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starve the rebellious farmers into submission. The planters are poor, and, inasmuch as they cannot possibly live for a year and a half without any money, they would be likely under such circumstances to succumb.

There is a bright tobacco district in Virginia, another in northern Kentucky, and another in North Carolina. The Kentucky planters have their headquarters at Lexington. A short time ago, being seized with an idea, they asked the warehouse owners of Louisville to advance money on their tobacco, so that they could hold it until the market needed it-the idea being to prevent the Octopus from getting hold of it and storing it away. Their astonishment as well as dismay may be imagined, when they ascertained that the warehouses were owned by the American Tobacco Company.

Texas, where a particularly excellent cigar tobacco is being grown from Cuban seed. The total number of acres devoted to the weed in the United States, however, has greatly diminished during the last half-dozen years-a fact made sufficiently evident by the figures already given, relating to the annual output. Á drop of 235,129,556 pounds during that length of time in one of our most important crops, affords a vivid notion of the amount of damage that can be done to our national prosperity by a single unscrupulous combination of capital.

During the calendar year 1905, we exported 292,925,181 pounds of tobacco. Of this output, Austria (the Italian Purchasing System incidentally supplies the Austrian Government) took the best; Italy absorbed the next best quality; Germany, the next; France, the next; and Spain, the poorest and cheapest. From

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this statement, which may be accepted as official, one is able to judge of the degree of connoisseurship which the various peoples of Europe may be said to exhibit in regard to the narcotic weed.

At the same time, it is almost impossible for an American to find a cigar or even a pipe tobacco anywhere in Europe that to his taste seems good, simply for the reason that the herb, in crossing the ocean, undergoes a change which spoils it for us. A Havana cigar is quite a different thing over there. But the Europeans enjoy the flavor given by the saltwater passage; and the Germans actually prefer tobacco that has made the voyage by sail, thus absorbing more of the air of the sea. They even want it to make the trip in warm weather, when the absorption is more rapid.

One may regard the rebellion of the dark tobacco farmers against the Trust

as rather a unique event in industrial history. It is probably the only recorded instance in which the producers of a great agricultural crop have risen against an oppressive monopoly and fought it successfully. successfully. The Octopus, it is true, has not yet given up the struggle, and it holds an unrelaxed grip upon the growers of the herb for domestic consumption; but it has received a sickening blow; and so far as present indications show, the time is likely to arrive before long when organization among the tobacco planters of the entire country will be so far perfected as to enable them to defy control by any combination of capital-a of capital-a situation. situation which, once achieved, will inevitably raise the price paid to the farmers and, as a result, expand the territory devoted to the weed, augmenting the annual output proportionately.

Tiny Master of Vast Engines

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By Charles Frederick Carter

Na large building beside the Hudson, near the upper end of Manhattan Island, a rank of enormous engines is neatly aligned like a file of soldiers on parade. To any one not on terms of intimate daily association with them the presence of this battery of engines is awe-inspiring. They are so large that the oilers climbing around on their steel ladders suggest ants crawling over a barrel. Their intricate equipment of cylinders and steam chests and drums and pipes and stuffing boxes and valves and rods and levers, the noise and the motion, create an overwhelming impression of power.

In a corner much too small to afford room for one of the great engines stands a cylindrical object of comparatively modest size, unlike anything usually found in engine rooms. Not a sound

comes from it, no vibration can be felt, nothing can be seen in motion. There is nothing about it to suggest vast power.

Yet this unobtrusive steel cylinder is the apotheosis of the steam engine, the goal toward which inventive genius has been groping for two thousand years. The nebulous idea which first presented itself to the perceptions of Hero, of Alexandria, one hundred and twenty years before Christ was born, which has baffled the brains of the ablest experimenters in thermo-dynamics in the age of steam, has at last attained its perfect form in the mind of a New York engineer. The concrete expression of the idea stands on a circular floor space fifteen feet in diameter-a steam turbine capable of generating 7,000 horsepower.

While only one-eighth the weight of metal required to build one of the vertical compound units at the other end of the

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room was used in its construction, the steam turbine generates nearly fifty per cent more power than one of the big engines. Without audibly proclaiming its achievement, the steam turbine yields a third more power for every pound of coal consumed than the noisy giants sprawled over the rest of the engine There is no heavy odor of hot

MEDIUM PRESSURE ROTAR, WITH BUCKETS READY TO GO INTO 120-INCH TURBINE.

oil hanging about it to remind the owner of an important item in his operating expenses, for the steam turbine doesn't take oil, thank you. It sticks to cold water with a steadfastness which should win the admiration of the W. C. T. U. and thereby reduces friction to the vanishing point.

