Part 26

My views, expressed in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of July 1880, and repeated above, remain unchanged, except in the direction of confirmation and development. I still believe that an enthusiastic, practically trained, sturdy arctic veteran, who has endured hardship both at home and abroad, whose craving eagerness to reach the Pole amounts to a positive monomania, who lives for this object alone, and is ready to die for it, who will work at it purely for the work’s sake—will be the right man in the right place when at the head of a modestly but efficiently equipped Polar expedition, especially if Lieutenant Schwatka is his second in command.

They will not require luxurious saloons, nor many cases of champagne; they will care but little for amateur theatricals; they will follow the naval traditions of the old British “sea-dogs” rather than those of our modern naval lap-dogs, and will not turn back after a first struggle with the cruel arctic ice, even though they should suppose it to be “paleocrystic.”

MR. WALTER POWELL.

Scientific aerostation has lost its most promising expert by the untimely death of Walter Powell. He was not a mere sensational ballooner, nor one of those dreamers who imagine they can invent flying machines, or steer balloons against the wind by mysterious electrical devices or by mechanical paddles, fan-wheels, or rudders.

He perfectly understood that a balloon is at the mercy of atmospheric currents and must drift with them, but nevertheless he regarded it as a most promising instrument for geographical research. I had a long conference with him on the subject in August last, when he told me that the main objects of the ascents he had already made, and should be making for some little time forward, were the acquisition of practical skill, and of further knowledge of atmospheric currents; after which he should make a dash at the Atlantic with the intent of crossing to America.

On my part, I repeated with further argument what I have already urged on page 113 of the “Gentleman’s Magazine” for July, 1880, viz., the primary necessity of systematic experimental investigation of the rate of exosmosis (oozing out) of the gas from balloons made of different materials and variously varnished.

Professor Graham demonstrated that this molecular permeation of gases and liquids through membranes mechanically air-tight, depends upon the adhesive affinities of particular solids for other particular fluids, and these affinities vary immensely, their variations depending on chemical differences rather than upon mechanical impermeability. My project to attach captive balloons of small size to the roof of the Polytechnic Institution, holding them by a steelyard that should indicate the pull due to their ascending power, and the rate of its decline according to the composition of the membrane, was heartily approved by Mr. Powell, and, had the Polytechnic survived, would have been carried out, as it would have served the double purpose of scientific investigation and of sensational advertisement for the outside public.

If the aeronaut were quite clear on this point—could calculate accurately how long his balloon would float—he might venture with deliberate calculation on journeys that without such knowledge are mere exploits of blind daring.

The varnishes at present used are all permeable by hydrogen gas and hydrocarbon coal-gas, as might be expected, à priori, from the fact that they are themselves solid hydrocarbons, soluble in other liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons. Nothing, as far as I can learn, has yet been done with silicic or boracic varnishes, which are theoretically impermeable by hydrogen and its carbon compounds; but whether they are practically so under ballooning conditions, and can be made sufficiently pliable and continuous, are questions only to be solved by practical experiments of the kind above named. Now that the best man for making these experiments is gone, somebody else should undertake them. Unfortunately, they must of necessity be rather expensive.

THE LIMITS OF OUR COAL SUPPLY.

Estimating the actual consumption of coal for home use in Great Britain at 110 millions of tons per annum, a rise of eight shillings per ton to consumers is equivalent to a tax of 44 millions per annum. These are the figures taken by Sir William Armstrong in his address at Newcastle last February. As the recent abnormal rise in the value of coal has amounted to more than this, consumers have been paying at some periods above a million per week as premium on fuel, even after making fair deduction for the rise of price necessarily due to the diminishing value of gold.

Are we, the consumers of coal, to write off all this as a dead loss, or have we gained any immediate or prospective advantage that may be deducted from the bad side of the account? I suspect that we shall gain sufficient to ultimately balance the loss, and, even after that, to leave something on the profit side.

