Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/443

 Popular Science Monthly

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���If you want to know why cotton is contraband of war this picture will tell you. It shows a Russian mine which ran ashore on the Baltic Sea and which the Germans ex- ploded. As in all modern mines the charge was composed of a high explosive made by the proper chemical treatment of cotton. The war is actually being fought with cotton — cotton grown upon the peaceful southern plantations of the United States, So long as cotton is obtainable these high explosives can be manufactured in great quantities. Nat- urally, the warring countries who can secure unlimited control of the cotton supply make themselves just that much more formidable to their enemies. Great Britain watches with never-closed eyes every shipload of cotton leaving the United States

���You read of "craters" in the newspapers — great holes produced either by the explosion of some huge shell or of some subterranean mine. This is a photograph of a type of crater produced by a mine. Surely the men in this war live on the crests of volcanoes — not figura- tively, but literally. At any moment the soldiers in the trenches may be blown to atoms by mines charged with high explosives made from guncotton. The tremendous expansive power of guncotton when exploded, will lift many million times its own weight of matter, with a suddenness that prevents any possibility of escape for those who are within its rflnge

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