The Sunday Oregonian., January 26, 1908, Magazine Section, Image 50

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BY' FRANK Q. CARPENTER.
TRAVELING by railway through
the wilds of Centrar "Africa!
Steamiifg for hundreds of milos.
among: zebras, gnus, ostrlrhes and gi
raffes. Rollir.q; along: through' jungles which
the rhlnpceros luiunts and where the
lion and leopard wait for their prey!
These are ' some of my experiences
durins a trip I have just taken oyer
the Uganda railway from Mombasa to
Nairobi! . '
. Ten years ago it took a month to
cover the distance between the. two
points, nnd'the whole way was on foot.
I made it In less than 24 hours, and
that in a comfortable car. ' The rail
road fare was t32, and I had fairly
KOOd meals on the war. The .distance
Is over 3000 miles and It is Just abouf
half the length of the railroad, leav
ing here I Khali continue my journey
ever it on to lake Victoria, and shall
land on that lake nut far from the
Source of the Nile. '
The Uganda Itailwu;-.
This gives you some idea of the
T'Kaiuia railway, which the British
completed only about five years ago.
The road begins at. the Indian. Ocean
and it climbs over some of the rough
est parts of the African continent be
fore it ends at Victoria, the .greatest
fresh water lake of the .world. L.eav
Ing the sea coast, .the rise of the. road
is almost continuous until It reaches
the high plains of British East Africa.
Here at Nairobi I am more than- a
mile above the pen. and.' about 15 miles
farther on ut the station of " Kikuyu,
the road reaches an altitude . of ' "00
feet above that of Mount Washington.
From tlyre the climb Is steady to a
point a mile and a half above, the sea,
and tlun there is a great drop into a
wide ditch-like valley 200 feet deep.
Crqsslng this valley the road again
'llscs nntil it is far higher .than -any
mountain in the United States east of
he llck1cs. It nttains an elevation of
feet, and turn falls down to Lake
A'ietorla, which is just about as high.
R8( the highest "of the Alleghenies.
Th i'Oid was built by the. British gov-"
ernnie-it u: has than five years and has
cost altogether over $ii.O0O.0J. It
has a gauge of 40 Inches, rails which
weigh .' pounds to the yard and its
tracks are well laid and ballasted.
1-ast year something like 40.0JO tons
of srocds and lS'OOO passengers were
carried over it. and its earnings were
about $ii 10.000 more than its operating
expenses. It does not yet pay any in
terest on the capital invested, but it
in of enormous value in the way of
opening up. developing and protecting
In country.
Twenty-seven 'American Bridges.
Among the most interesting features
of the road are its American bridges.
Thev cross all the great ravines be
tween here and Iake Victoria, and
every steel bar and every bolt and
rivt in them were made by American
workmen in American factories and
taken out here and put' up under the
superintendence ' of American work
men. The nay It happened was owing
to 'John Mull's desire to have the work
done quickly and cheaply and at the
tame time substantially. While he had
been laying the tracks from here to
the sea. our bridge companies had sur
prised the English by putting up the
steel lacuct across the Atbara River
in the Egyptian Sudan within a much
A JATfjOT 77V THE HOLE
jP0T 13 FULLY DUTCHES
BAR 13 UNBUqXEtf
shelter time and far - more cheaply
than the .best British builders could
possibly. d. . Th refore. - when the
Brihsh government asked for bids for
these' Uganda bridges they sent the
plans and specifications to the Brltisii
and to some' of our American firms as
well. The best British bids ' provided
that the shops should have two. or
three years tw .make the steel work,
and longer still to erect H In' Africa.
The American Bridge Company offered
to complete the whole job within
se-L'n months after the foundations
were laid, and that at' a charge of $90
per ton. to be -paid when all we're in
place and in-working order. This price
was about half that of the British esti
mates and the time was less than one
th'ird tiiat in which the eight bridges
already, constructed had been built, sp
the. American company gat the con
tract. It carried it out to the letter,
and-had the government done 'its part
the work would have been completed
in the time specified. Owing to delays
of one kind, or another it really -consumed
five months longer, but it was
all done -within the space of one year,
which was just about half the time
that the British contractors asked to
get their goods ready for shipment.
