Aetna Explosion 1916

Checked against the record. CONFIRMED IN A primary source, same day, page one, and then made much stronger. The Harrisburg Telegraph of September 20, 1916, page 1, city edition, carries the story datelined "Mount Union, Pa., Sept. 20" and reports the explosion as having happened "at 6 o'clock this morning." That kills the newspaper-date-versus-event-date trap outright: the paper and the event are the same day, and the paper says so. Every core claim in the original holds: September 20, 1916, six men killed, cotton dry house, completely destroyed, Aetna Explosives Company, Mount Union. Even the word "terrific" in the original is the newspaper's own word. Two claims cut. 1. "over 1,000 workers at peak production." NO source found. Big round employment numbers are exactly the sort of figure that gets repeated into existence. Cut, not hedged. 2. "The plant churned out smokeless powder for World War I." Cut as written. The papers call it a powder plant and an explosives plant, and the Evening Public Ledger of October 25, 1916 has Aetna and du Pont planning to convert auxiliary factories to dyestuffs once "the demand for explosives and munitions becomes normal," which confirms munitions but not smokeless powder specifically. Worth noting the United States was not in the war in September 1916, so "for World War I" needs care it was not given. 3. "killing six workers in an instant" loses "in an instant." Embellishment on top of a death toll. 4. "the cost of that industrial boom was measured in lives lost to catastrophic accidents" was a plural claim with a single incident under it. The Harrisburg Telegraph's weekly Mount Union column reported fires in that exact building on August 5, August 19 and September 2, 1916, in the seven weeks before it blew up. Three separate notices, each treated as ordinary town news. The post no longer has to assert a pattern. It can just print the paper. Not used: the Evening Public Ledger of January 8, 1916 reports an earlier Aetna fire "supposed to have been caused by spontaneous combustion due to overheating the building" with a loss figure the OCR renders as "J75.C0O." The figure is almost certainly $75,000 but the OCR is not clean enough to print a dollar amount from, so it is left out. The three krishocker.com and spicerweb.org URLs originally attached to this story are now unnecessary. The post stands on the newspaper.