w^e now get by simply striking a match was hard to create only a few generations ago. Then every family covered the coals in the fireplace with ashes before going to bed, and kept at least one fire burn- ing throughout the year. Our colonial forefathers had boxes of flint and steel in their houses; and as they found that scorched linen would quickly ignite, they saved their old handkerchiefs and worn-out sheets and charred them, in order that they might catch upon them the sparks from the flint. The guns had flintlocks, and thereby lit the powder, and the hunter often used his gun flint to start the camp fire. It was not until 1827 that the lucifer match, that could be lighted by friction, was invented, although it was known that the materials used in making it could be ignited long before that. The first matches were made by dipping little sticks of wood into a compound of brimstone, chlo- rate of potash, and some other materials. They were then dried, and were lit by drawing them through a piece of folded sandpaper. Later they were made so that they would strike upon being drawn over any rough and dry surface ; and now, after many improvements of various kinds, matches are used throughout the world. We make so many matches in the United States that we could each use five every day and have some to spare. We produce so many in one year that if they were all laid end LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE 315 to end, they would reach four million miles, or, if placed in rows side by side, would make a band around the earth more than one foot in width. Match-making machines. The first matches were made in England. The splints were cut by hand, and the manufacture was so costly that they sold at the rate of three or four for a cent. Then machines were gradually invented, and now they are very cheap. We have single machines which will make four million matches a day. The wood most commonly used for matches is pine, thoroughly dried and sawed into match lengths. The blocks are then put into an automotic feeder, which carries them to the machine where they are cut into shape. The machine cuts forty-eight matches at one stroke, and it 3l6 LAMPS AND BURNERS. HOW MATCHES ARE MADE makes several hundred strokes every minute. At the same time it sticks the matches in a flexible cast-iron band, where they stand out like the bristles in a brush, and upon .which they travel around wheel after wheel, dipping the ends into the vats which give them their caps of sulphur, paraffin, phosphorus, and other lighting materials. The matches, still in the band, are then carried through blasts of cool air, until they are dry and ready to pack. These machines are reliable. They will not handle broken matches, and the dust and splinters drop out and are carried down into the furnaces which furnish the steam for the works. Each machine will turn out several million matches per day, and it requires only twelve hands to operate it. The matches are packed, by girls, into boxes which con- tain from sixty-five to five hundred each. The girls have seats at circular tables, which revolve as the matches fall on them. The boxes are also made by machinery, the sheets of pine or straw board of which they are composed going in at one end and coming out at the other in boxes. This machinery saves a great deal of labor. The match business is done in numerous factories, a single one of which turns out as many as one hundred million matches per day. They make matches of wax and paper as well as of wood. They manufacture also the safety match that lights only upon striking the sides of the boxes, which are coated with a special preparation of phosphorus and powdered glass or emery that causes it to burst into flame. There is no phosphorus in the head of the safety match ; but this is put on the box, and when the match is rubbed over it the explosion occurs which produces the light. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS 317 37. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS "How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view! The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wildwood, And every loved spot which my infancy knew ! The wide-spreading pond, and the mill that stood by it, The bridge, and the rock where the cataract fell, The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it. And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the well — The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well. "That moss-covered vessel I hailed as a treasure, For often at noon, when returned from the field, I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure. The purest and sweetest that nature can yield. How ardent I seized it, with hands that were glowing, And quick to the white-pebbled bottom it fell ; Then soon, with the emblem of truth overflowing. And dripping with coolness, it rose from the well^ The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket arose from the well." THE old oaken bucket is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The modern pump has taken its place, and in our cities and towns the public works which give every^ home its water supply have consigned it to the things forgotten. Even far out in the country, upon many of our farms, we have harnessed old Eolus, whom the Greeks regarded as the God of the Winds, and have made him turn the wheels of the windmills which operate our pumps, and, in many instances, are making the gasoline or steam engine do the same. The methods