How They Were Built.
The British were surprised at how
easily and quickly the American carried
out. their contract and how little they
seemed to make of it. The civil engineer
who was sent -out to take charge of the
construction was little more than -a boy:
His' name was- A. B: Lueder, and he had
graduated- at Cornell University only a
year or so before: In addition to him
there was a Pennsylvania man named
Jarrett. who acted as superintendent of
construction, and about 20 bridge-builders
and foremen from different parts of
the United States. These men arrived at
Mombasa in December, 1S00, and they
had completed their work before the fol
lowing Christmas. They acted merely as
superintendent and fancy workmen. All
the rough labor was done by the East In
dians and native Africans, furnished by the
British.. .When the road was-started the
government' planned to use only Africans,
but they found this impossible, and
therefore imported 30.000 coolies from In
dia. These men came on contracts of
from two to five years and their wages
were from $4 to 115 a month and rations.
The nativ laborers were paid about 10
cents a day.
Before the American workmen arrived
here a large part of the bridge materfal
was already, in Mombasa. They left one
man there to see that additional"" ma
terials were forwarded promptly and
came at once to the seat of action. They
put up the bridges at the rate of some
thing like one a week and constructed
the longest viaduct in SUMf working hour.
Had it not been for the enforced delays
on the part of the government they
would undoubtedly have completed their
work in seven months.
As it was. what they did forms one of
the wonders .of civil and mechanical en
gineering. The bridge material was so
made that its pieces fitted together like
clockwork, and that notwithstanding it
was put- into shape away offT here, thou
sands of miles from the place, of con
struction and in one of the most savage
parts of the world. The materials in the
viaducts included about half a million
feet of southern pine lumber and more
.than 1S.000.000 pounds of steel. The. steel
was in more than 100.000 pieces and. the
heaviest piece weighed Ave tons. The
average weight was about 100 pormds
per piece. The greatest care had to be
taken to keep the parts together and in
their own places. Every piece was num
bered, and those different bridges, were
THE SUNDAY OKEGONIAX, I'ORTIyAND, JANUARY 26, 1908.
3P
THRO
Z2V DZAITETTR
painted in different colors. Most of the
natives here look upon steel as so much
jewelry, and it was impossible to keep
them from niching sojne pieces for ear
bobs and bracelets. -
VTiere Lions tnt the Passengers.
It was difficult to build this road on ac
count of wild beasts. There are a hun
dred places along it where one might
get off and start up a lion. Rhinoceroses
have butted the freight cars along the
track, and they infest much of the coun
try through which it goes. I was shown
a station yesterday where. 29 Hindoos
were carried off by two- man-eating lions.
The man-eaters came night alter night,
and took away one or two of the work
men from the construction eamp. They
were finally killed by an English over
seer, who sat up with his gun and
watched for them. '
' It was not far from this station of
Nairobi that a man was taken out of a
special car by a lion, while it stopped
over night on the side track. The win
.dows and doors of the car had been left
open for air, and the three men' who
formed its only inmates had gone to
sleep. Two were In 'the berths and the
other, who had sat up to watch, was on
the floor with his gun on his knees. As
the night went on he fell 'asleep, and
woke' to find himself under the belly of
the lion. The beast had slipped in through
the door. He seized the-man in the low
er berth, and jumped out of the window,
carrying him with him. The other two
men followed; but they failed to discover
the beast that night. The bones of the
man, picked clean, were found the next
day.
-Through Africa by Rail.
