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Show Auditor. B Harry Mercer was nominated for auditor be- B cause of his especial fitness for the place. It is B a most important office, and under Mr. Mercur it fl will be Allied with absolute honesty and perfect fl correctness. H The Karns Tunneling Machine. EnllgMened nations have been tunneling the hills since old Rome built acqueducts and the Catacombs. But the business was never perfected per-fected until to J. P. Karns, of Colorado, the grace was given to discover It. His invention Is to mining min-ing what the discovery of America was to the business world. The power drill was a mighty advance. Where men could by tremendous labor run a tunnel from one to two feet per day, the power drill enabled them to make eight to ten feet per day. The Karns invention for small tunnels tun-nels runs eight feet per hour. And now, there are whispers that a contract has been let to run a circular tunnel 18 feet in diameter through the stubborn mountain on the line of the Moffat road this side of Denver. It was expected that, running run-ning from both ways, it would require two and a half years to complete" the tunnel. This contract, If let, will guarantee to make this hole 18 feet in diameter at the rate of sixty feet per day, or if two machines are employed, working toward each other, then 120 feet per day of tunnel will be run. But at the GO feet per day, It means that a r.ile will be opened in just 88 days, Then the company will put on power drills and blast out six 'eet in depth, and the tunnel will be 24 feet high nndt the upper half of which will be a per-fec' per-fec' half circle. nother feature is that where water can be obt. ned a hydraulic pressure sends in a str m of water and all the debris from the drills is ished out and away. When, this is not practice' prac-tice' the debris is washed back and by an endless sen ' is carried up and dumped into waiting cars. iiie machine is but the application of an old prii iple. There is no grinding off of the rock as 1 is so long been tried and failed, but the rock is chipped off. A big Rand or, Ingersoll drill will keep four or Ave joints playing on the face of a tunnel This ma !:ine when cutting a 51-lnch tunnel sets 660 sucl' points in motion. In the same proportion an 18-f iot tunnel would use about 11,000 points. Nov; a single Ingersol drill will do as much work as about eight miners; so when an 18-foot Karns machine ma-chine is in motion, it means that it is chipping du'vn more rock than could an army as large as was General Lee's army at Gettysburg, working with single drills day and night. It can be seen how under those blows, the mountain comes down. It will require 3,000 feet of compressed air to run an 18-foot tunnel and this will be supplied by four Rand double-com-pressers working in a single battery. The machine if put upon the stubborn rock in the canyon of the north fork of Feather river, through which the Western Pacific railroad is making a path,- might reduce the time of completion comple-tion of that work by a year or more. Long ago, in the seventies, Von Smidtz, the great California engineer, surveyed a route over the Sierras, and reported to the old C. P. R. R. company that by a tunnel eight miles long the company could reduce the altitude at the summit some 1,500 feet and do away with the snow sheds. But eight miles. It seemed appalling. But with two of these machines the tunnel could be citt In loss than one year. Jt sinks shafts as well as runs tunnels. It means a revolution in mining and what as Mr. Belecher of the Utah company says: "I will before be-fore a year swamp all the furnaces in Utah with ore," does not seem improbable, for running small tunnels 150 feet per day can be run. It 13 a marvel in mining. The company which has the invention in Utah, includes some of the strong men of Utah. Such men as Mr. George T. Odel and Mr. M. H. Walker and others are stock- holders, and already ten miles of tunnel is waiting wait-ing the needed machinery, ten miles in Utah alone, and this may be considered as merely pre- liminary work. We do not see why railroads can not hereafter be run in straight lines. We believe it is the most splendid industrial achievement ever seen in a mining country. |