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 CHAPTER IX

INVENTIONS AND WARFARE

Soon after my return from my 1905 trip to Africa I got my attention turned away from taxidermy for a little while in a curious fashion. The Field Museum was still in the old Columbian Exposition Building in which it had started. The outside of this stucco building kept peeling so that it had a very disreputable appearance. The Park Department protested to the museum authorities. I happened to be in the museum one day when one of the officers had this on his mind and he said:

"Akeley, how are we going to get the outside of this building respectable at a reasonable cost?"

I got to thinking about it. In the many experiments of one kind and another that I had tried in working out methods for manikin making I had among other things used a compressed air spray. It occurred to me that it would be possible to make an apparatus on this principle that would spray a very liquid concrete on to the side of a building. I set to work and rigged up a somewhat crude apparatus and set it up outside the museum building. It was not a finished piece of mechanism and it had the further disadvantage of having its compressed air come quite a long way in a hose. Nevertheless it worked, and