by which we draw water from the depths of 3l8 THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS the earth, and send it to every part of our houses, are among the wonders of this world of industry through which we are traveling. They do not seem very remark- able to us, because they are before us everyday. But should we investigate how our little world broth- ers and sisters of the nations far away pro- cure water, we should see that we are far better off, and be thankful. Suppose, for in- stance, we make a visit to one of the smaller cities of Korea. The water comes from wells and it is taken from house to house by men or boys who do nothing else. The boy draws up the water and carries it in two great pails fastened to a framework which rests on his back. Each family pays so much a day or month for its water, and you may be sure that the children are warned against wasting it. It is so costly that the family washings are taken to the streams; and as for bathrooms, they are almost unknown. It is much the same in China and India. In the latter The oM oaken bucket. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS 319 country water-carrying is a regular trade followed by cer- tain families or castes from generation to generation, hi the cities of Egypt drinking water .is sold on the streets, and in Manchuria the water man has a great samovar or tea pot, from which he sells it steaming hot to his customers. In Morocco and Al- geria the water is drawn from the wells in goatskins and carried in such skins through the streets on the backs of men. In Tripoli I have seen it ped- dled about from large barrels slung across the humps of grumbling camels, which knelt beside the wells and wept real tears while they were loaded. ^ ^"""""y ^""'^ ^^'^'' P'^"'- In many parts of the world the fetching the water is the work of the women, just as cooking, sewing, and dish washing are with us. This is especially true of Palestine, 320 THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS where girls may be seen at the pubhc wells awaiting their turn, as was Rebecca when young Jacob met her and fell in love with her. The little girl of the Holy Land begins to carry water almost as soon as she can walk. At first she has only a small jar which she bears on her head. As she grows older this becomes larger, so that when full grown she is able to carry three or four gallons. Such a jar when filled weighs thirty or forty pounds, but the woman balances it on her head and walks along without touching it. In countries like those referred to the water supply is often from springs or streams, or cisterns and pools. Most of the water of Jerusa- lem, is from cisterns, each of the larger houses having one in the court in its center. Outside that city is the Pool of Siloam, and from other pools comes the water used by many homes. In some parts of Australia the people rely upon the rains, which fall copiously during a part of the year. The rain from the roof is carried by spouts into great tanks of gal- vanized iron, which rest upon the porches. The water is Algerian water carrier. THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS !2I cooled for drinking by putting it into canvas bags and hanging them where the wind blows. Some of the water soaks through the bag, and the evaporation of this makes that inside as cool as though fresh from a spring. In regions where there is no rain for a part of the year, cisterns are very important. They are usually made of stone or brick so cemented together that they will hold water; and they are placed where they will catch the rainfall. Many of the ancient cities had such stor- age tanks ; and, as we shall see later, our own cities have reservoirs in which the water from streams or wells is stored and held to be let out as needed. Some of the most remark- able of the ancient cisterns were those of Carthage, con- structed about 500 B.C. They were fed by the rains, and by springs far away in the mountains, the water being carried in great stone troughs built high up above the ground on pillars of masonry. These cisterns could supply six million gallons of water a day. They were enormous barrel-shaped caverns eighty feet thick and more than four hundred feet long, with pipes running from them to the various parts of the city. When I visited the site of old Carthage a year or so ago, I found most of these old reservoirs in ruins with Arabs living in them. CARP. HOUSES — 21 Water carriers, mid-Afnoa. 322 THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS In one a Bedouin woman was grinding corn between two stones, and in another was stabled a tiny gray donkey with a pretty little Arab girl standing beside it. Cisterns of Carthage. Others of the cisterns have been repaired, and some are now used to supply water to the towns and villages near by. These are thirty feet deep, and five hundred feet long. They are connected with steam engines which do the pumping. The old aqueduct has been repaired and ! with some modern additions it now gives water to the city of Tunis, which is not far from where Carthage once stood. In olden times and indeed until recently a great part of the water used by man came from dug wells. This was so in America during our colonial days, and it is still true of many of the less civilized countries of the world. In India wells twenty or thirty feet in diameter have been dug far down into the earth. They are often used for irrigation, the water being drawn by bullocks in great bags of