…co-starring her pet bear, Susie
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The Doclopedia # 2,003
Dangerous Inventions: Doctor Kolnov’s Ray Gun
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In 1893, Doctor Sergei Kolnov, professor of Physics at the University of Chicago, decided to test his “Disintegrating Ray Gun”. The test would take place in a 100 foot long cinder-block bunker covered by 18 inches of packed soil. The gun would be fired at a 24 inch square, 1 inch thick steel plate. This would be done 5 times, once for each power setting on the gun. Three students were there to help him.
The first firing took 1 minute to melt a 3 inch hole through the steel.
The second test took 6 seconds.
The third test blasted a hole through the steel and damaged part of the cinder-block 3 feet behind it in a fraction of a second. It also heated the entire bunker to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. This necessitated bringing in fans and ice to cool the bunker, as well as a recalibration of the timer.
The fourth blast vaporized 3 entire steel plates and 2 feet of cinder-block wall, as well as 10 inches of soil. It heated the bunker to 250 degrees.
The 5th test was postponed for two days so the bunker test area could be both reinforced and a remote activator could be rigged to fire the gun for 1/1,000th of a second from 200 feet away.
When the gun was fired, it heated the room to 700 degrees, frying certain wires and causing the gun to fire for 2 seconds. The beam shot through3 feet of steel, 5 feet of cinder-block, 3 feet of earth and then went on to cut a 3 inch hole through everything in a straight line for 10 miles, including many buildings that then caught fire.
As his assistants ran off for help, Kolnov activated the emergency fire control, which flooded the bunker with cold water. This caused it to explode.
Kolnov was not hurt and saw that his ray gun had been blown free and looked to be intact. Realizing that he was in deep shit, he grabbed the gun, tossed it into his waiting carriage and drove off.
At first, everyone thought Kolnov had died in the explosion, but three days later, a groundskeeper for the University reported seeing him driving away “at a fast clip”. The manhunt was on, but Dr. Kolnov was never found. He died 25 years later in Seattle, under the name “Sarge Cole”. Two days after his death, the Chicago Sun-Times got a letter from him confessing and apologizing.
But by that time, the events in Chicago were very old news.
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The Doclopedia # 2,004
Dangerous Inventions: Miss Grudin’s Post Hole Digger
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In 1895, Miss Helen Grudin was a 22 year old lady farmer from Fontanelle, Iowa. Her farm, which she had inherited from her late grandfather, was 2,000 acres of good land, but the buildings and fences were in poor condition. Still, Helen was fresh out of college in Chicago and needed a place to live and set up her inventor’s workshop. Having been raised on that very farm, she was no stranger to what needed to be done to get it productive, so off to the farm she went.
Aided by her not to bright, but kind hearted older brother, Ben, and the farm’s three hiredfolk, George, Donna and Milt, she set to work improving things. The house, barn and outbuildings got repaired, the old pond got cleaned out and enlarged and the crops and livestock got put into production.
Those first two years were dicey, but Helen made enough to keep afloat and even get her workshop up and running. But the old and rundown fences really needed replacing. Having lost her brother to his marriage to a girl from Des Moines, she was low on both manpower and money.
And then, on a trip to Omaha to visit friends, she happened to meet Dr. Sergei Kolnov. He was sitting on a park bench, drinking from a bottle of wine and looking quite terrible, but Helen recognized her old professor. Feeling sorry for all he must have gone through after 5 years of being on the run, she approached him and introduced herself.
Once she assured Kolnov that she was not working for agents of the law, she found out that he and his infamous ray gun had been moving from town to town, hoping to make it to Seattle, where his brothers lived. Alas, he was now broke and without hope.
Helen was going to offer him enough for a train ticket and some food when a thought hit her. She told him that she would pay his way to Seattle, first class plus a bit of money, and she would take the ray gun and hide it on her farm until he could come get it later.
With tears in his eyes, Kolnov accepted her offer. Two hours later, after he has cleaned up and written out instructions for the ray gun, “just in case”, he and Helen placed the device in a large trunk and parted company.
Three weeks later, after a bit of tinkering with lenses and making repairs to the power supply, Helen was ready to use the ray gun to dig post holes. Everything was set up for it do blast a hole 12 inches wide and 3 feet deep, using a power setting of 3. The gun was affixed to a wooden tripod, pointed straight down and then activated.
55 years later, in her memoirs written in Argentina, Helen would note what did/probably went wrong.
1: The repaired power supply generated about 3X the power it originally had.
2: The lenses did not just widen the ray, they intensified it.
3: At some point, the power dial had been damaged and drunkenly repaired by Dr. Kolnow. The 3 setting was actually the 5, maximum, setting.
4: A steel tripod might well have prevented what happened next.
Upon activation, the ray began blasting at a greater than expected intensity. This caused Helen, Milt and Donna to leap back while also causing the wooden tripod to burst into flames. The intense heat kept them back so all they could do was watch helplessly as the ray gun dropped into the ground fast, all the while sending up hot pressurized gasses from disintegrated soil.
Estimating that the ray gun was dropping at perhaps 10 miles an hour, Helen made some quick calculations and told her hired hands to set loose all the livestock, grab what they could and run to nearby farms to warn everyone to evacuate.
True to her calculations ans while watching from atop the Fontanelle church steeple 4 miles away, Helen saw the first jet of magma shoot 3,000 feet into the air about 4 hours later. She watched as as fell and then decided to head to Des Moines in the Steam Carriage that had been left behind as folks got out of town when the earthquakes started.
Thanks to a heavy rainstorm that blew in a few minutes later, the cinder cone began to build up fast. By the time Helen got to Des Moines, left a letter for her brother and stole a Personal Airship, the new volcano was 100 feet high. A day later, when Helen finally headed south and out of the USA for the next 60 years, it was 1,200 feet tall and growing. After nearly a year of constant eruption, it finally stopped. It was now 4,300 feet tall and had a base 50 miles across. It erupted another 6 times over the next 11 years before stopping entirely in 1910.
Now a national park, Mount Grudin is heavily forested and home to a wide variety of wildlife. In 1955, at the age of 82, Helen Grudin Sefrano, accompanied by her husband, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, visited Mount Grudin. She was “amazed and humbled” by it.
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