Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/463

Rh read about in children's books. I like to sit and watch it."

Monster! Indeed it is a true monster, both in shape and attitude. Its body is represented in the car; its thick neck has all the stockiness of invincibility; and its great square head, with the three steel teeth protruding like the fangs of an undershot bulldog, give it quite the air of a great animal, even in repose. But it is when it is in action that the personality of the thing becomes apparent. The beams of the derrick slide against one another like the sinewy tendons in the neck of a mastodon, the great head lowers itself for the charge, and the teeth fairly glisten as they attack the hillside. Then when some hidden obstacle is encountered and the way becomes temporarily blocked, the pent-up steam within it breaks forth as from its nostrils, and the great thing trembles all over and shrieks out its rage, the shrill tones only dying down to a satisfied grunt when the obstruction has been conquered. It weighs 200,000 pounds, and is the biggest steam shovel in the world. Once it encountered a rock which was too big even for it, and the way it throbbed, screamed, hissed, whistled, and shook when the object of its wrath refused to budge was a moving spectacle indeed.

The man who operates this great piece of mechanism bears the limited distinction of being one of the best steam-shovel workers in the world. He is certainly a perfect master of the machine. The shovel is used, in places, to clean off a ledge preparatory to blasting. Edison, with his sensitive needle, or "magnetic eye," as he calls it, went over the ground above the ledge before it was uncovered, and was able to determine its exact shape. Above the edge of the rock, stakes were driven, and the shovel operator was told to clean it off. So accurate was his work that the channel cut by the great machine did not at any point vary twelve inches from the wall of rock bordering the ore.