enough current is stored UD in these batteries to supply the house for a week. By an ingenious device, the engine, which is self-starting, is automatically shut off as soon as the batteries are charged. The automatic controller keeps the voltage the same whether one light or fifty are turned on at the same time. The battery requires no attention with the exception of an occasional addition of distilled water, for which purpose an automatic filler is provided. Moreover, it can be left standing indefinitely, either charged or uncharged, and in either a hot

or a freez

HITCHED UP IN THE KITCHEN

Most of the appliances speak for themselves, but the little portable motor on the table is everything from a remarkably good vacuum cleaner to a silver polisher,

has cut the combined work of washing and ironing by hand from three and onehalf to four days to one or one and onequarter days. The daintiest laces may be washed absolutely clean without fear of injury, and the machine handles the heaviest blankets and thoroughly cleans them. The electric ice making plant enables Mr. Wells to make fifty pounds of ice daily and maintain his ice box with a refrigeration capacity of two hundred and fifty pounds besides, for the modest sum of fifteen cents. With ice at forty cents per one hundred pounds this is no small saving.

The equipment of the dining room is equally perfect, with its array of electric percolators, toasters, and chafing dishes. Two real novelties here are an electric drink mixer, and a tiny electric fountain in the center of the dining-room table, the water playing over subdued colored lights, producing a unique and very beautiful effect.

The owner's bedroom in this electric wonder house contains everything that the comfort-loving could desire. In the dressing room are an electric heater for the curling iron, an electric hair dryer, which supplies both hot and cold air, and

every necessary appliance for massage treatment worked by the same means. Even electric pads take the place of the old-fashioned hot water bags.

Mr. Wells' success does not mean that the next man, who objects to the exorbitant prices charged by most electric companies for current, can follow the same plan independently, for the cost of installing an individual plant is high. Mr. Wells, however, has figured out a rather interesting plan of an isolated plant, which he calls the "block system," intended to cover equipment for a block of ten residences, supplying each with seventy-five sixteen candle power lamps, one hundred pounds of pure ice per day, and power to run small motors, such as are used on sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, silver polishers, etc. The total cost of equipment for such a plant Mr. Wells has figured would be about four thousand dollars, or four hundred dollars per house, and the fuel cost two hundred and seventy dollars per year, or twenty-seven dollars per house. The cost of current would amount to only one and one-tenth cents per kilowatt hour, as against eighteen cents, which is charged by many companies.

A

T last there is a place on the eastern coast of America where the greatest dreadnaught likely to be built within twenty years can be properly massaged and groomed for a fight or a frolic. This recently completed Drydock Number Four in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was not built, however, without extraordinary difficulties being overcome. In fact it is called the "hoodoo drydock", since it cost the lives of twenty men, the serious injuring of four hundred others, and brought two big contracting firms to ruin. Yet naval officers say it is worth it. Although the whole structure occupies a space only

seven hundred and twenty-six feet long and one hundred and ten feet wide, it was almost eight years from the time the work was started until the first ship was floated into the finished dock. When Congress appropriated one million dollars for its construction, in 1905, it was expected that the dock would be ready for use in two years.

It seemed a comparatively simple task, at first. After all, a drydock is merely a lined hole in the shore with water gates at one end and pumps for emptying the dock when the ship has been floated in and the gates closed. The building of such a dock had never before attracted

at

be of masonry construction, built on foundation of piles driven deep into the earth. A certain big contracting company planned to surround the entire site of the dock with steel-sheet piling and thus secure a large open excavation. The chief engineer had hardly gone lower than the surface soil when every pile his men drove showed a strange desire to return to the surface. No matter how hard the drivers pounded them down, they came bobbing up to the surface again. Soundings proved that there was a thick layer of quicksand underlying the

This was not the worst of the contractor's misfortunes. Two big sewers, one six, and the other seven feet, flowed past the dock site. past the dock site. One of these burst and poured its waters into the excavation; then the other cracked and added its share so that the contractor had to stop all other work and build a concrete dam across the face of one sewer, while he patched up the other as best he could.

