The Dream City, Paul V. Galvin 
Digital History Collection
 
 
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  VIEW OF LIFE-SAVING STATION AND BATTLESHIP - A visitor at the World's Fair might go aboard the structure illustrated on this page before us, and receive all the impressions to be conveyed on an actual steel-clad man-of-war. Many persons had seen the thick armor-plates in Krupp's Building, in the Bethlehem exhibit in the Transportation Building, and at the Government Building, and when they descended into the shot-laden hold of this museum of war, they had a sensation of foundering, though they knew the ship was built on the bottom of the lake, and could not be floated without contravention of the treaty whereby we are to keep the great lakes free of these beligerent machines. To inspect the apparatus of patriotic murder as it was here exposed was a horrible privilege, for it could be seen that the ingenuity and the needs and extremities of human life still appertain to slaughter, and to a means of death so skillful that the wars of the future must blanch even the faces of their inventors. Here we stood by a machine gun that could be aimed by orders through a telephone from the conning tower aloft, where the captain stands. A few turns of the crank would destroy a line of yawls at a distance of three miles. The great guns would move around by the turning of a wheel, but there is always danger that their recoil will destroy the upper works. Many of the cannons were real. The sinking of the Victoria made this strange exhibit especially instructive.
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Digital History Collection
Page created: August 26, 1998