On investigation, I learned that a fire had started in the tool-house from some cause unknown, and had proceeded long enough to get one side of the interior of the building well ablaze. As there were five gallons of denatured alcohol in the place, and the same quantity of gasoline, and about ten pounds of sulphuric ether, it is probable that one of these had become heated and, bursting, set free a lot of vapor which, mixing with the atmosphere, exploded. There were also in the building about thirty pounds of finely pulverized aluminum, ten pounds of magnesium powder and other ingredients for flashlight powders, with which I intended to conduct experiments. As these materials were not mixed, they were not explosive, but their combustion was what produced the wonderful light when the explosion occurred. The result was not like that from an explosion of dynamite, in which case the building would have been literally blown to fragments, but, as is usual in gas explosions, the roof of the building was lifted up, the sides thrown out, and the roof dropped in. Even the front door of the building, charred from the initial fire, was found otherwise intact. While sitting on the porch of my house on Lake Hopatcong, dictating this story to my stenographer, and when I had arrived at this point, she suddenly called to me, "Look!" pointing her finger across the Lake to a huge column of smoke going up from the Atlas Powder Works, and mushrooming out into the sky. The direct distance is about three miles, but it seemed quite a long time before we felt the shock and heard the sound. Although the sound was loud and the shock considerable, the sound was much louder and the shock much heavier even at longer distances in several directions, owing, I imagine, to the difference in the underlying strata of earth. As I learned later, the explosion took place at one of the packing houses, which carried another packing house with it, together with a nitroglycerin storehouse, so that about ten tons of dynamite, or its equivalent, went up in that column of smoke. I understand that seven men were killed, and about twice as many injured. It was the largest and most destructive explosion that had ever occurred at those works. WHEN THE WASH VANISHED I was once invited to speak at a County Fair at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I used to live when in the publishing business. My subject was Explosive Materials and Their Use in Warfare. The management was especially desirous that I should give my auditors some sort of spectacular demonstration, to show what explosives would do. A platform was erected in an open field, and I had an arena roped off at the rear of the platform about fifty feet wide, and running back several hundred feet. In the rear portion of this arena I buried several sticks of dynamite, and connected them with an exploder and a battery on the platform.