Popular Science Monihly 



845 



An Electric Endless-Chain 

 Barge-Loader 



A LARGE jubhcr of build- 

 ing material at Wheel- 

 ing, West Virginia, recently 

 had a serious problem to face 

 in the way of expensive hand- 

 ling of materials. On one 

 large contract he had no 

 jilace to unload his materials 

 from the barges on the Ohio 

 River except at the public 

 wharf. No permanent un- 

 loading machinery could be 

 built at that point. It was 

 necessary to sho\'el the sand 

 and gra\el into the dump 

 wagons from the barges. Fin- 

 ally he de\ised the endless- 

 chain loader shown in the 

 accompan>'ing illustration. 



This machine is operated by 

 a tive-horsepowcr motor, and 

 current is supplied by the 

 local electric company. By 

 hand-loading, it required two men fifteen 

 minutes to load a one and one-half-\'ard 

 dump-wagon, whereas, with the loading 

 machine, the same wagon can be loaded 

 in less than two minutes. 



Stilts Instead of Overshoes 

 for Muddy Crossings 



AMERICANS find it more dif^cult than 

 the English to understand what 

 Dickens means when he says in David 

 Copperfield, "Women went clicking along 

 the pavement in pattens." Pattens 

 were an abbreviated form of stilts. 

 The word is also used by builders as 

 the name of the base of a column 

 or pillar, and so, architecturally, 

 the patten is the supi)f)ri 

 used by a woman to keep 

 her out of the water and 

 mud. From this architec- 

 tural use has corne the 

 secondary application 

 of the word, meaning 

 an arrangement at- 

 tached to the shoe, as 

 shown in the illustra- 

 tion, so that the walker 

 is raised three or four 

 inches above the solid 

 earth. If the mud and 

 water did not exceed 

 that depth the shoes 

 werethuskeptfairlydry. 



Pattens— a necessi- 

 ty in the old days 



An endless-chain loader built to save time and money 

 in unloading sand and gravel in large quantities 



It appears that pattens were not worn 

 solely by the rich, but were luxuries 

 indulged in by the very poor. In speaking 

 of a person who was not especialh" speedy, 

 Ben Johnson uses the comparison, "You 

 make no more haste now than a beggar 

 upon pattens." In the ballad of Farmer's 

 Old Wife occurs this startling expression: 

 "She up with her pattens, and beat out 

 their brains." 



This would lead us to belic\-e that al- 

 though the mothers of those days may have 

 believed in applying a slipper occasionally 

 to that portion of a child's anatomy where 

 there is least danger of inflicting injury to 

 \ital parts, it was certainly not done 

 with pattens. In those early times 

 w (imcn belie\ed that they must walk 

 ^ in tills startling inconvenient wa>-, 

 high in the air, to keep out of the 

 mud and water. Then came 

 the era when rubber overshoes 

 were worn and now, judging 

 from obserA-ations made even 

 on coimtry roads, women 

 disdain any protection and 

 go plowing through the 

 mud with thin low shoes, 

 that \\ ere whiteonce. There 

 is an awful series 

 of degenerations 

 from the patten 

 to white slippers 

 in tile mud. 



