80 



Popular Science Monthly 



The wgj^r is shot out from 

 the nozzles at the rate of one 

 thousand gallons a minute 



Cooling Off a River with Its 



. Own Water ,, 



'T^.HE- large manyjacturing 



X plants of the'Wdstinghouse 

 Company in Pennsylvania re- 

 quire a whole river of cool water 

 to run them efficiently. The 

 water is needed to condense the*steam which 

 has been used to drive the steam-engines. 

 After serving this purpose in the first few 

 plants, the water becomes hot, and unless 

 it is artificially cooled, it is unfit for further 

 use. In the summer, the temperature of 

 the river often reaches nearly a hundred 

 degrees. 



By artificially cooling the river, thou- 

 sands of dollars have been saved because of 

 the increased efficiency of the steam- 

 engines. To cool it off, the river's own 

 water is used as it emerges from the dis- 

 charge-tunnels of the plants. The hot 

 water from the tunnels is forced by two 

 huge centrifugal pumps into a battery of 

 forty-five large nozzles. These are stretched 

 along a large cast-iron pipe, six hundred 

 feet long, and a continuous spray is formed 

 which reaches fnr out into the river. Each 

 spray is directed against another, and the 

 collision breaks up the sprays into particles 

 microscopically small but millions in num- 

 ber which of course, quickly cool as they 

 travel through the air. When they finally 

 fall and- mingle again the whole river is 

 cooled more than twenty degrees. 



Such a spray is a rare spectacle when 

 the sun shines on it. The particles of 

 water shot out from the nozzle at the rate 

 of one thousand gallons a minute form a 

 continuous rainbow. 



Felling a Stack of Steel by 

 Means of a Flame 



THE felling. of this great 

 steel stack below was 

 accomplished by means of a 

 single oxy-acetylene cutting- 

 torch. 



Acetylene-gas was stored 

 under great pressure in a steel 

 tank and as it slowly issued 

 from the tank into the torch it 

 was ignited. As the acetylene 

 burned in the air a great 

 r.mount of heat was devel- 

 oped; but when oxygen was 

 turned on from another tank, 

 the heat then developed was 

 many times greater. In fact, so hot was 

 the small flame that it bit into the solid 

 metal as if it had been so much putty. 

 The places that were cut being carefully 

 selected near the bottom of the stack, 

 the huge column of steel was made to 

 fall in a predetermined spot. 



The stack was on the old Harrison 

 Street station of the Commonwealth 

 Edison Company, in Chicago, now being 

 dismantled to make way for a new sixty 

 million dollar terminal. 



This huge steel stack was felled in a few min- 

 utes by the flame of an oxy-acetylene torch 