So far the great drydock was nothing but a big jagged hole in the ground, littered with debris, and filled at the bottom with pools of sewer leakage. Hun

dreds of thousands of dollars had been thrown into this hole with little or nothing to show for it. The quicksand had been too much for the engineers; the contract was annulled three years after it was let, and the contracting concern is said to have been impoverished through damage suits preferred by injured workmen and unforeseen expenses of fighting the shifting sands.

A second engineering company took its spade in hand and tackled the quicksand. After studying the formation of the ground, it was decided to build a concrete wall on the west side in an effort to stop the motion of the sub-surface sands. Not only did this wall fail to overcome the shifting of the sand, but under pressure of earth and water it began to slide inward. There was more trouble with breaking sewers and finally the big power plant at the head of the dock site collapsed and threatened to sink down into the bowels of the earth. Several men were hurt in this chain of new misfortunes and the government finally annulled the second contract. The second contracting firm, like the first, left the drydock contract financially crippled and facing a score of lawsuits.

It was chiefly during the two earlier contracts that the dock earned the name "hoodoo", although men continued to get themselves maimed or killed in the dock excavation almost up to the day of its completion. A strange fatality seemed to follow the project. In nearly all of the big setbacks that overtook the work, such as the bursting of sewers, the collapse of sidewalks and the sinking of buildings, men were seriously or fatally hurt. But in the everyday course of construction the accidents were just as numerous. Men fell from scaffolding, dropped hammers or bolts on each other's heads, ladders broke, donkey engines blew up, and in a hundred ways Fate seemed determined that the dock should never be built.

After the second company's failure, the Government altered its policy toward the dock project. In addition to letting the contract to a new firm, a naval engineer was named to supervise the work and advise with the contractors. Civil Engineer Frederick R. Harris, U. S. N., was given this position, and between this

naval officer and the general manager of a third firm of contractors, the credit for the successful outcome may be divided.

Mr.

Since the original appropriation, the entire design of the dock had been changed. Its size had been increased twice, and the features of its construction had been radically altered. Since the first plans had been drafted, the superdreadnaught type of fighting ship had been built, and not only must the dock be larger, but the floor must be able to support the weight of such vessels. Harris abandoned all idea of using piles and turned to a method never before used in the construction of a drydock. Before another step was taken, the engineers made up their minds to know just what there was beneath the dock site that was causing all the trouble. In a vague way it had all been ascribed to "quicksand", but borings showed that what the previous contractors had thought to be hard pan rock about eighty feet below the surface was merely large boulders wholly unsuitable for a foundation. At the head of the dock, rock bottom was encountered at ninety-five feet. One hundred feet further from the head this ledge had sunk to one hundred feet, but at the entrance it was lost entirely.

The information thus obtained is really responsible for the ultimate success of the naval officer and the contracting engineer. It showed them the futility of any attempt to use pile construction. Caissons such as those used in laying down the foundations of the great skyscrapers were sought as the only alternative, although they had never been used in this manner before. Two things had to be guarded against: The flow of the quicksand in from the sides, with its consequent peril to the big buildings all around, and the persistent tendency of the shifting sands to bubble up in the center of the excavation. The dock must have not only string walls to protect it on all sides, but a floor sturdy enough to resist the upheaval of the sands and the downward pressure of the ships that would be docked.

First, a concrete retaining wall was put down all around the dock site. Caissons were driven to bed rock wherever possible and on these the retaining wall

The hoodoo drydock in use.

tendency to float, when empty, on the water and mud that sweep in beneath it. Thus it must be anchored against this upward thrust, and the floor must be strong enough not to bulge over the points of upward pressure. When filled the burden is reversed. Then the dock floor must withstand the load of thousands of tons of water; but the greatest stress comes when a great ship is placed on the blocks. All the other pressure is

floor. The center line piers are anchored each with a one-million-pound slab of concrete and the side piers with anchors that weigh eight hundred thousand pounds.

All this has cost money. Instead of the original appropriation of one million dollars, the dock has consumed three million dollars. The actual time needed for the construction of the new dock by the successful firm was but two years.