Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic]

BROADSIDE VIEW OF HYDRAULIC DREDGE.
Suction pipe drawn up out of service.

sills are 33 feet below the normal low-
water level. The embankments of the
canal are for the most part in low ground;
and the slopes are protected by stone,
pitching from 61⁄2 feet below the water
to 34 feet above it. The sharpest curve
has 3,300 feet radius; and at all curves
the canal is widened, according to the
curvature, from 34 feet to 52% feet.

From its commencement near Brunsbüttel, the canal runs northeasterly, the route lying chiefly through marshes and shallow lakes and along river valleys. Two-thirds of the total excavation was mainly of boulder clay, with layers of liquid peat and sand, and could be excevated in the dry. This excavated material was used partly for raising the tracts of land by the sides of the canal, and partly for filling the lakes through which the canal passed. One-third of the excavation was of boggy soil and had to be dredged, a portion of this material being afterwards carried into the open sea. So little consistence had this boggy soil that in places-such as the Meckel Moor, for example-it was carried

behind the dikes in a line of floating pipes, 2,000 feet long.

In the work of excavation, there were employed, altogether, 46 dredges and elevators and 247 steamers and vessels of all sorts. There were also 94 loco-. motive engines and 2,756 trucks employed to remove the dredged material. In some of the low lands much difficulty was experienced in digging out the earth, but the difficulty was not so much an engineering problem as one calling for ingenuity to surmount. The sandy soil, formerly the bed of the sea and sometimes containing an admixture of clay, lay at a depth of 26 to 33 feet below the surface; and the bed of the canal is, therefore, on firm ground. But above this, the clay was soft and overlaid by a bed of marshy soil, floating sand, and sedge peat, between sixteen and twenty-six feet thick. This material was too soft to form the banks of the canal, which had to be made of sand brought from the rear.

About four miles inland from Brunsbüttel, it began to be necessary to make the dikes for the canal by depositing the

[graphic]

LONG DISCHARGE PIPES OF HYDRAULIC DREDGE.

Dredges of this type were first used in the construction of the Kiel Canal.

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small]

dams on each side, the profile of the canal was successfully cut. In a distance of six miles, no less than 2,362,000 cubic yards were thus deposited.

The single mishap during the entire work occurred at the terminus on the North Sea. The quay walls of the inner harbor of the Elbe lock rest on piles in marshy soil. When, after the completion of the piles, the soil between them. was excavated, one of them yielded to the outside pressure, but it was soon repaired. Apart from this, the only mishaps were a few unimportant slips here and there, as already mentioned.

The eight or ten thousand workmen employed on the canal were housed and boarded in barracks built and managed

Commission, but arrangements were also made with the various municipalities to take care of any cases requiring attention.

The canal is crossed by two road bridges, five railway bridges, and sixteen wire-rope ferries. The road bridge at Haltenau is carried on double pontoons; and that at Rendsburg, sustaining the road to Itzehoe, has a hydraulic swingspan of 164 feet; the two railway swing bridges at Rendsburg, of 164 feet span, bear each one line of the Rendsburg-Neumenster Railway, and that at Taterpfhal, three miles from Brunsbüttel, the single line of the Elmshorn-Hvidding Railway. The West Holstein Railway and a road cross the canal

at Grunenthal on an arch bridge of 514feet span, 137.8 feet in height. The KielFlushing Railway and the Kiel-Eckeonforde road cross at Levansan.

The Kiel canal is excellently protected at both ends against the possible attack of hostile vessels. The entrance from the Baltic is two miles south of Friedrichsort, where the strongly fortified coasts of the bay are only 2,600 feet from each other. At the other end, the open sea, where a hostile fleet is not prevented from manoeuvering by the sand banks, lies at a distance of about thirty miles from the entrance; while the batteries on the island of Neuwerk would protect the passage of vessels turning the corner at Cuxhaven, in their course from Brunsbüttel to Wilhelmshafen, as the island lies north of that corner, and about twenty-two miles from the entrance of the canal.

The Kiel canal is a brilliantly illuminated waterway. Electric lights, 800 feet apart on tangents and much closer on the curves, give a full-moon glare from entrance to entrance, and even the fogs of winter interfere little with navigation.

As is usually noted in the case of great ship canals, the traffic on the Kaiser Wilhelm canal, during the first year after its opening, was disappointing. Against an

estimated revenue for the year of 5,000,000 marks, the total receipts amounted to only 900,000 marks. Only 750 steamers and 9,300 sailing vessels, mostly small ones, passed through. The amount of traffic, however, has steadily increased. During last year there were more than 35,000 vessels reported as having passed through the canal, and the total revenue amounted to more than 3,000,000 marks. In five years after its opening the traffic had more than doubled, and almost trebled as regards tonnage. An average of 500 war vessels pass through the canal each year, and the test as regards navigability for very large craft has been successfully met. Such deep-draught vessels as the German cruiser Fürst Bismarck and the Japanese cruiser Yakumo have passed through without accident and at a good rate of speed. There has been no interruption from ice, and it has been possible to maintain traffic even when the sound and the belt have been blocked with ice. It has recently been decided to greatly enlarge the canal so as to allow of the passage of war-ships of the latest type, which are of much larger tonnage than the largest in commission when the big ditch was dug. This work will cost many millions of dollars and take several years to complete.

[graphic]

Ultimate End of Small
Small Potatoes

P

By W. D. Graves

OTATOES are so universally an article of diet that they are rarely thought of in any other connection; and the assertion that they enter almost as universally into the makeup of the clothes we wear as into our food, would be apt to be received, by many, with some skepticism. Yet such statement would scarcely exceed the truth. Fully four-fifths of the solid matter in the ubiquitous tuber is starch; and potato starch, though costing rather more than that. derived from maize or wheat, is much preferred, and almost exclusively used, for sizing the yarns used in weaving cotton, wool, and silk goods.

Up in the northern extremity of Maine, where the average annual snowfall is about 110 inches, and where the growing season is barely five months long, in the county of Aroostook, which produces, on the soil where once grew the "punkin pine," of which old carpenters

speak reverently, more potatoes per acre than any other unirrigated land in the United States, are located about threefifths of the whole number of potatostarch factories in the country, making 6,000 of the 15,000 tons annually produced in "the realm of the good King Theodore."

There, planted by machinery, cultivated and dug by machines, are raised some of the finest "murphys" in the world, specially sought for the Boston and New York markets, and shipped for seed to all parts of the United States. But, for every barrel of the large, smooth tubers such as one sees in the city markets, there is half a barrel or more of small and inferior ones, which are worked into starch; while, in years of plenty and low prices, many of the finer ones go the same way.

Potatoes in Aroostook are as wheat in Dakota, and all calendars there begin and

[graphic][merged small]
« PreviousContinue »