The abundance of our fuel has engendered a shameful wastefulness that is curiously blind and inconsistent. As a typical example of this inconsistency, I may mention a characteristic incident. A party of young people were sitting at supper in the house of a colliery manager. Among them was the vicar of the parish, a very jovial and genial man, but most earnest withal in his vocation. Jokes and banterings were freely flung across the table, and no one enjoyed the fun more heartily than the vicar; but presently one unwary youth threw a fragment of bread-crust at his opposite neighbor, and thus provoked retaliation. The countenance of the vicar suddenly changed, and in stern clerical tones he rebuked the wickedness of thus wasting the bounties of the Almighty. A general silence followed, and a general sense of guilt prevailed among the revellers. At the same time, and in the same room, a blazing fire, in an ill-constructed open fire-place, was glaring reproachfully at all the guests, but no one heeded the immeasurably greater and utterly irreparable waste that was there proceeding. To every unit of heat that was fully utilized in warming the room, there were eight or nine passing up the chimney to waste their energies upon the senseless clouds and boundless outer atmosphere. A large proportion of the vicar’s parishioners are colliers, in whose cottages huge fires blaze most wastefully all day, and are left to burn all night to save the trouble of re-lighting. The vicar diligently visits these cottages, and freely admonishes where he deems it necessary; yet he sees in this general waste of coal no corresponding sinfulness to that of wasting bread. Why is he so blind in one direction, while his moral vision is so microscopic in the other? Why are nearly all Englishmen and Englishwomen as inconsistent as the vicar in this respect?

There are doubtless several combining reasons for this, but I suspect that the principal one is the profound impression which we have inherited from the experience and traditions of the horrors of bread-famine. A score of proverbs express the important practical truth that we rarely appreciate any of our customary blessings until we have tasted the misery of losing them. Englishmen have tasted the consequences of approximate exhaustion of the national grain store, but have never been near to the exhaustion of the national supply of coal.

I therefore maintain most seriously that we need a severe coal famine, and if all the colliers of the United Kingdom were to combine for a simultaneous winter strike of about three or six months’ duration, they might justly be regarded as unconscious patriotic martyrs, like soldiers slain upon a battle-field. The evils of such a thorough famine would be very sharp, and proportionally beneficent, but only temporary; there would not be time enough for manufacturing rivals to sink pits, and at once erect competing iron-works; but the whole world would partake of our calamity, and the attention of all mankind would be aroused to the sinfulness of wasting coal. Six months of compulsory wood and peat fuel, with total stoppage of iron supplies, would convince the people of these islands that waste of coal is even more sinful than waste of bread,—would lead us to reflect on the fact that our stock of coal is a definite and limited quantity that was placed in the present storehouse long before human beings came upon the earth; that every ton of coal that is wasted is lost for ever, and cannot be replaced by any human effort, while bread is a product of human industry, and its waste may be replaced by additional human labor; that the sin of bread-wasting does admit of agricultural atonement, while there is no form of practical repentance that can positively and directly replace a hundredweight of wasted coal.

Nothing short of the practical and impressive lesson of bitter want is likely to drive from our households that wretched fetish of British adoration, the open “Englishman’s fireside.” Reason seems powerless against the superstition of this form of fire-worship. Tell one of the idolaters that his household god is wasteful and extravagant, that five-sixths of the heat from his coal goes up the chimney, and he replies, “I don’t care if it does; I can afford to pay for it. I like to see the fire, and have the right to waste what is my own.” Tell him that healthful ventilation is impossible while the lower part of a room opens widely into a heated shaft, that forces currents of cold air through doors and window leakages, which unite to form a perpetual chilbrain stratum on the floor, and leaves all above the mantel-piece comparatively stagnant. Tell him that no such things as “draughts” should exist in a properly warmed and ventilated house, and that even with a thermometer at zero outside, every part of a well-ordered apartment should be equally habitable, instead of merely a semicircle about the hearth of the fire-worshiper; he shuts his ears, locks up his understanding, because his grandfather and grandmother believed that the open-mouthed chimney was the one and only true English means of ventilation.

