MAKING SHOPS PLEASANT.

There is no outlay that can be made by employers, that will bring in a greater proportionate return than that which is done to make the surroundings of men at their work pleasant as circumstances will permit. Many employers recognizing this have instituted many conveniences that otherwise would not have been enjoyed by their employes and they have never regreted it and many successful manufacturers credit their success over less sagacious competitors to their expenditures in this direction.

Still how many manufacturers there are in every branch of industry, that never give that subject a thought, including those of railroad repair shops, where some apparently even study to make it as unpleasant as possible, at least when approached regarding the inovation of some simple change that would add greatly to the comfort of the men, reply, "Well, if you do not like the way things are you know what you can do."

The location of a grind stone where it will have good light and easy access, costs no more than to place it where men hate to go to it; to place a fan over the heads of men and so the noise tends to drive them crazy or keep their nerves unstrung from morning till night does not add to their capacity in the least. If some foremen could experience the great releif that is felt by men working under such conditions when the fan belt breaks and the noise subsides for a few moments, and were able to estimate the value of keeping that condition constant, it might show better figures than they could estimate from the employment of a complete set of cheap men, and they would very soon find that there is a far better place for that fan after all. Proper attention paid to the ventilation of the blacksmith shops would result in a more contented and correspondingly better set of men and mechanics for it would improve all.

There are a thousand and one little matters that no one would feel like com

with a view of making men at work more comfortable would be changed and also prove an economical move.

A good share of a man's life is spent at his work, if there is any place where all possible comfort should be had, it is the place where this work has to be done, and it is a good sign for the future that in the construction of shops this is generally being considered in the plans, and also that occasionally some one sees the advisability of making a change for the better in what some less considerate predecessor established.

ABOUT THE HOBBIES OF MACHINISTS.

I suppose I have a pretty healthy and vigorous belief that a machinist, or, for that matter, any other man, is incomplete without a hobby. Everybody knows what a hobby is. It is principally something different from, something out of the regular course of one's daily occupation. It is the rest of change, which is better than the rest of inaction. It is better in many ways; but especially because it is a rest which may and should represent progress instead of retrogression.

In the machinist the existence of a hobby by no means presumes any slighting of his regular business. The best men in the shop are apt to have decided hobbies. The hobbies rather speak of a superabundance of vital or mental force. I might, if I dared, go farther and suggest, for bolder ones to follow it up, and the hobby is a masculine peculiarity consequent upon the largeness of the male intellect.

The hobbies I have known machinists to have range almost over the whole field of human thought and activity. Music, poultry and politics, doctoring, and dog-fighting, fishing; phonography and flowers, boat-building, mesmerism and chemistry-I don't know what I have not heard of for hobbies. Fellows in the shop get to be known for their hobbies, and in their circle are the accepted authorities upon their specialities. In a jobbing and repair shop this often comes handy. The general repairing in a "live" city calls for the steam man, the printing-press man

the pump man, the elevator man, the dynamo man, etc. Then there is generally another to fall back upon with all sorts of unclassifiable jobs, whom they will usually call the Yankee, or the tinker, or something of that sort.

Sometimes the hobby runs away with a man and carries him forth into fresh fields and pastures new. One leading astronomer of to-day was a boy in a railroad shop, whose mind kept wandering to the stars. He made a telescope and took it out on the street to show the moon and the planets to the crowd, and so got enough money to buy books to help him along in the same line. Some one picked him up and put him into an observatory connected with one of our leading educational institutions, and to-day he is at the head of it, and earning world-wide distinction. He has already discovered more comets than any other man in America. His friends are apt to consider him a nuisance, he has such a habit of button-holing them with his specialty. He is all hobby, and unless he soon strikes some secondary hobby for a diversion he will wear out before his time.

The hobby for the young machinist may well be in the line of his trade. In fact there must be something wrong with him, he will be lacking in essentials of progressive and successful career, if he does not find himself seeking knowledge outside of the shop, and beyond shop hours, about subjects related to his business. There are plenty of things for a young fellow to be interested in now. I know the feeling is common, probably we all have it at sometime, that we were born too late, and the biggest achivements are all accomplished, that the largest opportunities are all appropriated. Later on we all realize that precisely the reverse is true; and the liveing proof of it is the fact that today the greatest things of all ages are being done before our eyes.

