Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/230

 214

��Popular Science Monthly

���I Proisis Jliius. Scrv.

��New York's skyline by night is the most impressive sight of its kind in the world. The night the Statue of Liberty was illuminated, at which time the above photograph was taken, the buildings on Manhattan's shoreline stood out in brilliant array, a light in every window. The buildings

��slightly darker pieces inserted here and there variously down to the base of the flame, where the darkest of the tints defined the lines of the bronze of the torch against the glass of the flame.

It took six hundred pieces of glass, each about one ' inch square, to complete the glass area of the torch. The glass is so fixed to the ribs that any section may be replaced at any time from the inside. Spring clips and non-hard- ening putty, separatin g the glass from the brass bolts which hold the plates to the ribs, pro- vide a resili- ency which practically insures the glass torch flame against breakage.

To make the torch represent a burning flame, fifteen five- hundred

���At the moment the statue was bathed in light Ruth Law, the flyer, swept like a comet across the sky, two streams of white magnesium flame trailing behind her aeroplane

��candlepower gas-filled electric lamps were connected with a flasher. A flasher is merely a rotating drum containing surface projections which close the lamp circuits every time they hit a stationary piece of metal. The flasher connected with the Statue of Liberty lights is not set to certain revolutions, the experts preferring to allow it to carry out the unsteady flicker and blaze of the burning torch. The torch

also contains a lighthouse lens, nine and one half inches in di- ameter and fifteen inches deep. Thus the torch sends out a flickering light and a constant glow.

The sources of the flood lights are fifteen batter- ies of projec- tors. Eleven of these batteries are

�� �