But suppose we were to say, “You love a cheerful blaze, can afford to pay for it, and therefore care not how much coal you waste in obtaining it. We also love a cheerful blaze, but have a great aversion to coal-smoke and tarry vapors; and we find that we can make a beautiful fire, quite inoffensive even in the middle of the room, provided we feed it with stale quartern loaves. We know that such fuel is expensive, but can afford to pay for it, and choose to do so.” Would he not be shocked at the sight of the blazing loaves, if this extravagance were carried out?

This popular inconsistency of disregarding the waste of a valuable and necessary commodity, of which the supply is limited and unrenewable, while we have such proper horror of wilfully wasting another similar commodity which can be annually replaced as long as man remains in living contact with the earth, will gradually pass away when rational attention is directed to the subject. If the recent very mild suggestion of a coal-famine does something towards placing coal on a similar pedestal of popular veneration to that which is held by the “staff of life,” the million a week that it has cost the coal consumer will have been profitably invested.

Many who were formerly deaf to the exhortations of fuel economists are now beginning to listen. “Forty shillings per ton” has acted like an incantation upon the spirit of Count Rumford. After an oblivion of more than eighty years, his practical lessons have again sprung up among us. Some are already inquiring how he managed to roast 112 lbs. of beef at the Foundling Hospital with 22 lbs. of coal, and to use the residual heat for cooking the potatoes, and why it is that with all our boasted progress we do not now in the latter third of the nineteenth century, repeat that which he did in the eighteenth.

The fact that the consumption of coal in London during the first four months of 1873 has, in spite of increasing population, amounted to 49,707 tons less than the corresponding period of 1872, shows that some feeble attempts have been made to economize the domestic consumption of fuel. One very useful result of the recent scarcity of coal has been the awakening of a considerable amount of general interest in the work of stock-taking, a tedious process which improvident people are too apt to shirk, but which is quite indispensable to sound business proceedings, either of individuals or nations.

There are many discrepancies in the estimates that have been made of the total available quantity of British coal. The speculative nature of some of the data renders this inevitable, but all authorities appear to agree on one point, viz., that the amount of our supplies will not be determined by the actual total quantity of coal under our feet, but by the possibilities of reaching it. This is doubtless correct, but how will these possibilities be limited, and what is the extent or range of the limit? On both these points I venture to disagree with the eminent men who have so ably discussed this question. First, as regards the nature of the limit or barrier that will stop our further progress in coal-getting. This is generally stated to be the depth of the seams. The Royal Commissioners of 1870 based their tables of the quantity of available coal in the visible and concealed coal-fields upon the assumption that 4000 feet is the limit of possible working. This limit is the same that was taken by Mr. Hull ten years earlier. Mr. Hull, in the last edition of “The Coal Fields of Great Britain,” p. 326, referring to Professor Ramsay’s estimate, says, “These estimates are drawn up for depths down to 4000 feet below the surface, and even beyond this limit; but with this latter quantity it is scarcely necessary that we should concern ourselves.” I shall presently show reasons for believing that the time may ultimately arrive when we shall concern ourselves with this deep coal, and actually get it; while, on the other hand, that remote epoch will be preceded by another period of practical approximate exhaustion of British coal supply, which is likely to arrive long before we reach a working depth of 4000 feet.

The Royal Commissioners estimate that within the limits of 4000 feet we have hundreds of square miles of attainable coal capable of yielding, after deducting 40 per cent for loss in getting, etc., 146,480 millions of tons; or, if we take this with Mr. Hull’s deduction of one-twentieth for seams under two feet in thickness, there remains 139,000 millions of tons, which, at present rate of consumption, would last about 1200 years. But the rate of consumption is annually increasing, not merely on account of increasing population, but also from the fact that mechanical inventions are perpetually superseding hand labor, and the source of power in such cases, is usually derived from coal. This consideration induced Professor Jevons, in 1865, to estimate that between 1861 and 1871 the consumption would increase from 83,500,000 tons to 118,000,000 tons. Mr. Hunt’s official return for 1871 shows that this estimate was a close approximation to the truth, the actual total for 1871 having been 117,352,028 tons. At this rate of an arithmetical increase of three and a half tons per annum, 139,000 millions of tons would last but 250 years. Mr. Hull, taking the actual increase at three millions of tons per annum, extends it to 276 years. Hitherto the annual increase has followed a geometrical, rather than arithmetical progress, and those who anticipate a continuance of this allow us a much shorter lease of our coal treasures. Mr. Price Williams maintains that the increase will proceed in a diminishing ratio like that of the increase of population; and upon this basis he has calculated that the annual consumption will amount to 274 millions of tons a hundred years hence, and the whole available stock of coal will last about 360 years.