But come with me and take a trip on
that part of the Uganda railroad over
which ' I have been traveling. W start
at Mombasa, a little coral island in the
Indian ocean. Our train Carrie's us across
a great steel bridge to the mainland,
and we climb through a jungle up to the
plateau. We -pass baobab trees, with
trunks like hogsheads, bursting out at
the top into branches. They make one
think of the frog who tried to blow him
self to. the size of a bull and exploded in'
the attempt. We go through cocoanut
groves, by mango trees loaded with fruit
and through plantations of bananas,
whose long green leaves' Quiver in the
breeze made by the train as -it passes.
Now we see a gingerbread palm, and now
strange flowers and plants, the names of
which we do not know. As we rise we
can'see the straits which separate Mom
basa from the mainland, and higher still
the broad expanse of the Indian ocean
comes into view.
For the first 100 miles the climb is
almost steady, and we are about one
third of a mile above the sea when we
reach the station at Vol. Here the
country is more open; and far off in the
distance one can see a patch of snow
floating like a cloud. That patch Is the
mountain of Kilimanjaro, and its top is
more than 19.000 feet above the sea. It
is qbout the highest mountain on the
continent, and still is not much higher
than Mount Kenia, that other giant of
British East Africa which rises out 'of
the plateau some distance north of Nair
obi. After the jungle of the coast line, the
country becomes comparatively open; and
it soon begins to look like parts of
America where the woods .have been cut
away and the brush allowed to grow
up in the fields. Here the land is car
peted with grass about a foot or so
high, and thousands of square miles of
such grass ' are going to waste. I saw
no stock to speak of, and at that place
but little wild game. Without knowing
anything about the tsetse fly' and other
Trains oh the Uganda Railway
in the Wilds of Africa, Race With
Zebras, Gnus and Antelopes
cattle pests. I should say that ;the pas
tures just back of the coast; might' feec
many thousand cattle and hogs. The.
soil seems rich. It is a flat clay, of the
co'ior of well burnt brick, which turns
everything red. This dust filled our car,
It coated our faces, and crept through
our clothes.- When we attempted to
wash, the water soon became a bright
vermilion, and the towels upon which
we dried were brick-fed.-' My ' pillow,
after riding all night through such dust,
had changed from white to terra-eotta;
and there was a Venetian red spot where
my head had laid
Amons the Antelopes and Zebras.
It is a stranger thing to go to sleep In
the woods and to awake finding yourself
traveling over a high, treeless, country,
with game by the thousand gamboling
along the car tracks. We awoke, on the
Kapiti plains, which are about a mile
above the sea, and - 28 miles from
Mombesa? , These plains are of a black
sandy loam and they are covered, with
a thick grass. They look much like Iowa,
Kansas or 'Nebraska did when the rail
roads were 'first, built through them and
when the , buffaloes galloped along with
the cars. The same conditions prevail
here, save, that the game is of a half
dozen big kinds, and most of it is such
as you can see only' in our zoological
gardens at home. According to law no
shooting may be done for a mile on each
side of the track, and the road has be
come a great game preserve .two miles in
width and about 60S miles long. The
animals seem to know that they are
safe when they are near the railroad and
most of them are as quiet as our do
mestic beasts when in the fields.
Let me' give you some notes which - I
made with these wild animals on all sides
of me. I copy: These Kapiti plains are
flat and I am riding through vast herds
cf antelopes and zebras. Some of them
are within pistol shot of the cars. There
are ' 50-odd zebras feeding on the grass
not 100 feet away. Their black and white
stripes shine in the sunlight, and they are
round, plump, arjd beautiful. They raise
their heads as the train goes by and
then continue their grazing. Further on
we see antelopes," some as big as a 2-year-oid
calf, and others the size of a
goat. The little ones ha,ve horns almost
as long as their bodies. There is one
variety which has a white patch on its
rump. This antelope looks as though it
had a baby's lib tied to its stubby tail
or had been splashed with a whitewash
brush. Many of the antelopes are yellow
or fawn colored: and some of the smaller
ones are -beautifully striped.
Wild Gnus and Ostriches.
Among the. most curious animals to be
seen are the gnus. As I write this there
are some galloping along with the train.