cow- THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS 323 skins and poured into canals through which it goes over the fields. Egypt has many wells worked by the sakiyeh, a wheel turned around by a blindfolded bullock, camel, or water buffalo. The wheel has cogs which fit into the cogs of a vertical wheel to the rim of which clay jars are fastened. The vertical wheel extends down into the well, and as it turns the jars dip into the water and fill, emptying into a trough as it turns. There are wells in all the oases of the Sahara, and in the fertile spots of most desert regions. There are many in China and Japan, and in Europe, and in most other countries of the world. "Tne sakiyeh, a wheel turned arounc by a blindfolded bullock." ./ \ Our wells of to-day are different from those of the past. Instead of digging a great hole in the earth and rock and walling it with brick or stone, we now use machinery to 324 THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET AND ITS SUCCESSORS drill or bore a hole from three to eight inches in diameter far down into the earth, and tap the porous rock into which the water from above has drained. This rock is often surrounded by other rock of such a nature that the water cannot pass through it, the porous rock thus forming a spongelike reservoir which holds the water. Such rock A modern bathroom. may lie not far from the surface, or it may be hundreds of feet below it with hard rocks above. Some of the bored wells are half a mile deep, and several have been sunk more than a mile straight down through the rock. There is one at Pittsburgh which is more than forty-six hundred feet deep, and another at St. Louis which measures over thirty-eight hundred feet. One of the deepest of such THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES 325 wells, near Leipzig in Germany, goes five thousand seven hundred and thirty-five feet down into the earth. In driUing such wells when the porous rock is first struck the water often rushes up with great force. One was put down near Paris which yielded more than five million gallons a day, throwing a column of water to the height of a five-story house, and there are several in Australia which flow one million or more gallons every twenty-four hours. In the Australian wells the water often rushes forth in such quantity that it eats out a channel many miles long through which it runs. One well there has produced six million gallons a day, and some others over one hundred thousand gallons an hour, furnishing water for vast flocks of sheep and serving also to irrigate thousands of acres of land. Most of the wells, however, yield only a few gallons per minute, and pumps worked by wind, steam, gasoline, or electricity are required to raise the water to the surface. Such wells are known as artesian wells, the name coming from the province of Artois in France, where the first deep wells of Europe were made. They are now to be found all over our coun- try, the water from them being pumped into high tanks built upon a framework of steel near the houses or barns. o>»;c 38. THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES THE waterworks of our great cities are far more exten- sive than any attempted in the past. More water is now used than ever before. We require it, not only for scrubbing, cooking, washing, and bathing, but for water- 326 THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES ing our lawns and streets, and for manufacturing purposes. New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia each use several hundred million gallons a day, and many of our cities daily consume more than two barrels of water for every man, woman, and child in them. In figuring out how much water a city should have, some engineers estimate the amount at fifty gallons or upwards per person each day, and this is so much that only our modern waterworks can supply it. Roman aqueduct. It is an important question with every city, town, and village as to where it shall get its water supply and how it shall be carried into the houses. In some great cities the water is from rivers and lakes, in others from springs and THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES 327 deep underground wells, or from reservoirs which are often made for the purpose, far away in the mountains. Most of the New York water comes from the Croton River and Aqueduct across Harlem River, New York. the Catskill Mountains. London is supplied by the Thames, Petrograd by the Neva, Berlin by the Spree, Hamburg by the Elbe, and Rotterdam by the Rhine. In our own country, Washington, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia are among the largest cities supplied by the rivers on whose banks they stand. Every one of us can probably tell what the names of these rivers are and mention other towns which get their water in the same way. The cities of the Great Lakes are supplied from those great natural reservoirs and the water of many of the big cities of Europe has a similar source. At the same time some other cities draw their water from under the ground. This is the case with Indian- 325 THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES apolis, which stands over a bed of water-soaked limestone into which numerous wells have been bored. The wells are on the average about three hundred feet deep, and Reservoir and standpipe, New York. some of them are ten inches in diameter. They produce many millions of gallons of water each day. London gets some of its water also from a