98 pp. With 8 mounted mounted albumen photographs, including 6 stereo views by L. Daft. 25x16.5 cm. (9¾x6½"), original cloth. First Edition.

The photographs show various aspects of the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel; one print is a photographic reproduction of a drawing of a laborer drilling underground and two photographs illustrate the effects of nitroglycerin explosions. George Mowbray (1815-1891), an English immigrant to the United States, was the first to use nitroglycerin to obtain oil from dormant wells after the first successful oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. In 1867 Mowbray took his process for making nitroglycerin to the Hoosac Mountain in Massachusetts, where engineers were boring a tunnel almost five miles long and twenty-two feet wide to connect Boston to the burgeoning economy to the west. After fifteen years of work they had penetrated barely a mile into the mountain. Mowbray manufactured some 6,000 pounds of nitroglycerin a month for the project. Equipped with the new explosive, considered ten times as powerful as black powder, the tunnelers burrowed through the mountain at an accelerated rate. The tunnel was finally completed in 1875, having cost over nine million dollars and the lives of 200 workers.