OCR Text |
Show Submerged Timber. The strength of a hemlock stick a foot square that had been in water for almost forty years was recently tested test-ed in the 600,000-pound testing machine ma-chine at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute insti-tute at Troy, in New York. The timber, tim-ber, which was 1G feet 9 inches long, had formed part of one of the piers of the Congress street bridge at Troy. When the pier broke down after the flood in the spring of 1913, the timber was turned over to one of the material-testing laboratories of the institute. insti-tute. It was kept in the open air for three months, and then placed in a dry room for a little more than nine months. When placed in the testing machine, the calumn failed under a load of 3S4.000 pounds; that is, the long-submerged wood showed au ultimate ulti-mate strength of 2,670 pounds to the square inch. In the opinion of Prof. T. R. Lawson, who conducted the test, the remarkable strength of this piece of hemlock seems to show that being be-ing immersed in water for a long time does not decrease the column strength of timber that is subsequently permitted permit-ted to dry out. Youth's Companion. |