chalk bed below it, but even this and the rivers do not furnish all that it needs and it is now planned to bring water in pipes from the mountains of Wales, which are one hundred and eighty miles away. But how do the city works force the water into the houses } We can each find out as to his own town by visiting its waterworks, and this I advise you to do. The methods are different in different cities. The water is sometimes distributed by gravity from reservoirs or lakes, THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES 329 or from streams higher up than the highest roofs of the houses. This gives a great force and when the pipes are opened the water may be thrown high enough to be used when the buildings catch fire. In some places the water is pumped by machinery from other sources into reservoirs at the right elevation. Or it may be forced into stand- pipes, or pumped directly into the water mains with such a force that it will go through the houses and have also a pressure sufficient to protect them from fire. In every case the water flows from the works through the chief streets of the city in great mains, and is carried from them to the side streets in smaller pipes, and by pipes still smaller into the houses. These pipes are usually of Croton dam. iron, and in every large city, taken together, they are many miles in length. The cost of making the reservoir and of putting in these pipes, added to the expense of the ma- 330 THE WATER SUPPLY OF GREAT CITIES chinery connected with the waterworks, is great. It is easily paid by the consumers, however, each house being taxed a few dollars a year according to the water used in it. There is one thing we almost always consider as to our water supply. This is that the water be pure or at least free from such germs and bacteria as might make us ill. Irrigation canal, Washington. The large wells in which hung the old oaken buckets were often near stables and other buildings from which foul mat- ter sank down into the soil and drains, thus causing fevers and other diseases. In the artesian or bored wells, the hole is small and it often goes down hundreds of feet through the rock. Nevertheless it should be kept far away from any place from which foul stuff might seep in, and the water should be carefully examined from time to time that we may know it is good. FURNITURE 33 1 There are several tests which may be made, and it is al- ways best to be careful. If there is any doubt whatever, the water should be rejected, or sent to a chemist who can tell you what it contains. Indeed, the purity of water is now thought to be so im- portant, that most of our cities have built great settling reservoirs and filters through which the water is passed be- fore it is let out into the mains of the city. In some places it is run over beds of gravel and sand, which are changed from time to time as they become filled with impurities. There are at Philadelphia works of this kind which filter millions of gallons a day, and Washington and other places have fine filtration plants. In Washington the water is brought from the Great Falls of the Potomac through an aqueduct to a reservoir, from which it passes on through another aqueduct nto the filtration beds. Here it is con- ducted into twenty-nine great chambers built under the ground. These chambers are made of concrete and their floors are covered to a depth of four feet with beds of fine sand and gravel. The water flows over these beds and drains through them, passing out clean and clear into a reservoir or lake from which it goes into the pipes of the city. Each of the chambers will filter three million gallons/ a day, and from sixty to seventy-five million gallons of pure water are thus daily furnished to the people of our national capital, _^ 39. FURNITURE THE object of our journey to-day is to learn about the furniture which forms to a great extent the life of the home and a large part of its comfort. We first visit Japan. 332 FURNITURE The houses here are comparatively bare. There are no beds but thick wadded quilts laid on the soft white mats of the floor, and the only tables are little low portable ones which are used chiefly as trays for bringing the food in at the meals. There are neither sofas nor chairs. The people sit on their heels, and when one writes a letter he rests his paper on his knees or perhaps lies on his stomach and writes on the floor. Crossing to the mainland of Asia we observe that the Chinese of the better classes have bedsteads which are often beautifully carved, but they are without springs and usu- ally without mattresses. They have chairs, but the backs are straight; and the cushions are so thin that we might as well sit on hard wood. Many of the poorer Chinese sleep upon ledges built in one side of the room and heated, as we have already seen, by flues running under them. The Koreans sleep on the floor and their tables are like those of Japan. • As to tableware, all these people have beautiful porcelains, and all use chopsticks instead of the fork. In the Philippine Islands the poorer people sleep upon a framework of bamboo canes upon which matting is laid ; and in India the most common bed is a rude wooden frame with a network of ropes as thick as a clothesline stretched over it. The bed is so small that a grown man must bend up his legs and lie " spoon fashion " upon it. The East Indian peasant's home is usually a hut, and his furniture consists of little more than a table, a few stools, and a bed. He has a set