Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/748

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��Popular Science Monthly

��Making Money Out of Waste Land With a Stream of Water AS Henry Ford was laughed at when Jr\. he claimed he would make a success- ful automobile, so Harlan K. Whitney, a civil engineer, caused much merriment

���The new residence addition of Battle Creek, Mich., which was formerly a waste of marshes and ugly hills

��principles to waste real estate is bound to change Mr. Whitney from an engineer of moderate means to a land owner of wealth. There will be at least one hundred lots in a most desirable location, whose total value should run close to one h und red thousand dollars. The cost was only nominal.

The reclaiming of many acres of useless land has been effected in many American cities, notably Washington and New York, and in many ways ; but the use of hydraulic power for that purpose is an innovation.

��when about two years ago he bought twenty acres of the most useless land on the outskirts of Battle Creek, Mich.

The property was about evenly divided between rolling hills and squashy marshes. To-day the hills have been dumped into the marshes and leveled off, and soon Mr. Whitney will open his new addition of six blocks, which are less than three quarters of a mile from the business district, and only a block from a street-car line.

It is doubtful whether the power of hy- draulics has ever before been used in the State of Michigan for this purpose. One hundred and twenty-five thousand yards of earth have been washed away, and about twenty acres graded. Some hills were twenty-five feet high.

The apparatus used was simple — so simple in fact, that it caused about as much ridicule as the suggestion that the land could be reclaimed. Two two- inch streams from an eight-inch well were pumped with a two-stage centrifu- gal pump. The water was carried some- times as far as six hundred feet, sheet- iron sluices conveying away the used liquid with the sand and gravel driven before it. For a long time the water was turned back into the well, allowed to settle, then pumped over again.

His application of hydraulic mining

���How the work was done. The hills were

washed away with water which carried the

mud formed down into the marshes

Purifying Iron in a Vacuum

AN entirely new method of producing L pure iron is reported to have been discovered by Trygve Yensen, an as- sistant in the engineering experiment station at the University of Illinois. This discovery was made during an investigation of the magnetic properties of iron and iron alloys. His method con- sists in melting electrically refined iron in a vacuum, which reduces the impuri- ties far below any point which had been reached by any previous investigator. The magnetic properties of this vacuum- fused iron have proved to be remarkable.

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