We then walked another half-mile to a farmhouse, where a horse and wagon were procured. Thence I was driven to Farmingdale, four and a half miles distant, where I had to wait two hours for the next train to New York.
The only physician in the town was an invalid, ill with tuberculosis. I called on him while waiting, and condoled with him, as he was much worse off than was I.
On arrival in New York, I was taken in a carriage to the elevated station at the Brooklyn Bridge. On reaching my station at Eighty-fourth Street, I walked four blocks, and then up four flights of stairs to my apartments on Eighty-second Street, where the surgeon was awaiting me. It was now evening, and the accident had occurred at half-past ten o'clock in the morning. That was a pretty hard day!
As I had no electric lights in the apartments, only gas, the surgeon declared that it would be dangerous to administer ether, and that he must, therefore, chloroform me. He added that there was no danger in using chloroform, if the patient had a strong heart. Thereupon I asked him to examine my heart, since, if there should be the least danger of my dying under the influence of the anesthetic, I wanted to make my will.
"Heart!" exclaimed the surgeon, with emphasis. "A man who has gone through what you have gone through today _hasn't_ any heart!"
The next day I dictated letters to answer my correspondence as usual. The young woman stenographer, who took my dictation, remarked, with a sardonic smile:
"You, too, have now become a shorthand writer."
The grim jest appealed to my sense of humor.
On the third day I was genuinely ill and had no wish to do business. Within ten days, however, I was out again, attending to my affairs.
About the first use of nitroglycerin in the United States as a blasting agent on a large scale was in the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts, on the Boston and Albany Railroad.
So many accidents had occurred where the use of nitroglycerin had been attempted, that engineers and contractors were afraid to employ it. Nobel, however, had discovered that when nitroglycerin was absorbed in infusorial earth, it was rendered much less sensitive. This material he called dynamite.
A chemist by the name of Professor Mowbray believed that the main trouble with nitroglycerin had been that it was not sufficiently purified in its manufacture. He induced the builders of the Hoosac Tunnel to try his product. He built a laboratory on the side of Hoosac Mountain, over the village of North Adams, where he produced the stuff.