Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/431

 Popular Science Monthly

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���engaged for eight years in carving scores of colossal figures, representing the Confederate Army and its famous generals on the march. The portait studies are all to be likenesses

��window he can increase or decrease the scale of the figtires.

Cut into the heart of the mountain will be a memorial hall, running the entire length of the colonnade. In this imper- ishable hall will be kept the valuable rec- ords and relics of the Daughters of the Confederacy, as well as records of the Southern States.

A park of eighty acres will be laid out at the foot of the mountain, and from its path a suitable view may be obtained of the principal figures carved in the rock.

The cost of the work, which is now es- timated at about two million dollars, will be raised by indixidual contributions from the entire people of the South. It is said that several wealthy people have of- fered to finance the entire project, but it was deemed best to make this a popular undertaking, so that it may more truly represent the spirit of the American South.

The Bridge That Telephones Built

THE building of the great railroad bridge which spans Hell Gate, was greatly expedited by the telephone. The work started last January, and in Oc- tober of last year the steel arms that had been insistently creeping over the river from shore to shore were joined with the aid of a telephone system, which

��in itself was a fitting climax to one of the greatest construction feats the world has ever seen.

Telephones were located in the power houses, the offices, in the erector cabins, at the jacks, at the compressor house and on the structure in close proximity to the boss riveters.

The critical moment came on the day when both arms were completed and were ready to be lowered into alinement. The completed arms hung in midair ex- actly twenty-two and one-half inches out of alinement. The traveling erectors had been shoved out to the last eighth of an inch, another shove and they would have tipped everything over, and ruined a year's work, to say nothing of some twelve million dollars in steel.

Gages were aftixed to the sides of the final beams marked off to the thirty- second of an inch, and at the exact spot the foreman stood with the telephone at- tached to a girder directly in front of him and with every station cut in and open. Every man knew his job and every man repeated back his telephonic order. It was a gigantic and res|)onsible task to put up to the telephone, but the 'phone faultlessly carried the orders of the fore- man -over steel girders and under the East River to the men who stood at the pumps, the erectors and the riveting machines.

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