The Dream City, Paul V. Galvin 
Digital History Collection
 
 
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  THE KRUPP GUN EXHIBIT - The interior of Herr Krupp's Building was a single chamber, and the visitor there obtained a valuable and memorable lesson on the simplicity of really great things. Here was truly a place where subjective or inner thought was the measure of enjoyment. A child might enter here, and see little to arouse its wonder. An engineer might linger all day, to find his thoughts ever after returning to the prodigies that here surrounded him. The engraving shows the gun eighty-seven feet long, that weighs two hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds, or one hundred and twenty-four tons; it is the longest and largest, yet not overwhelmingly so. The labor of getting that cannon from Essen, Germany, to Chicago was the marvel of modern transportation. At Hamburg and at Baltimore great cranes were used, such as the one which may be seen in this series of engravings lifting a sixty-five ton locomotive. A special nest of flat-cars was built - that is, two flat-cars were bridged together; another pair was bridged together; then a longer span bridged the two pair together, and thereon the cannon rested, having eight railroad trucks under it. This gun fires a projectile that weighs a ton, and the missile goes sixteen miles. A half-ton of powder is used, and the cost of the charge is $1,250. Near by was a steel plate sixteen inches thick, through which a twelve inch shot had been projected, cracking the plate and throwing the upper corner half and inch awry. The steamship forgings were as wonderful as the cannons.
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Digital History Collection
Page created: August 26, 1998