There were no surviving witnesses, not even the horses.
After I had sold the works at Maxim and had invented motorite, I needed a place in which to make the material, and hired a branch of the works there for that purpose.
It was winter. My wife had accompanied me as a precautionary measure. She was sitting in the laboratory to keep warm, near a big barrel stove charged with bituminous coal.
On entering the laboratory for something, my wife asked me what was in those two tin pails sitting near the stove. She said that she had a suspicion it might be nitroglycerin, and she informed me that one of my men had just been in, stirring the fire, and that the sparks flew out in all directions, some of them lighting in the buckets, to be quenched in the very thin film of water floating on top of the oily liquid.
"Horrors!" I said. "It _is_ nitroglycerin!"
I called the man who had placed it there, and told him to take it away. As it was necessary to keep the material from freezing, he took it into the boiler-house near by. A little later, on going into the boiler-house, I saw one of the men stirring the fire, while the other was standing with his coat-tails outstretched in either hand, forming a shield to keep the sparks from flying into the nitroglycerin.
It is practically impossible to make the ordinary man appreciate the necessity of care in the safe handling of explosives, and the life of the careful man is always endangered by the actions of the careless one.
My successors in the use of the dynamite plant at Maxim had in their employ a day-watchman, an all-round combination useful and useless man, his usefulness and uselessness alternating with the alternation of his sobriety and inebriety.
One morning, after a night out, he proceeded to build the fire in the laboratory stove. To start up the kindling wood, he had been in the habit of lighting a handful of shavings, and then pouring on a little kerosene from a tomato can, which he kept upon a near-by shelf.
During that night, someone--possibly one of the laboratory operatives--had placed a similar can, filled with nitroglycerin, upon the same shelf, to keep it from freezing.
In periods of convalescence from his various stages of intoxication, the watchman had before seen two cans upon that shelf or shelves, but he knew that one of them was real, and the other an hallucination. Couldn't fool him that way!