CHAPTER 1X 
INVENTIONS AND WARFARE 
OON after my return from my 1905 trip to 
Africa I got my attention turned away from 
taxidermy for a little while in a curious fash- 
ion. The Field Museum was still in the old Colum- 
bian Exposition Building in which it had started. 
The outside of this stucco building kept peeling so 
that it had a very disreputable appearance. The 
Park Department protested to the museum authori- 
ties. I happened to be in the museum one day when 
one of the officers had this on his mind and he said: 
“Akeley, how are we going to get the outside of this 
building respectable at a reasonable cost?” 
I got to thinking about it. In the many experi. 
ments of one kind and another that I had tried in 
working out methods for manikin making I had 
among other things used a compressed air spray. It 
occurred to me that it would be possible to make an 
apparatus on this principle that would spray a very 
liquid concrete on to the side of a building. I set to 
work and rigged up a somewhat crude apparatus and 
set it up outside the museum building. It was not 
a finished piece of mechanism and it had the further 
disadvantage of having its compressed air come quite 
a long way in a hose. Nevertheless it worked, and 
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