The steam turbine is not only Japanese in efficiency, but it is also a very Chinaman for perversity. All accepted ideas regarding the essential features of steam engines must be discarded in considering the steam turbine. That which an engine has, the turbine has not. In a steam turbine there are no "dead centers" where the development of power comes

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to a full stop and begins over again. twice in every revolution-as in a reciprocating engine-for it has no piston, no cross-head, no crank pin, no connecting rod, no valves and no eccentrics. It has nothing which can be adjusted with a monkey-wrench, nothing which will yield to a soft hammer, nothing susceptible to the insinuation of the steel bar. The steam turbine is tool-proof.

The cosmopolitan character of the steam turbine is rounded out by a capacity for increase in size which, like the capital stock of a modern corporation, is limitless. While reciprocating engines are by their very nature limited in size, turbines of 7,000 horsepower are common, a number of 16,000 horsepower have been constructed and there are no practical difficulties in the way of building them of 50,000 horsepower if need be.

To the extent that power is generated by the impact of a fluid upon buckets or vanes on the periphery of a wheel a steam turbine is like a water turbine; but there the resemblance ends. In a water turbine the fluid always has the same volume and temperature, and so the energy it exerts is always the same. Steam, on the other hand, varies within wide limits as its temperature and pressure change. For instance, 141 cubic feet of saturated steam at 200 pounds pressure produces 1,647 cubic feet at atmospheric pressure; and if the pressure be reduced to six-tenths of a pound, one-fourth of the steam would be condensed and the volume of steam and water combined would be 25,500 cubic feet. In a water turbine, if the water were delivered upon the wheel under a head of 150 feet its velocity would be 96 feet in a second and a cubic foot of it would have a kinetic energy of 9,000 foot pounds. A cubic foot of steam at 50 pounds pressure has so small a mass that in order to produce the same amount of energy it must move at the rate of 2,200 feet in a second. If steam at a pressure of 150 pounds is allowed to expand into a 28-inch vacuum, which is as near a perfect vacuum as it is possible to obtain in ordinary work, it will move at the rate of 4,010 feet in a second, or 45.6 miles a minute. If it were possible to produce a perfect vacuum between New York and Chicago along the shortest rail route a jet of steam introduced

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at one end of the line would travel in 21 minutes the distance the fastest trains in the world require 18 hours to traverse.

It was this property of steam which prevented the perfection of the steam turbine long ago. Some idea of the difficulty of mastering the problem as well as the vast amount of effort bestowed upon it may be gathered from the fact that in the last 120 years no fewer than 429 patents relating to steam turbines were granted in England alone; yet it was not until 1883 that a steam turbine which would work was produced, and up to the present but three types have been able to attain any degree of commercial

success.

The first successful steam turbine was produced in 1883 by Dr. Carl Patrick Gustaf de Laval, a Swedish scientist. De Laval directed jets of steam, expanded by being introduced through the small end of a cone-shaped nozzle, like the nozzle of a garden hose turned wrong end to, upon a row of tiny buckets upon a single small wheel enclosed in a chamber. The velocity of this small wheel was so tremendous that it had to be mounted upon a flexible shaft and the

speed had to be reduced by a ten to one gearing to make the power available at all. In the larger sizes the turbine wheel revolves with a peripheral velocity of 1,200 feet per second. De Laval solved but half the problem, for he could not control the steam. It has not been found practical to build De Laval steam turbines of more than 300-horsepower and its field of usefulness is restricted.

A year after De Laval obtained his patent, C. A. Parsons, of England, found that he could control the speed of rotation of a steam turbine by using the same steam upon a number of wheels in succession. This meant that turbines of any size and for any purpose could be built. The problem was finally solved.

Roughly speaking, the Parsons turbine is a horizontal cylinder within which is a shaft on which are a number of steel wheels from fourteen inches to three feet in diameter and an inch to two inches in thickness, with little concave brass buckets or vanes set close together upon their rims. Between each pair of wheels is a stationary raised ring of buckets on the inside of the cylinder, with their concave surfaces facing in the opposite direction

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In foreground, 27-inch turbine with top laid bare; in background, 120-inch turbine.

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