They are great beasts as big as a moose,
with the.hprns of a cow and the mane
and tail of a horse. They are sometimes
called wilde-beeste; they make very good
hunting.
- But look, there are some ostriches. The
flock contains a dozen or more birds,
which stand like interrogation points
away off there on the plain. They turn
toward the cars as we approach and then
spread their wings and- skim away at
great speed. Giraffes are frequently seen.
They are. more timid than the antelope,
however, and are by no means so brave
as the zebras. ,
We see -more and more wild animals as
we go onward. The whole region is a
zoological garden;" and the beasts are so
protected that they are fast Increasing in
number. All hunting here must be done
by licenses, and, as I shall show later, it
costs ?250 for the right to shoot a cer
tain number of elephants and other big
game. The only animals 'which one can
kill without government permission are
lions and leopards, and the danger is that
the lion or leopard and not the man will
do the killing. . -
Telegraph Wire as Jewelry.
One of the great troubles, that the Brit
ish government had while building the
Uganda railroad was to keep the natives
from stealing the telegraph wires. The
women use such wire as jewelry. They
bind it around the legs from the ankle to
the-knee. ' They wrap It in great- coils
around their necks, and they make it into
round disks, ,which they tie to the lobes
of their ears. They steal aH sorts of rail
road bolts and nuts for personal ornamen
tation, .and" brass wire and pieces of
bronze are so much in demand that they
One Thousand
More Than Fifty
THE greatest patentee in this coun
try and that probably means the
greatest in the world is Thomas
A. Edison. He has rolled up the enor
mous total of almost 1000 patents and
shows no inclination to quit.
Ask the Patent Office people . who
come next to Edison, and they will tell
you that nobody is within hailing dis
tance of the wizard. A good many
men can count their patents by the
score, and as some of them are much
younger than Edison they may beat
him out in time.
Up to the present, however, he de
serves the title of the Great American
Patentee. That means a goed deal, for
it is undoubtedly a fact that an Ameri
can will take out a patent on less
provocation than any other man or woman
in the world.
- As a consequence the Patent Office
.is piling up a swollen fortune which
makes it -a bloated bondholder among
the Government departments. It has
achieved a surplus of 6. 000.000, and Is
growing richer every day. Yankee in
genuity is gorging the Patent Office
with" records and piling up models by
the hundred thousand.
The first patent under thi Govern
ment was taken out by Samuel Hop
kins, July 31, 1790. It was on a process
.for "making pot and pearl ashes;" Two
other patents were taken put the same
year.- One was for making candles, the
other for a process of making flour and
meal.
Apparently we as a people took kind
ly to the patent idea from the very
start, for we jumped from three in 1790
to 3S in 1791. On March 11 Samuel
Mulliken- took out four all by himself.
But on August 28, James Ramsey utter
ly eclipsed Mulliken by taking out six.
That was the greatest day the Patent
Office had known, for within its limits
no less than 14 patents were issued to
aspiring genius. Three of these were
"-3C ' .
4,
will pass current as money. All the way
here I have seen natives loaded with wire
of one kind or another. Some had little
more than the wire on them, and the
clothes of most were conspicuous by
their absence. About the' only cloth
worn along the Uganda road is small
pieces of cotton. Some of the men wear
breech cloths. , and some of the women
have short skirts. Farther up the line I
understand they wear nothing, and at the
terminal stations both men and women go
about as naked as when they were born.
. Some Queer Jewelry.
It is wonderful how these people mu
tilate, themselves in order to be what
they consider beautiful. The ears of
many of the women are punched like
sieves, in order that they may hold rings
of various kinds. At Vol I saw a girl
with corks, each about as big around as
Patents to Thomas A.' Edison
Thousand Patents Issued at Washington Last Year.
on "improvements in Captain Savary's
steam engine," and one was taken out
by the famous John Fitch for propell
ing boats by steam." As eight out of
the 14 patents of that day were for
the application of steam It almost de
serves to be immortalized 'as a steam
anniversary.
