Science in Short Chapters — The Limits of our Coal Supply, Part I

THE LIMITS OF OUR COAL SUPPLY.

[23] 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.

[24] 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. [25] 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.

”[26] 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.

Those who have never been underground, and only read of colliery disasters, commonly regard the fire-damp and choke-damp as the collier’s most deadly enemies, but the collier himself has quite as much dread of a rotten roof as of either of these: he knows by sad experience how much bruising, and maiming, and crushing of human limbs are due to the friability of the rock above his head.

Mr. Hull quotes the case of the Dunkinfield colliery, where, at a depth of about 2500 feet, the pressure is “so resistless as to crush in circular arches of brick four feet thick,” and to snap a cast-iron pillar in twain; but he does not give any account of the density of the accompanying strata at the place of these occurrences.

I suspect that it was simply _a want of density_ that allowed the superincumbent pressure to do such mischief.

The circular arches of brick four feet thick were but poor substitutes for a roof of solid rock of 40 or 400 feet in thickness; an arch cut in such a rock would be all key-stone: and I may safely venture to affirm that if, in the deep sinkings of the future, we do encounter the increased density which Mr. Hull anticipates, this will be altogether advantageous.

I fear, however, that it will not be so, that the chief difficulty of deep coal-mining will arise from occasional “running in” due to deficient density, and that this difficulty will occur in about the same proportion of cases as at present, but will operate more seriously at the greater depths.

A very interesting subject for investigation is hereby suggested.

Do rocks of given composition and formation increase in density as they dip downwards; and if so, does this increase of density follow any law by which we may determine whether their power of resisting superincumbent pressure increases in any approach to the ratio of the increasing pressure to which they are naturally subjected?

If the increasing density and power of resistance reaches or exceeds this ratio, deep mining has nothing to fear from pressure.

If they fall short of it, the difficulties arising from pressure may be serious.

Friability, viscosity, and power of resisting a crushing strain must be considered in reference to this question.

Mr. Hull has collected a considerable amount of data bearing upon the rate of increase of temperature with depth.

His conclusions give a greater rate of increase than is generally stated by geologists;

but for the present argument I will accept, without prejudice, as the lawyers say, his basis of a range of 1° F. for 60 feet.

According to this, the _rocks_ will reach 99. 6°, a little above blood-heat, at 3000 feet, and 116. 3° at the supposed limit of 4000 feet.

It is assumed by Mr. Hull, by the Commissioners, and most other authorities, that this rock temperature of 116° will limit the possibilities of coal-mining.

At the average prices of the last three years, or the prospective prices of the next three years, this temperature may be, like difficulties of the thin seams, an insurmountable barrier; but I contend that at higher prices we may work coal at this, and even far higher, rock temperatures; that it matters not how high the thermometer rises as we descend, we shall still go lower and still get coal so long as prices rise with the mercury.

Given this condition, and I have no doubt that coal may be worked where the rock temperature shall reach or even exceed 212°.

I do not say that we shall actually work coal at such depths; but if we do not, the reason will be, not that the thermometer is too high, but that prices are too low; in other words, value, not temperature, will determine the working limits.

Mr. Leifchild, in the last number of the “Edinburgh Review,” in discussing this question, tells us that “the normal heat of our blood is 98°, and fever heat commences at 100°, and the extreme limit of fever heat may be taken at 112°.

Dr. Thudichum, a physician who has specially investigated this subject, has concluded from experiments on his own body at high temperatures, that at a heat of 140° no work whatever could be carried on, and that at a temperature of from 130° to 140° only a very small amount of labor, and that at short periods, was practicable; and further, that human labor daily, and at ordinary periods, is limited by 100° of temperature, as a fixed point, and then the air must be dry, for in moist air he did not think men could endure ordinary labor at a temperature exceeding 90°.

” It may be presumptuous on my part to dispute the conclusions of a physician on such a subject, but I do so nevertheless, as the data required are simple practical facts such as are better obtained by furnace-working than by sick-room experience.

During the hottest days of the summer of 1868 I was engaged in making some experiments in the re-heating furnaces at Sir John Brown & Co. ’s works, Sheffield, and carried a thermometer about with me which I suspended in various places where the men were working.

