This day in The Record in 1916

Tuesday, Oct. 24, 1916

A Cohoes man is scalded to death and a co-worker is seriously injured when a tank of boiling water explodes at the Crystal Bleachery, The Record reports.

Adelard Bellrose of 148 Bridge Avenue dies at about 1:30 p.m. of the injuries suffered in the explosion on Adams Avenue, Van Schaick Island. Henry Payatte is also badly scalded and “is not expected to live,” as of press time for our evening edition.

“Officials of the company are at loss concerning the cause of the explosion, but it is partly laid to steam pipes which coursed through the tank’s interior,” our Cohoes reporter writes.

“The tank was thirty feet in depth and was submerged twenty-five feet, so that only five feet of it was above the ground. When the explosion came sheets of the scalding water went up as high as the roof, then showered about the whole room.”

There are eight other men in the room besides Bellrose and Payatte, but all but one escape injury entirely, while Arthur Trahan is only “slightly injured.” These lucky men still “suffered from shock to such an extent that medical means had to be employed to enable them to control themselves.”

BALLOT BATTLE

Rensselaer County has decided to stick with voting machines for this November’s elections after a crisis caused by the late appearance of an extra slate of candidates. The debate goes on, however, over how the voting machines should be rearranged to accommodate the extra party.

Representatives of the Automatic Registering Machine company have been showing municipalities throughout New York how to rearrange the names on its machines. Since there are eight parties in the field, but room for only seven on the machines, “the parties were so arranged that in some instances the voters had to seek his candidates in groups.”

Nevertheless, “it was agreed that all would have an equal chance to vote freely and correctly under the arrangement.” Or so it was agreed until the state chairman of the Prohibition party proposed an alternate layout that would give all but the two smallest parties, the Independence League and the American Party, lines of their own.

The state attorney general has approved both arrangements, but the fourman county board, with two Democrats and two Republicans, has a hard time deciding between them. The Democrats prefer the layout suggested by the Prohibitionists, while the Republicans warn that yet another change will only confuse voters.

The vote on the layout is a party-line tie, but with Republican Andrew Delaney conceding that “we can’t stay tied,” the GOP commissioners join with the Democrats on the second vote.