The next year there came a decided
reaction, only 11 patents being issued
In the entire 12 months, not even as
many as on the' one day in August of
the year before. In 1796 a word which
has become the commonest in the Pat
ent Office vocabulary began . to make
itself conspicuous. It was "imprevement."
Out of 44 patents issued that year
27 were on Improvements of one thing
or another. The next year the im
provements numbered 40 out of 51 pat
ents. There is an astonishing frequency of
French names in the early patent rec
ords. . About 1802 they were especially
numerous, and they were generally at
tached to something rather ambitious
in the way of an invention.
For instance, that year Jean Bapt'ste
Aveilhe patented a "machine for rais
ing water," which is described in the
patent records, with profusion of ex
clamation points and parentheses', as:
(!!! a perpetual motton !!!). A few
months . later another Frenchman
named Marentllle Invented "an insub
mersible boat."
Pills, pills, pills! Our patent-medicine
appetite is one of long standing, for
almost -the commonest object of the
early patentee was some form of pills;
antibilious pills cream of tartar pills
and so on. One of the peculiar descrip
tions Is of a patent issued In 1799 for
an "effeminate ropery for spinning rope
yarn."
The present activity in producing
military balloons had a forerunner in
1799, when a "Federal balloon" was
patented. In the same year a "check
to detect counterfeits" was patented.
And in 1800 a description of a tele
my little finger, put through holes in the
rims of her ears. She had a great cork
in each lobe and three above that in
each ear. There was a man beside her
who had two long sticks in his ears, and
farther up the road I saw o"ne who had
so stretched the lobe holes that a good
sized tumbler could have been- passed
through them. Indeed, I have a photo
graph of 3. man carrying a jam pot in
his ear. ' '
As I write I can see an ebony African
with a -brass collar around his neck and
ankle'ts on his legs. His- only other gar
ment is a strip of calico about the loins.
With him is, a man with a nose ring not
unlike that we use to keep pigs from
rooting, and further over is a giddy
naked dandy who has three coils of gal
vanized telephone wire in each of his
ears.
Nairobi, British East Africa, Dec 20.
graph instrument, the first appearing
in the patent records, - was filed by
Jonathan Grout, Jr., of Massachusetts.
In the 15 years between 1790 and
1S95 only 600 patents, were issued. That
was a big number considering the
times. The word "only" is used be
cause now, a century later, we are is
suing patents at the rate of 1000 a
week! "
It was not until. May 5, 1809, that a
woman took out a patent. It is to
Mary Keyes that the honor must be
given.
Who she was or where she lived
the records fail to state. ' Her patent
Is described as "Straw weaving with
silk or thread." ' For six years Mary,
was alone In her glory, the sole woman'
patentee in this country. Then another
woman came forward with an idea. Thi
time it was a corset.
In 1819 a woman patented "cream of
tartar, carbonated liquid": in'l822 one
of them pinned her faith and money to
her 'idea of a foot stove: in 1823 it was
"weaving grass hats," in l'd28 a sheet iron
shovel: In 1&3 a "calash balloon for ladies;"-in
1S34 "extracting fur from skins
and manufacturing it into yarn."
The first Ice cream freezer was added
to the records by a woman in 1843, an
In 184i), if you please, a woman invented
a "suomarlne telescope and lamp." The
1849 feminine patent the above list
includes all taken out by women dur
ing this period suggests a picture of
truly Idyllic indolence. It was . a
"rocking chair with fan attachment."
The ladlee proceeded to evolve corset
stays, skirts, butter' workers and sim
ilar appropriately feminine devices un
til one of them went far afield in 1858
and patented a method of "mounting
a fluid lens."
In 18S8 there were 70 patents taken
out by women. The number grew to
361 In 1894, and heaven knows what it
Is now. At any rate, the Patent Office
doesn't know. If you want to go over
the record of 50,000 patents granted
last year, nobody will say you nay.