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Page 12
He tried jets of steam and of air with sand, and found that he could
roughen a pane of glass almost instantly. By coating a part of the
glass with hot beeswax, applied with a brush, through a stencil, or
covering it with paper cut into any desired figures, he could engrave
the most delicate and intricate patterns as readily as if plain. Glass
is often made all white, except a very thin coating of brilliant
colored glass on one side. This he could cut through, leaving letters
of brilliant color and the general surface white, or _vice versa_.
Seal cutting is a very delicate and difficult art, old as the Pharaohs.
Protect the surface that is to be left, and the sand blast will cut out
the required design neatly and swiftly.
There is no known substance, not even corundum, hard enough to resist
the swift impact of myriads of little stones.
It will cut more granite into shape in an hour than a man can in a day.
Surely no one will be sorry to learn that General Tilghman sold part of
his patents, taken out in October, 1870, for $400,000, and receives the
untold benefits of the rest to this day. So much for thinking.
Nature gives thousands of hints. Some can take them; some can only
take the other thing. The hints are greatly preferred by nature and
man.
CREATIONS NOW IN PROGRESS
The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them?
Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted
not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works.
"Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me,"
says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted
below.
Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for
lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it
has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was
regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that
$15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The
glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take
about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.
Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and
compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of
charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as
yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make
diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we
have not yet attained the mastery of.
We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would
enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc.,
"Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect
palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact
architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for
crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power
to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them
together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms
as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by
one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact
as a diamond.
The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in
making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making
of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.
While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we
can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section
of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down
in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore
into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and
chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any
direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what
sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only
where they know that value lies.
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