CHAPTER IX
INVENTIONS AND WARFARE
Soon after my return from my 1905 trip to
Africa I got my attention turned away from
taxidermy for a little while in a curious fashion.
The Field Museum was still in the old Columbian
Exposition Building in which it had started.
The outside of this stucco building kept peeling so
that it had a very disreputable appearance. The
Park Department protested to the museum authorities.
I happened to be in the museum one day when
one of the officers had this on his mind and he said:
"Akeley, how are we going to get the outside of this building respectable at a reasonable cost?"
I got to thinking about it. In the many experiments of one kind and another that I had tried in working out methods for manikin making I had among other things used a compressed air spray. It occurred to me that it would be possible to make an apparatus on this principle that would spray a very liquid concrete on to the side of a building. I set to work and rigged up a somewhat crude apparatus and set it up outside the museum building. It was not a finished piece of mechanism and it had the further disadvantage of having its compressed air come quite a long way in a hose. Nevertheless it worked, and
