Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1901 — FOUNDED ON NOVELS. [ARTICLE]

FOUNDED ON NOVELS.

fortunes Built from the Imaginative Pages of Fiction. Oxygen parties are now the rage in fashionable circles. The gas has the property of reviving tired nerves and bodies in a way which no tonic can equal. It is supplied in tanks, and the guests inhale it through long tubes just as Turkish smokers do tobacco smoke from a hookah. The firm of Elsworth, who supply the gas, is rapidly reaping a fortune, and this fortune they will owe, indirectly at least, to the novelist, Jules Verne. One of Jules Verne’s books—“ Dr. Ox’s Experiment”—deals with a scientist who flooded a little sleepy Dutch town with oxygen, and thereby produced fruit and vegetables such as the world had never before seen. Incidentally, Its effect was also to render the phlegmatic Dutchmen violently Quarrelsome. The perusal of this book gave the head of a firm of chemical engineers the idea which is now causing such delight to bored people of fashion. Jules Verne, with his wonderful prophecies and inventions, which have, since he wrote of them, become actual facts, is responsible for more than one individual rising from poverty to riches. No one was ever more fascinated by a story than was Claude Leverson by Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” In this book the novelist describes how a party climbed down the crater of an extinct Icelandic volcano, anad so reached the inner recesses of the earth. Young Leverson, who was at school when he read the book, made up his mind to copy the adventures of his hero, and many years afterward did actually explore the craters of a number of unmapped peaks in New Granada. It was in 1894, while camped on the shores of the river which tills the old crater pit at the top of the Shn Geronimo Mountain, that he made his famous discovery of the Geronimo emerald field, which has since made him one of the five richest men on the South American continent. In Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” the people of the world, as it is to he a couple of centuries hence, use no money at all. It Is, therefore, ratlief curious that the hook should have been the means of bringing a large fortune to an enterprising American who started a colony in Mexico on the lines laid down by Bellamy. Th colonists used no money, but they grew immense quantities of fruit and corn, which their manager, whose name was Dalby, sold for the public good, and bought with the money such supplies as they needed. No one seems to have called on Dalby for accounts of his transactions; but one day he disappeared, and it was found that he

had taken with him nearly $75,000, whlci his colonists had been kind enough to make for him. A writer who Is still alive is responsible for the millions of James McKenna, the finder of the Half-Moon Creek diggings in Alaska. It was a poem of Bret Harte’s, written thirty years ago, which put it into v McKenna’s head to go to Alaska. In the poem im question Bret Harte describes a miner as wielding his pick in the midst of snow and ice in Alaska. Why shouldn’t there be gold up there? thought McKenna, although none was then known of. He reached the country two years before the Klondike rush, and attributes all Ills good fortune to his favorite poet.