204 ALEXANDER H. FORD 



in this country so as to allow the silk manufacturer to under- 

 sell the Asiatics in their own markets, our inventors turned 

 their minds to inventing a machine that would do the work 

 of the coohe and separate the fibers of the ramie which grows 

 wild in many parts of America. After years of seemingly 

 hopeless experimenting, success has at last crowned their 

 efforts, and now a vegetable fiber finer than silk and much 

 more durable, can be placed on the market at a price within 

 reach of the poorest man. Again the American idea has 

 triumphed, a new crop will henceforth be grown in our south- 

 ern states, for the separator bears the same relation to ramie 

 that the gin does to cotton, and like the cotton gin, promises 

 to create another industrial revolution. 



The American contractor has such complete confidence 

 that the inventor will find a way that he often accepts 

 contracts which at the time of signing, seem impossible of 

 accomphshment. The digging of the Chicago drainage canal 

 caused the invention of many improved dredges and rock 

 cutting machinery, so that it was not so strange after all, when 

 foreign contractors and engineers refused to attempt the design 

 of dredges powerful enough to remove the sandbars of the 

 mighty Volga, that the Russian government, after first send- 

 ing its minister of rail and waterways to America to learn our 

 methods, imported a young engineer from the banks of the 

 Chicago river, commanding him to accomplish what Europe 

 had declared impossible. It is not strange that his success, 

 which was marked, caused the governments of India and 

 Australia to rescind their determination not to spend another 

 pound on dredges for their rivers, so that to-day American 

 dredges are accomplishing results in Europe, Asia, and 

 Australia, which were despaired of by British mechanics. 

 These mighty dredges, patterned after, but much larger than 

 those on the Mississippi, are as completely automatic in their 

 working as the latest inventions in electricity and compressed 

 air devices can make them. 



In many American shops, to encourage the men to 

 make improvements in the machinery, the inventor of any 

 new labor saving device is allowed to draw the wages he has 

 saved the firm, and the foreman encourages the man of ideas, 