of brass bowls to drink from, and these are scoured so that they shine like gold. The Burman sleeps upon mats, and his pillow is a little frame of bamboo, FURNITURE 333 which rests under his neck. His dishes are bowls of lac- quer, and his cups ladles of coconut shell. The native African sleeps on a bed of grass or leaves, or perhaps a coarse mat which is rolled up during the day ; and the same is true of the many tribes of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. In Mohammedan lands the houses have divans covered with soft cushions on which the people In a Filipino home. sit and sleep, and the tables are often brass trays on a framework of wood. They use dishes and bowls at their meals, but the table is set without knives or forks. Every one has his own knife and spoon, and he eats with his fingers. In Europe and South America the people use beds, tables, and chairs much like our own, and they have about the same tableware. As we journey on from country to country we observe that the furniture used by a people is to some extent a sign of its civilization. The first men slept upon grass like 334 FURNITURE the African savage. They sat on the ground and their tables were logs and flat stones. After that they built ledges which they covered with skins ; and then made stools and rude tables of one kind or another. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks had tables and chairs ; and the Romans had President Jackson's bedroom at the Hermitage. couches about their dining tables upon which they lay at their meals. During the Middle Ages the beds of the rich were lux- urious. Sheets of fine linen were used, and the mattresses were covered with silk. The beds were enormous. Queen Elizabeth had one which was seven feet wide, and certain kings then held their receptions in bed. The beds were covered with hangings, and the posts at the corners ran FURNITURE 335 almost to the ceilings. This was the nature of the better beds of our country in colonial times. George Washington and others of our early presidents slept inside the " four poster " ; and it was such a bed that Andrew Jackson had. We now regard inclosed beds unhealthful, and think that one should have the windows wide open and sleep under sheets and light blankets with nothing about him to keep out the air. In our colonial days the dining tables were often long, wide boards laid upon trestles shaped like a sawhorse, which were taken apart and placed against the walls after meals. The tablecloth was called a board cloth. It was often of homespun linen made in the family. Our first settlers had but little tableware, and it was some years before the two-tined steel fork came into general use. They had knives, spoons, and cups, but trenchers or wooden platters took the place of our plates, and glass- ware was so rare that it was highly prized. Miles Standish ate from a trencher; and John Winthrop, the Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, brought the first fork to America in 1633. Silver knives and forks came into use soon after the Civil War. 336 FURNITURE At that time but few families had china and there were no saucers or covered dishes. There were seldom enough cups to go round, and only enough chairs or stools for the grown-ups. Some families had a narrow bench on each side of the table, and the children often stood behind those who sat there and the food was handed to them. In other places the children stood at a side table and brought their wooden plates to the main table for more food, when their first portion was eaten. To-day the poorest of us have enough knives, forks, and dishes for all the children, and every little one has his seat at the table. We have comfortable beds, and easy chairs of all kinds. Our floors are covered with carpets and rugs, and many of us live in more luxury than the kings of the past. Indeed, we now require so much for our homes that a great industry has grown up to supply the demand. Thou- sands of workmen are kept busy making furniture and their output is enormous. We have seven cities each of which t produces from three million to thirteen million dollars' worth of furniture per annum. The chief of these are New York and Chicago, the two largest cities of our country, but next comes Grand Rapids, Michigan, which makes a specialty of such manufacture. Grand Rapids has over five hundred furniture factories, and it has many thousand men who do nothing else but make bureaus, beds, tables, and chairs, and other things for FURNITURE 337 the home. The industry began when the city was still surrounded by forests of hard woods, and now although these have been cut away it still thrives on account of the skill of its workmen, and the fame which its furniture has for beauty, cheapness, and excellence of construction. Twice a year the city has furniture fairs to which mer- chants from all parts of the United States and even from Furniture factory. other countries come to see the new patterns and to buy for their stores. In some years many thousand people visit these fairs, and the sales amount to as much as two hundred million dollars. The town has great exposition buildings for showing its wares. But suppose we visit one of the large furniture factories They cover several acres and are filled with all sorts of cutting, sawing, planing, and carving machines. Much of the wood comes from far-away parts of the world. There is mahogany from Cuba, Central America, and Africa; CARP. HOUSES — 22 338 FURNITURE teakwood from the