The latest returns show, for 1872, an output of 123,546,758 tons, which, compared with 1871, gives a rate of increase of more than double the estimate of Mr. Hull, and indicate that prices have not yet risen sufficiently to check the geometrical rate of increase. Mr Hull very justly points out the omission in those estimates which do not “take into account the diminishing ratio at which coal must be consumed when it becomes scarcer and more expensive;” but, on the other hand, he omits the opposite influence of increasing prices on production, which has been strikingly illustrated by the extraordinary number of new coal-mining enterprises that have been launched during the last six months. If we continue as we are now proceeding, a practical and permanent coal famine will be upon us within the lifetime of many of the present generation. By such a famine, I do not mean an actual exhaustion of our coal seams (which will never be effected), but such a scarcity and rise of prices as shall annihilate the most voracious of our coal-consuming industries, those which depend upon abundance of cheap coal, such as the manufacture of pig-iron, etc.

The action of increasing prices has been but lightly considered hitherto, though its importance is paramount in determining the limits of our coal supply; I even venture so far as to affirm that it is not the depth of the coal seams, not the increasing temperature nor pressure as we proceed downwards, nor even thinness of seam, that will practically determine the limits of British coal-getting, but simply the price per ton at the pit’s mouth.

In proof of this, I may appeal to actual practice. Mr. Hull and others have estimated the working limit of thinness at two feet, and agree in regarding thinner seams than this as unworkable. This is unquestionably correct so long as the getting is effected in the usual manner. A collier cannot lie down and hew a much thinner seam than this, if he works as colliers work at present. But the lead and copper miners succeed in working far thinner lodes, even down to the thickness of a few inches, and the gold-digger crushes the hardest component of the earth’s crust to obtain barely visible grains of the precious metal. This extension of effort is entirely determined by market value. At a sufficiently high price the two-feet limit of coal-getting would vanish, and the collier would work after the manner of the lead-miner.

We may safely apply the same reasoning to the limits of depth. The 4000 feet limit of the Royal Commissioners is at present unattainable, simply because the immediately prospective price of coal would not cover the cost of such deep sinking and working; but as prices go up, pits will go down, deeper and deeper still.

The obstacles which are assumed to determine the 4000 feet limit are increasing density due to greater pressure, and the elevation of temperature which proceeds as we go downwards. The first of these difficulties has, I suspect, been very much overstated, if not altogether misunderstood; though it is but fair to add that Mr. Hull, who most prominently dwells upon it, does so with all just and philosophic caution. He says that “it is impossible to speak with certainty of the effect of the accumulative weight of 3000 or 4000 feet of strata on mining operations. In all probability one effect would be to increase the density of the coal itself, and of its accompanying strata, so as to increase the difficulty of excavating,” and he concludes by stating that “in the face of these two obstacles—temperature and pressure, ever increasing with the depth—I have considered it utopian to include in calculations having reference to coal supply any quantity, however considerable, which lies at a greater depth than 4000 feet. Beyond that depth I do not believe that it will be found practicable to penetrate. Nature rises up, and presents insurmountable barriers.”

On one point I differ entirely from Mr. Hull, viz., the conclusion that the increased “density of the coal itself and of its accompanying strata” will offer any serious obstacle. On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that such density is one of the essential conditions for working deep coal. Even at present depths of working, density and hardness of the accompanying strata is one of the most important aids to easy and cheap coal-getting. With a dense roof and floor the collier works vigorously and fearlessly, and he escapes the serious cost of timbering.