The Value of Rotaries.
The old-fashioned way of getting rid of snow on railroads was by means of the primitive shovel. A storm would send every available man out on the road, and many were the backaches next day.
The second step was the early form of the snow-plow, a form still in use wherever the Frost King is not too fierce in his operations. It is a wedge-shaped plow, which is pushed against the snow by locomotives behind it, and sometimes as many as seven locomotives have been hitched in line for that purpose. But the engines are liable to get off the track, and the method is clumsy and inefficient compared with the rotary snow-plow, which is the latest contrivance.
This rotary plow may be twelve or more feet in diameter. It consists of a series of rapidly revolving knife-edged scoops, that bore their way through the snow and ice and send it from fifty to a hundred feet to one side and the other. This snow-screw is rotated by its own engine, and the whole affair is propelled by one or two engines behind. It may move from two to twelve miles an hour, and it will conquer any snow bank that Boreas can heap together.
This evolution of the snow-plow contains a hint for all men that are obliged—as so many are—to force a way through opposing elements in the world.
You may push against them, ram them, propel yourself bluntly and headlong. You may get derailed. You may get a broken head. The obstructions will very likely be rammed out of the way, but it will be at great and unnecessary cost.
Try the rotary motion. Take the hindrances on the flank. A rifled cannon is a far more efficient weapon than a battering ram. A Billy goat is not a good model for our following. Bluntness is never a virtue, and it is always expensive. There is a better way.
Just an Overhanging Tree.
Do we think enough about keeping a clear way for other people alongside our lives?
In a lovely suburb of Boston is a beautiful tree, whose graceful branches overhang the street.
Along came a wagon, and the covered top caught in this drooping branch.
The strain on the wagon snapped the key bolt of the front axle, and the front wheels separated from the body of the vehicle.
The driver was dragged forward, and fell under one of the wheels.
The horse, with the shafts and wheels, started off to roam the streets, leaving the driver unconscious on the ground, with three broken ribs.
All of that because a branch of a tree was not trimmed out of people's way.
Every day I am obliged to dodge just such overhanging boughs, or awning fixtures, or other appurtenances of our complex city life.
Every day I get some new illustration of the duty so to manage one's personal pleasure and work and convenience as not to interfere with the great procession of existence.
"Live, and let live"—and the last is a "mighty" important factor in the first.
Slides.
From the beginning of the excavation of the Panama Canal up to the day of opening, no less than two years and three months of the time of the diggers was occupied in the removing of material that slid into the big ditch from the hills and banks at the side. One year the removal of the slides occupied twenty-four weeks and another year it actually occupied forty-four weeks, leaving only eight weeks for the real work of digging.
These slides confused the work and retarded it almost beyond measure. More than 250 acres of ground slid into the canal. More than thirty million cubic yards of material had to be removed in addition to what was in the direct course of the canal. Not all the horses and mules in the United States could draw this enormous mass. It would make a wall seven feet thick and seven feet high reaching from New York to San Francisco. It imprisoned dirt trains: It wrecked steam shovels. It broke up the water system and the system of compressed air. If it had not been for the slides the canal could have been used about a year earlier than it was.
But, after all, Colonel Goethals and Colonel Gaillard were contending with the difficulty that besets every worker. How much we could do if it were not for the slides! If we could simply do our legitimate work, unhindered by unexpected and haphazard obstructions! Now the slide is a headache. Now it is a long-winded caller. Now it is the failure of a co-worker to bring in his contribution to the task in season. Now it is bad weather. Now it is a break in machinery. Now it is some unreasonable extra demand upon our time. Whatever it is, it is a slide. Down it rushes from the hills, impetuous, irresistible, cruel. It smothers our plans, it wrecks our strength, it confuses and disheartens our spirit.
Well, what shall we do with the slides?
Do what Colonel Goethals and Colonel Gaillard did with them—haul them out of the way! Put them where they will do no further mischief! And go serenely on with our life-work, defying the worst slides to prevent us. In 1908 it was estimated that the cost of digging the canal would be 98 cents a cubic yard for the whole cut. The next year Colonel Goethals brought the cost down to 78⅔ cents a yard. And in 1912, when the slides were the most troublesome, the cost was crowded down to 54⅜ cents. That is the way to conquer slides.