At the place where I was chiefly engaged (a corner between two sets of furnaces), the thermometer, suspended in a position where it was not affected by direct radiations from the open furnaces, stood at 120° while the furnace doors were shut.

The _radiant_ heat to which the men themselves were exposed while making their greatest efforts in placing and removing the piles was far higher than this, but I cannot state it, not having placed the thermometer in the position of the men.

In one of the Bessemer pits the thermometer reached 140°, and men worked there at a kind of labor demanding great muscular effort.

It is true that during this same week the puddlers were compelled to leave their work;

but the tremendous amount of concentrated exertion demanded of the puddler in front of a furnace, which, during the time of removing the balls, radiates a degree of heat quite sufficient to roast a sirloin of beef if placed in the position of the puddles hands, is beyond comparison with that which would be demanded of a collier working even at a depth giving a theoretical rock temperature of 212°, and aided by the coal-cutting and other machinery that sufficiently high prices would readily command.

In some of the operations of glass-making, the ordinary summer working temperature is considerably above 100°, and the radiant neat to which the workmen are subjected far exceeds 212°.

This is the case during a “pot setting,” and in the ordinary work of flashing crown glass.

As regards the mere endurance of a high temperature, the well-known experiments of Blagden, Sir Joseph Banks, and others have shown that the human body can endure for short periods a temperature of 260° F.

, and upwards.

My own experience of furnace-work, and of Turkish baths, quite satisfies me that I could do a fair day’s work of six or eight hours in a temperature of 130° F. , provided I were free from the encumbrances of clothing, and had access to abundance of tepid water.

This in a still atmosphere; but with a moving current of dry air capable of promoting vigorous evaporation from the skin, I suspect that the temperature might be ten or fifteen degrees higher.

I _enjoy_ ordinary walking exercise in a well-ventilated Turkish bath at 150°, and can endure it at 180°.

In order to obtain further information on this point, I have written to Mr. Tyndall, the proprietor of the Turkish baths at Newington Butts.

He is an architect, who has had considerable experience in the employment of workmen and in the construction of Turkish baths and other hot-air chambers.

He says: “Shampooers work in my establishment from four to five hours at a time _in a moist atmosphere_ at a temperature ranging from 105° to 110°.

I have myself worked twenty hours out of twenty-four in one day in a temperature over 110°.

Once for one half-hour I shampooed in 185°.

At the enamel works in Pimlico, belonging to Mr. Mackenzie, men work daily in a heat of over 300°.

The moment a man working in a 110° heat begins to drink alcohol, his tongue gets parched, and he is obliged to continue drinking while at work, and the brain gets so excited that he cannot do half the amount.

I painted my skylights, taking me about four hours, at a temperature of about 145°;

also the hottest room skylights, which took me one hour, coming out at intervals for “a cooler,” at a temperature of 180°.

I may add in conclusion, that a man can work well in a moist temperature of 110° if he perspires freely.

” The following, by a writer whose testimony may be safely accepted, is extracted from an account of ordinary passenger ships of the Red Sea, in the “Illustrated News,” of November 9, 1872: “The temperature in the stoke-hole was 145°.

The floor of this warm region is close to the ship’s keel, so it is very far below.

There are twelve boilers, six on each side, each with a blazing furnace, which has to be opened at regular intervals to put in new coals, or to be poked up with long iron rods.

This is the duty of the poor wretches who are doomed to this work.

It is hard to believe that human beings could be got to labor under such conditions, yet such persons are to be found.

The work of stoking or feeding the fires is usually done by Arabs, while the work of bringing the coal from the bunkers is done by sidi-wallahs or negroes.

At times some of the more intelligent of these _are promoted to the stoking_.

The negroes who do this kind of work come from Zanzibar.

They are generally short men, with strong limbs, round bullet heads, and the very best of good nature in their dispositions.

Some of them will work half an hour in such a place as the stoke-hole without a drop of perspiration on their dark skins.

Others, particularly the Arabs, when it is so hot as it often is in the Red Sea, have to be carried up in a fainting condition, and are restored to animation by dashing buckets of water over them as they lie on deck.

”