jungles of Siam and Burma ; rosewood from the valley of the Amazon ; bamboos from Japan ; and rattan from Borneo and other islands of the Dutch East Indies. There are bird's-eye maple, oak, walnut, and cherry from different parts of the United States, and cheaper woods from our great forest belts. Some of the woods are costly, and especially the mahogany, a single log of which may be worth several thousand dollars. Indeed, many woods are so valuable that they are used in thin sheets, which are pasted or glued to other wood so firmly that the two seem as one. The fine woods cover the cheap woods like a skin, and are so fitted on that no one would suppose that the furniture was not wholly made of the costly hard wood. Such work is called veneering. The fine wood is sliced or sawed by delicate machinery into great sheets, not so thick as the cover of this book. These are then treated so that they can be wrapped around a column, or made to follow the curves of an armchair or bedstead. The veneer is put on rough, and then smoothed and polished so that it shines like a mirror. Most of our fine furniture is veneered in this way, the oak, mahogany, maple, and birch being glued upon pine, poplar, or other cheap wood. The core, as the cheap wood is called, is usually covered with two thicknesses of veneering, the grain of the wood of one running in one direction and that of the other crossing it at right angles. This prevents cracking, and, if properly done, makes the furniture more durable than though it were solid and of one wood throughout. The work of polishing and carving is now largely per- formed by machinery. The wood is smoothed by great FLOOR COVERINGS 339 drums covered with sandpaper, one of which will do as much as twenty men working by hand ; and the carvers are aided by cutting tools, moved by machinery which turns them around at the rate of fifteen hundred revolutions a minute. 40. FLOOR COVERINGS IT is a long way from the dirt floor covered with leaves, grass, rushes, or the skins of wild beasts to the beautiful carpets and rugs to-day. Just when man began to make rugs is not known ; but there are pictures of weavers at work on the stone walls of the tomb of Beni Hassan in Egypt, and we know that those pictures were cut more than forty-five hundred years ago. The ancient Egyptians spread rugs before the images of their gods, and it is said they sometimes laid them down on the ground for their sacred cattle to lie on. Alexander the Great had splendid carpets, and he found such carpets in use during his march through Asia to India. For a long time the finest rugs of the world were woven in Persia, Turkey, and Syria; and to-day the most costly ones are some which were made in those lands long, long ago. \Vc have old Persian rugs which sell for a thousand dollars and upwards apiece; and some fine silk ones, beautifully woven, have brought as much as twenty-five thousand dollars. Those old rugs were all woven by hand, and the best of them took many months in their making. They are composed of fine wool or silk, and have colors and tints which we cannot make now. It was during the Crusades that the art of rug making 340 FLOOR COVERINGS was carried from Turkey to Europe; and at that time the noble ladies of England, France, and other coun- tries made carpets and tapestry wall-hangings with their needles and upon their rude looms. Later factories were started, and Belgium began to make Brus- sels carpet, the name coming from the city of Brussels. Some of the Belgian weav- ers went to England and settled at Bristol, where they made Bristol carpet, and in 1745 some French weavers established a factory at Wilton, England, and began to make a carpet like that we now know as Wilton. All these first carpets were costly. They were woven largely by hand, and only the rich could afford them. In colony times most of our houses had bare floors, or carpets woven of old rags torn into strips. The strips were sewed end to to end, and then woven on rude looms by the women of the family. A few of our wealthy people had Turkish rugs and ingrain carpets which had been imported, but these were so rare that the children were often warned to walk lightly when upon special occasions they were admitted to the carpeted room. Persians weaving rugs. Arabian rug merchant. (J41) 342 FLOOR COVERINGS After the Jacquard loom was invented in 1801, carpets grew cheaper. Many other improvements in weaving machinery followed, and we now make all kinds of car- pets and rugs at a very low cost. We have enormous factories which weave nothina^ else. There is one at Making carpets. Yonkers, New York, tnat has one thousand looms run by machinery, and turns out as much as fifteen million yards of carpet a year. This would be enough to cover a walk six or seven feet wide, from where the factory stands clear across the United States to San Francisco. The factory employs five thousand hands, and two thirds of these are women and girls. FLOOR COVERINGS 343 But this is only one factory, and we have so many others that we make altogether more than one hundred million yards of carpet a year. We weave all sorts of rugs, and carpets are now so cheap that even the poor- est can use more or less of them. We import also In a Japanese home. many rugs of cotton and jute from Japan, where such things are made at low cost. We also buy fine old rugs from the Orient, some of which, although used for years, are more beautiful than any now made. In addition to these floor coverings of wool, silk, and