At my laboratory near Lake Hopatcong, one of the natives, who had made a reputation as a well-digger, and claimed to be able to descend through more rock in a day than could any other living man, thought that his strenuous habitude would adapt him to the manufacture of explosive materials, and with this in view he applied to me for a position.

My foreman gave him a job in which his duty was to assist with the rolling of motorite. The foreman gave the fellow explicit instructions about the care necessary to keep his fingers from getting in between the rollers, as it would not only prove uncomfortable for him were he to shed a finger or a hand, but it would also spoil the motorite by mixing it with his lacerations.... Almost at once, the end of one finger went.

Immediately, the well-digger was discharged, for his own sake and for the sake of motorite.

The man next took a contract to dig a well for one of the cottagers on the Lake. It was in the early winter. The weather was cold, and his dynamite froze very hard. He placed it in a bucket of boiling hot water, which thawed the outer stratum of the frozen stick, overheating it and rendering it very sensitive, while the core remained frozen solid.

He was too active and impatient a workman to wait long for a stick of dynamite to thaw, so he took the partly thawed stick, seized a hatchet, and proceeded to chop off one end of it.

The blow of the ax upon the soft, overheated, highly sensitive portion, compressing it against the frozen interior, which served as an anvil, exploded the stick. There was one finger and the thumb left on his right hand which held the ax, while his left hand, which had held the dynamite, and his whole left arm, were blown away.

When he looked about him with the one astonished eye that was left, he seemed pained that his old friend dynamite had gone back on him in that way.