Excerpt from Development of Liquid Oxygen Explosives During the War The increasing cost of dynamite and permissible explosives at the time the United States entered the great war caused the Bureau of Mines to investigate all possible substitutes. The author of this paper called attention to the possibilities of liquid oxygen and carbonaceous material as an explosive compound to serve as a substitute for black blasting powder and dynamite in certain kinds of mining and quarrying work. The raw materials - oxygen and carbon - are unlimited in quantity, and production requires merely power and suitable apparatus for liquefying the oxygen of the air. This kind of explosive was first used experimentally in Germany under the name of "oxyliquit." It was tested in an early form at the Simplon Tunnel (Switzerland) about 1899, and although the claim was that the tests were favorable, it evidently was not a decided success commercially with the methods then used. Apparently one of the troubles then not realized was that the oxygen used was not pure enough, but contained too much nitrogen. In fact, the earliest experiments were with liquid air, more or less self-enriched by standing, the nitrogen evaporating faster than the oxygen. The bureau began its testing of liquid oxygen explosive in April, 1917, and experimental results, as reported in this paper were decidedly favorable, but owing to the difficulty of obtaining suitable liquid oxygen manufacturing machinery and the necessity of concentrating the bureau's explosives investigations on military explosives, further experiments had to be postponed for a while. Following the armistice, the Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the Bureau of Mines decided to send a committee of Bureau of Mines engineers and metallurgists to Europe to observe the progress in the special industries under the stimulus of war, and the author of this paper, as chief mining engineer, was asked to particularly observe the progress that had been made with liquid oxygen explosive. Mr. Rice reports that the Germans used liquid oxygen explosive extensively in nongaseous coal mines, in quarrying, and in iron mines, as well as for destructive purposes in French steel plants. At several Lorraine minette iron ore mines the Germans had installed in a permanent manner liquid oxygen explosives apparatus for mining the ore. Other European countries were not found to have used liquid oxygen explosive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.