While it is true that with the young man in earnest his hobby will be very sure to have some connection with his chosen business, it must still be remembered that the machine business is connected with all the lines of activity, and

he can scarcely choose amiss. There will be books to study, there will be questions to investigate in any direction. Photography is not the most interesting and instructive because it happens to be popular. Electricity is a big field for study, and the applications of it are only in their infancy.

I believe one of the best of all the hobbies is the habit of writing. I do not know of any way or means whereby so much is to be learned as in the effort to clearly and fully state or discribe what we know already. A man who sets out to make an accurate drawing of an existing machine must know more of its detail and construction than one would who only gave a casual glance at it. However good the habit of writing may be, one will not be apt to keep it up in solitude. Writing is done with the assumption that some one will read it. Let it be read. It is by no means necessary that one should know it all to become an acceptable writer for the mechanical journals. I haven't the slightest doubt that in some sense men may know too much to be best able to tell what they know. The man expert on the geography of the earth probably can't direct you correctly to a house in the next street. Important things in the shop may become so familiar that we don't think of mentioning them. It is the one who is a novice in traveling who will see and speak of all the noticeable things, and not the worn-out old stager. So if in the shop you encounter some novel difficulty and a good way out of it, some improved way of doing a familiar thing, some curious action of phenomenon with its explanation or seeking one, something to be done that you don't know how to do, ventilate it all. Nothing in any paper ever strikes everybody; nothing in any mechanical paper ever strikes every mechanic.

Darwin collected good evidence on the connection between cats and clover, showing that the prevalence of cats is essential to its successful growth. I wonder if any one has shown how hobbies help the eyesight. The lesson of the machinist's eyesight is analogous to his mental experience. He is the best thinker whose mind is exercised in thinking. So diversity of occu

pation is good for a man's eyesight. The sight of machinists fails earlier than it should, and especially when the eye has little change of work. The failing eyesight, or, rather, the changing eyesight, which comes with middle age, is caused, they say now, by a slowness or inability of the eye to readily adjust itself to changing lights and distances; and as the inability is fostered by disuse or by a narrow use, so it is retarded by a wider exercise of the faculty. The machinist who spends all his time in a dark corner watching the monotonous operation of a single machine, and who has no other and different eye exercise, may expect to come early to spectacles. Here is where the benign touch of hobbies is laid on the failing eyes. The machinist who has a lively hobby for rifle shooting, or fishing, or gardening, or any out-door exercise, is the one we may expect to find with the best eyesight, and the most expert at fine and accurate work in the shop.

While I seem to speak of and advise the choice of a hobby, the fact is that the hobby chooses the man. There is a choice by the individual, but it is an unconscious or instinctive one. It is nature's reaction from the strain of work, and the work gives direction to the rebound. We can make the most of hobbies when they appear, by not despising them in others nor being ashamed of them in ourselves.

It would lead us too far to show how toys and hobbies have been the progenitors of much that the world values and enjoys to-day. Indeed, it might be said that the enlargement of our lives comes mostly through this means. There the restless and unconscious reaching out for the novel and attractive. We do not know what we shall discover until it is here. We seek amusement; but by and by we find the amusing thing useful, and, before long, necessary; and so we go, and so we grow.-Frank H. Richards in American Machinist.

CURIOSITIES OF COAL. Does any one except a practical chemist ever stop to think of all the substances which we get from pit coal and the almost inconceivable variety of there uses?

