Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/703

 Popular Science Monthly

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��Giant Slabs of Marble to Commemorate Abraham Lincoln

THK largest stone in the great Lincoln Memorial has been swung into place. There are three of these slabs of marble all of the same size, and they arc reputed to be the largest ever set in any structure in this country. Each is more than six feet high and more than nineteen feet long and weighs about twenty-eiglit tons.

The big blocks came from a quarry in Colorado which is situated just below the perpetual snow-line of the Rockies, on the eastern slope of the Great Divide. It is the boast of this quarry that it can get out in one solid mass a block of marble as big as any derrick can lift. The fact is that modern mechanical appliances for the hoist- ing of giant slabs have transformed quarrying. While the old- time quarrymen worked under unfavorable conditions, and occasionally succeeded in ship- ping a large slab to a cus- tomer, the modern man works with improved apparatus and deals in tons instead of pounds. The strides made in transportation facilities enable

��iiim to sliip an expensive piece of stone with the assurance that it will reach its destination safely.

According to Henry Bacon, the archi- tect of the Lincoln Memorial, there arc more than eight hundred pieces of stone in the structure. These weigh from twelve to twenty-five tons each. No other piece of architecture in the world can boast of such construction. It reminds one of the giant stones of the pyramids of Egypt.

��Meerschaum as a Building Material in Spain

EVEN the most aesthetically inclined of our American millionaires would hardly consider the luxury ot living in a residence built of meerschaum as within the range of their fortunes, yet there are many unpretentious houses of this material in the Spanish town of Val- lecas, near Madrid, where a coarse variety of this substance may be found.

Oddh' enough, just across the Straits are the Moroccans, who have discovered that still another varie- ty of meerschaum lathers freely and makes a good substitute for the ordinary toilet soap.

���Th(j laiycil pieces of marble ever set in any structure in lliis country have been swung into place in the Lincoln Memorial. Each one of these giant slabs weighs twenty-eiglit tons

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