> This is turning into a did the holocaust happen debate. A few days
Oh, please. I don't expect anyone to take my assertions on faith. I sent the mail to LBO as a list rather than you personally because someone on LBO might know; I addressed it to you because you made the claim and so were most likely to know.
My impression was that major killers during the construction of the trans-continental railways were that exposure, rock slides, and poor blasting procedures were the major killers.
To my rudimentary knowledge of blasting, it is extremely rare for a single explosive to be used, even in the 19th century, and so most blasting would require some kind of fusing system to touch off several charges simultaneously. A large charge wastes most of its energy blowing a large hole; multiple charges crack the rock face at several points, and it is pulled apart by its own weight. I am no expert and make no claims to be one, but this seems to make sense.
However, seems somewhat like a practise somewhat like that during the construction of Kingston Penitentiary, during the later part of the 19th Century. Convicts built the Penitentiary (which is a quite handsome limestone building, but I digress) out of locally quarried limestone. The technology, if you can call it that, of fuses was quite primitive. It wasn't unknown for a prisoner to blow himself up, given that a single prisoner lit the fuse in the open and ran for cover, but that was because of poor quality fuses - either one would burn too quickly, too slowly, or not at all and then detonate when a second attempt was made.
Given that the transcontinental railway and the Penitentiary were built around the same time, I would think that the same weaknesses in blasting technique would be present in both cases. Dangerous, yes. Almost suicidally dangerous.
> ago, I was watching on the History channel a program of the
> development of dynamite, and it mentioned in passing that practice,
> which is not disputed even by the railroad historians. I don't have
> the stomach to research it.
I'm not asking for the railroad historians, Henry, and I personally don't know any railroad historians. I'm just asking for a reference, so I can look it (or something along those lines) up for myself.
Marco
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> Marco Anglesio | Listen: we are on Earth to fart around. <
> mpa at the-wire.com | Don't let anyone tell you any different. <
> http://www.the-wire.com/~mpa | --Kurt Vonnegut <
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