cotton, we have mattings made of a straw which grows in China and Japan. The straw is a sort of grass or reed which reaches a height of six feet. When it is ripe it is cut, dried, and packed up in bales, and shipped to 344 FLOOR COVERINGS the factories. It is there sorted and the freshest and greenest of the straws are taken for the white parts of the matting, while the rest is put aside to be dyed. The matting is woven like cloth, and much of it upon hand looms, operated by children. During a visit to a Japa- nese factory I saw some little ones of eight and ten years of age working at the machines, and I was told that they Matting store in japan. were paid only a few cents a day. Such matting is put up in rolls of forty yards each, and tightly packed for shipment across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. Other mattings are made of the husk of the coconut. The nuts as we buy them in the store have been shelled, much as we shell black walnuts. Around each nut as it FLOOR COVERINGS 345 falls from the tree is a husk as thick as your finger, and composed of a coarse fiber, known to commerce as coir. It is from this that coir matting is made. The husks are soaked in water until they are soft, and the fiber is beaten out with hard wooden clubs. It can now be twisted into a yarn by rolling it between the palms of the hands, and this yarn can be reeled upon bobbins and woven by looms into mats. Such matting is coarse and durable. It is com- monly used for offices and for halls and stairs which have very hard wear. In addition to carpets and mattings we have certain floor coverings which are more or less waterproof. They are used for bathrooms, kitchens, and other such places. Among them are oilcloth and linoleum, made by passing a sheet of cheap fiber through liquid glue, rye flour, tapioca, or varnish, and then covering it with a mixture of ocher, lin- seed oil, and benzine. After this the oilcloth is printed by means of blocks, each of which gives one of the colors of the pattern. The cloth is then dried and varnished, after which it is trimmed and rolled up for the market. Linoleum is usually made of cork and linseed oil, to which are added a little resin and pigments of various kinds. The cork is the waste from the factories which make corks for bottles, the waste being ground into flour. In the meantime the light cotton cloth, which forms the base of the linoleum, has been covered with layers of boiled lin- seed oil. It is upon these that the ground cork mixed with resin and oil is spread, the whole being rolled upon a backing of jute. The printing is done in the same way as upon oilcloth. 346 FLOOR COVERINGS As we stop and think of the many places from which even the most common things in our homes come, we are amazed at their number and at their wide distances apart upon the face of the globe. They involve the work of nearly every nation and tribe upon this big round earth, giving employment to millions of our world brothers and sisters, and binding us to them through commerce and in- dustry as they relate to our shelter. Take, for instance, the materials which lie right under our feet, that we have been considering to-day. How many long journeys it would require to visit the places from whence they came, and to get well acquainted with the many queer people who have had a part in their making. The study of carpets would involve travels to all the wool-raising regions and also to the homes and factories in which the carpets are made. In the United States we annually make enough carpet to form a strip reaching twice around the globe, requiring hundreds of factories and thousands of looms. A study of matting would necessitate travels clear around the world; and an investigation of oilcloths would take us to the cork forests of Spain, the flax lands of India, and to the places whence come the resin, tapioca, benzine, and the other things used in their making. It would be the same with almost every article as relates to our shelter, and it would be an impossibility for us to cover them all. We must therefore be satisfied with having considered the main branches in this great field of industry and com- merce, and our travels shall now come to an end. This does not mean that we have seen all concerning them that the world has to show. We might further investigate the wonders of our furniture, visiting the works from which FLOOR COVERINGS 347 come the china we have on our tables, the pianos and organs which give us music, the pictures and other art works on our walls, and the books which form such a necessary part of our lives. We might go abroad to ex- amine the various kinds of architecture as shown in the mighty cathedrals and other structures of Europe, and look further into the home life of our little brothers and sisters of far-away lands. All these things would be interesting ; but they are by no means essential to this series of travels as to " How the World is Housed " and they may be left to our leisure at some time in the future. INDEX Adobe houses, 130. Amber, 231. American brickyards, 135-142. Andrea della Robbia, 141. Apartment bouses, 246. Aqueducts, 326. Arab tent dwellers, 22. Argand burner, 310. Arlington, 62. Artificial stones, 122-127. Baalbek, 106. Babylon, 127. Bamboo, 42, 96, 220, 338. Bedouin village 22. Bessemer, 160. Betel palm, 98. Bohemian glass, 194. Borneo, houses of, 41. Brass, 180-188. Bricks, 127-142. Brick structures of antiquity, 127-135. Brickyards, American, 135-142. Bronze, 183. Building construction, 243. Building tools, 15, 145. Buildings, world's tallest, 238-247. Buildings of the past, 98-110. Burma, houses of, 51. Cabins, log, 56. Calumet and Hecla Mine, iMi Candles, 279. Candle tree, 281. Cane huts, 36. Carrara, 115. Carr.