Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 May 1901 — Erratic Nitro-Glycerlne. [ARTICLE]

Erratic Nitro-Glycerlne.

Long experience commonly makes the oil well shooter unconsciously, if not avowedly, a fatalist Nitroglycerine would make a fatalist of any man. It is a substance that Is likely to do almost anything except what is predicted of it. A ten-quart can of It had been dropped off the roof of a house with no disastrous consequences, while it Is on record that a man. In passing a can that had been emptied and that was lying beside a forest path, struck it with his walking stick and was promptly blown into a neighboring tree-top. Instances are numerous where workmen have “thawed out” the erratic fluid by standing the cans on top of a hot stove and have continued to eat three meals a day, and yet the dropping of a piece of hot iron intc a tub of water In which such cans hi.' been standing wrecked a building and the adjoining derrick. Instances such as these could be multipl’<sd from the annals of the oil country and serve to show how unreliable nitro-glycerine is. As one shooter expressed it: “If only a man sticks to this business long enough, he is pretty certain sooner or late.* to be spread all over the next county.”—Frank Les lie’s Popular Monthly.