Everybody is familiar with those of them that are in daily use, such as gas, illuminating oils, coke, and parafine, but of the greater part few persons know even the names, science advances so rapidly and its nomenclature is so extensive and so abstruse. It is no wonder that merchants and manufacturers take advantage of this ignorance to foist upon the public articles of food, of drink, or for the toilet that, if they are not always dangerous to the health, have not in them a particle of the substances which they pretend to contain. Though pit coal has been known for some hundreds of years, the discovery of its numberless products is confined to the present century. Illuminating gas was unknown a hundred years ago. Petroleum has been in use only about forty years, and it is scarcely more than fifty since some one discovered that stone coal was inflammable. Nearly all the other products derived from soft coal have been discovered and applied in the interests of science or of fraud within the last twenty-five years. The first thought in regard to coal is that it is made to give heat or warmth; the next that one of its principal uses is to illuminate. But there are obtained from it the means of producing over four hundred colors, or shades of color, among the chief of which are saffron, violet blue, and indigo. There are also obtained a great variety of perfumes-cinnamon, bitter almonds, queen of the meadows, clove, wintergreen, anise, camphor, thymol (a new French odor), vanaline, and heliotropine. Some of these are used for flavoring. Among the explosive agents whose discovery has been caused by the war spirit of the last few years in Europe are two called dinitrobenzine, or bellite, and picrates. To medicine coal has given hypnone, salicylic acid, naphthol, phenol, and antipyrine. Benzine and napthaline are powerful insecticides. There have been found in it ammoniacal salts useful as fertilizers, tannin, saccharine (a substitute for sugar), the flavor of currants, raspberry, and pepper, pyrogallic acid and various substances familiar or unfamiliar, hydroquinone used in photography, and such as tar, rosin, asphaltum, lubricating

DISTRICT DEPARTMENT.

The Magazine has a larger circulation now than at any time in its history, but it is not as large as it should be or might be if the members would not leave the work of canvasing all to the agents but assist them whenever they can.

Correspondents are requested to get in their contributions for the November issue as early as possible as we will be obliged to go to press a few days earlier than usual in order to get the Magazine mailed before the District convenes.

Magazine agents are requested to make an effort to collect and send in that which is still outstanding on their lists. Subscribers who have not paid up will confer a favor by handing the amount due from them to the agent, or if they cannot see him, send direct to this office.

District Master Workman Neasham has visited the Locals on the Nebraska and Kansas divisions since our last issue and reports that there is an increase in the interest shown in the work of the Order at all points. Let this interest reach that point that it should and those results that all desire will follow.

The locals statisticians are earnestly requested to send in the report called for on blanks accompaning circular letter of September 10th, at the earliest possible moment. Local officers and members should assist in making this report as complete as possible and see that it is not neglected, as it will be of importance to the District.

The local officers should not forget that a quarterly report is due on October 1st. This report should be ready to mail immediately after the first meeting in the month, no matter whether the P. C. Tax is ready to send with it or not. Do not wait to send it by your representative. The D. R. S. needs the reports as early possible to complete his annual report District.

Could my voice ring out in every town and city where there is an Assembly of this Order I would say: Bury every difference now; put every obstacle to your progress out of the way. I would ask of each earnest member to go out into the highways and byways and insist that all members attend the meetings. Tell them that labor, manhood, "Freedom, asks their common aid,"-up to that Faneuil Hall of Knighthood-the sanctuary of your Assembly — where the cause of equity for him who toils requires your presence.

T. V. POWDERLY.

The Fifth Annual Session of the District will convene at Denver, Colo., October 29th. It is to be hoped that there will be a full representation and that the delegates will come well prepared to present the needs of the members in their several localities, be prepared to devote some hard conscientious work in the consideration of such matters as may come up for the general good, and when the District adjourns be prepared with all the power they possess to carry out such plans for the future as may be agreed upon, for the good to be accomplished through the deliberations of the District lays with them, they return to their locals as the "home missionaries" for the year. This should be in view when delegates are selected. The convention does not open with the sounding of brass band and speeches of mayor or governor, nor is the real advancement of the interests of workingmen to be accomplished in that way. District No. 82 has every reason to be proud of its past record and there is no reason to believe that it will be ashamed of its future record. It may not have accomplished as much as some may have wished but it has far more than any similar District in the Order and that too has been of a solid nature on which it is safe to build on. Delegates will find good accomodations at Lindell hotel, corner 11th and Larimer streets, where arrangements have been made for them. Delegates will find District headquarters at room 14, McClelland block, corner 15th and Lawrence streets.