-ira m;irble, 105, II5. Carnaiiba palm. 98, 381. Carpet, 340. Caves, 13. Cement, 122, China, forests of, 94. Great Wall of, i^o. Homes of, 47, 204. Villages of, 49. Chinaware, 336. Chinese inventors, 217. Cisterns, 320. Cliff dwellers, 15. Coal gas, 291. Coconut oil, 281. Coir, 345. Coke, 156. Colonial homes, 55, Colonial schoolhouses, 51. Colosseum, 105. Concrete, 122. Copal, 230. Copper, 180-188. Cut glass, 203. Desert of Sahara, 27. Douglas fir, 76. Egypt, homes of, 30. Electricity, 299-307. Heating, 277. Lighting, 302. Elephants, logging. 91. Eskimos, 15, 25. 27, 262. Esparto grass, 220. Europe, houses of. 52, 268. Fiji, houses of, 39. Filtration, 331. Fire, 257-270. Fire making, 313. Fireplaces. 27Z. 349 350 INDEX Fire worship, 260. Floor coverings, 339-346. Forestry, Government Bureau, 72, 228. Forests, 64-73. Africa, 64. Burma, 90, Canada, 206. Central, 71. Europe, 66. Japan, 95. North America, 64, 67. Northern, 70. Pacific Coast, 71. Roclcy Mountains, 7I. Southern, 71, 227. South America, 64. World's great, 64-73. Forks, 335. Furniture, 331-339. Galena, 182. Garfield, James A., 60. Gas, illuminating, 291-299. Glass, 188-204. Blowing, 202. Bohemian, 194. Plate, 197. Venetian, 192. Granite, 103, 1 10-122. Great Pyramid, 99. Great Wall of China, 130. Guam, houses of, 36. Gypsum, 126. Hawaii, houses of, 36. Hinges, 164-173. Homes, colonial, 55-64. Hotels, 247-256. Hot water heating, 271. House building, 232-237. Museum of, 164. House, evolution of, 9-17. Plan of, 232. House lighting, 278-285. Houses, adobe, 130. Apartment, 246. Borneo, 41. Burma, 51. China, 46, 264. Egypt, 30. Eskimo, 15, 25, 27, 262. Europe, 52, 268. Fiji, 39. Guam, 36. Hawaii, 36. India, 50. Japan, 44, 265. Korea, 46, 263. Log, 56. New Guinea, 39, 41. New Zealand, 266. Norway, 52. Philippines, 39, 266. Porto Rico, 36, Pygmy, 12. Salt, 27. Samoa, 36. School, 61. Siam, 51. Spain, 55. Uganda, 34. Huts, 26-36. Bamboo, 40. Grass, 36. Ice, 27. Mud, 27, 35, 47. Palm-leaf, 11. Stone, 34. Ice huts, 27. India, houses of, 50. Indian, homes of, 34. Wigwams, 56. Incandescent lamp, 302. Inns, native, 247. Iron, 142-163. Cast, 149. Furnaces, 156. How mined, 151. Rolling mills, 156. Smelting, 156. Transportation of, 152. INDEX 351 Iron, uses of, 142. Visit to mines, 154. Where found, 150. Wrought, 149, 163. Jacquard loom, 342. Japan, forests, 95. Homes of, 44, 265. Hotels, 249. Java, temples of, 109. Kafirs, homes of, 32. Karnak, loi. Kauri gum, 230. Kerosene, 290. Kirghiz, the, 18. Knives, 335. Korea, houses of, 46, 263. Kutab Minar, 146. Lake Victoria, homes on, 33. Lamps, 307. Betty, 311. Carcel, 310. Nernst, 307. Latchstring, the, 61. Lead, 180, 224. Limestone, 114. Lincoln, Abraham, 59. Linoleum, 345. Linseed oil, 226. Locks, 164-173. Log cabins, 56. Logging industry, 73-83. Lumber, 73-90. Camps, 73, 81. Rafts, 79. Mahogany, 337. Maori, house, 266. Marble, 104, 107, 108, 110-12X Masai, the, 32. Matches, 307. 313, 315. Matting, 343. Mortar, 124. Mount Pcntelikon, 104, 115. Mount Vernon, 63. Mud huts, 27, 35, 47. Mulberry trees, 218. Nails, 164-173. Negritos, homes of, 13. New Guinea, homes of, 39, 41. New Zealand, 266. Nile Valley, 30. Nipa palm, 98. Norway, houses of, 52. Obelisks, 103. Office buildings, 241. Oils, 221. Oilcloth, 345. Oil tanks, 287. Oil wells, 282. Ore, transportation of, 151. Paints, 221. Palm trees, 97. Paper, manufacture of, 207, 209, 219. Paper, wood pulp, 204-212. Papyrus, 213. Parchment, 215. Parthenon, 104. Pentelikon, Mount, 104, 115. Perganius, 215. Petroleum, 281, 286-290. Crude, 289. Philippines, houses of, 39, 266. Pig iron, 159. Pigments, 222. Pine, 89, 227, 315. Plaster, 122. Plaster of Paris, 126. Plymouth Rock, 56. Pompeii, 132. Poplar, 205. Porcelain pagoda, 146. Portland cement, 123 Porto Rico, houses of, 36. Pygmy, houses of, 12. Pyramids, 99. 352 INDEX Quarries, granite, no. Marble, 107, 1 10-122. Slate, no. Rattan, 338. Real estate deed, 234. Red lead, 224. Reservoirs, 329. Roofing tiles, 141. Rosewood, 338. Rugs. 339- Sahara Desert, the, 22. Sakiyeh, 323. Salt houses, 27. Samoa, houses of, 36 Sandstone, 112. Sawmills, 78, 83. Saws, 86. Schoolhouses, col< iiial. 61. Screws, 164-173. Sepia, 225. Sheepskin, 216. Siam, houses of, 51. Skyscraper, the, 242. Slnte, 113. Smith, Captain John, 59. Spam, houses of, 55. Spruce, 205. Standish, Captain Miles, 59. Steam, 271. Steel, 149, 160. Stone huts, 34. Stoves, 271. Sun-dried brick, 30. Taj Mahal, 108. Teakwood, 91, 338. Temple of Heaven, 109. Tent dwellers, 17-24. Tent making, 18. Terra cotta, 141. Thebes, loi. Tiles, 141. Timgad, 134. Tin, 173-180. Titles to property, 233. Tools, building, 15. Tower of Babel, 127. Turkish hotels, 249. Turpentine, 228. Uganda, houses of, 34. Varnish, 221. Veneer, 338. Venetian glass, 192. Vesuvius, 132. Wall paper, 220. Warming pans, 274. Washington, George, 59. Water, 317-331. Water power, 306. Water, sources of, 327. Wells, 317, 324. White ants, 32. White lead, 180, 224. Wigwams, 56. Wood, fibrous, 206 Zinc, 173-180. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below Hl^ APR 9W^ Form L-9-15m-7,'32 G133 C22h ^■^ C&rpenter '.7 the world is" n-OUDod* C2LE-W UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACIL AA 000 798 346 3 .RANCH, ALIFORNIA, S. CALIF. iiliiii '.■•''\\<'M^ , m tTj .1 '"* lis'