Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/857

 Popular Science Monthly

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��A New Way of Loading Steamers from Freight Cars

AN unusual handling plant designed L to reduce the time in transferring pig-iron, coal, steel and various other bulk materials from gondola cars to boats, has been installed by a large steamship company at Cleve- land, Ohio.

��profit by experience. Writing of the bad condition of the roads in England in 1685, Macaulay says:

"The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difificulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. ... In the seven- teenth century the inhabitants of Lon-

���A gigantic locomotive-crane empties coal into the one-hundred-ton concrete bin from which it is loaded into carts through three hand-operated gates

��A one-hundred-ton concrete bin, held above the ground by steel beams, is situated midway between the freight tracks and the steamship. A locomotive crane on the tracks transfers the material from the cars into the bin. Two-ton carts are hauled under the bin, and the coal drops into them through three hand-operated gates. As soon as the carts are filled, they are drawn to the steamship by means of electric trucks equipped with storage batteries. It is said that this plant has proved a decided success and has largely reduced the handling costs of i)ulk materials.

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��Bad Roads Make Bad Going T is no truer that history repeats itself than that men, in general, do not

��don were for almost every practical pur- pose, farther from Reading than they now are from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna. . . . When Prince George of Denmark visited the stately mansion of Petworth in wet weather, he was six hours going nine miles.

All this was the condition of highway traffic in England two hundred and thirty-one years ago and it can be duplicated in many parts of the United States today. It has been estimated by careful government experts that only about 150,000 miles of really first-rate modern highways are to be found in the United States; the total mileage of public roads in January, 1915, was 2,273,131.

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