The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1897-03-31


it are made in the United States eaeh
year, and practically all of this lis
made in the old beehive ovens. which
absolutely ignore every by-product in
the Pennsylvania coke regions alone: a
billion feet of good fuel gas are wasted
every week, not to mention the other
by-products already listed. Yet in an
the great coke districts of Europe
! (outside of England) the beehive fur
mace has been almost absolutely super
seeded by closed ovens, which make
more coke from the same amount of
coal. and save all the by-Droducts in
/ addition
toned here to show that there is no
need that the consumption of coal
should go on at anything like the.
present rate. So soon as economists
become fully aroused to the impending
| danger, there will come a revolution
in the entire coal industry, and meth
| DDS viii be adopted that Will give our
coal fields a vastly extended lease Of
/ life.
Yet, after all, this is only temporiz-
ing, for it is self-evident that however
the supply of coal be conserved, it
must finally give out altogether and
whether it be in one century or in ten.
the result is equally sure. Some Gay
the work of the world must be done
through some agency other than coal,
II work be done at all. What other
agency may be available as a substi-
! tute?
That question has been asked by
thoughtful men over and over. and
several efforts have been made to give
1t a practical answer Theoretically,
the answer is not very difficult. The
/ sources of available energy are COM
paratively few and well-defined. There
are, of course, the great forces of wind
and running water, used by primitive
peoples and never altogether aban-
doned, to which we might return. But
chiefly the investigators have turned
| their thoughts toward the vast food
OF energy that comes to us each Gay
directly from the sun-that big fire.
as John Ericsson phrased it. which is
hot enough to run engines at a dis
| tance of 90O00.0G0 miles" The heat
which falls on the earth each day from
this big fire" was estimated by F,rics-
son to equal the energy of 217, 600 000 Of
1,OOO-hOrSe-pOwer engines working
night and day. A vast proportion Of
this energy is radiated back into space,
unused by man.
If a way could be found TO utilize
this vast flood of energy that comes
with the sunlight, clearly we might
snap our fingers at the coal beds. Esv-
cry boy knows from his own expert
ence how powerful the heating power
of the suns rays are when brought to
focus with a magnifying glass; and
the classical story of ArchimedeS set
ting fire to the Roman fleet off SYRIA
cuse with cOncave system of steel
mirrors (whether true or not) illus
trates another way in which the suns
rays may be gathered. This latter way
has been thought by engineers more
available for their purpose. and some
very remarkable results have been at
concave mirrors or systems of fiat mir
rors arranged to bring the light to- a
focus. With such a system,
Button set fire to plank at distance
of $50 feet. More recently another
Frenchman, Villette by name, has eX-
perimented with a cOncave mirror AZ
inches in diameter in the focus of
which, when exposed to the sun, iron
ore was melted in "a seconds. cast iron
in IS seconds, d silver sixpence in seven
seconds, and tin in four seconds; while
an emerald was melted into state like
turquois, and a diamond lost seven
eighths of it's weight
But perhaps the most practical of
the experiments that have been made
in this direction are those of NJ.
MOuchot in France and of John ErieS-
son. the famous builder of the Monitor,
in America. Each of these inventors
strOve to make sun motor that should
De pTdCllCdlly dNdldDle IOr running an
engine, and both were entirely success
full in the effort Mouchet producing d
system of mirrors that would rapidly
boil water and Ericsson one that.
under a clear sky, ran an engine with
perfect regularity at 240 revolutions per
hour after hour. But the
about the practical adoption
Of these sun motors was the very
tangible one. that, counting the cost
Of construction they cannot compete
with the energy stored in coal, even
when the latter is used as waStefully
as we now use it. So the world re-
sarded these engines as little better
Investigator has thought it worth
while TO take up the work which the
leath of Ericsson, in 1888, interrupted.
But the recent report which esti-
mates the decay of our anthracite
rade in the next generation, serves
o recall Ericsson's prophecy that some
lay the coal Will become as rare as
liamonds," and that then the great
Industrial centers of Europe and
America will decline in power, while
manufacturers will flock to such tropi-
al regions as upper Egypt, where a
never-ceasing sun power would be
for running their engines
Should that prediction be fulfilled it
sill no longer be westward but
quator-ward that the course of EN-
ire will take its way; and the
Egyptian of the future, fulfilling
Iacaulays forecast, may ransack the
uins of Westminster Abbey with the
anne antiquarian interest with which
he European archeologist of TODAY
ansacks the sarcophagi of Egypt
But there are two or three other
ossible sources of energy which
with all his imagination,
verlooked in making this forecast,
nd it is not unlikely that these may
e called on TO avert the disaster which
he great engineer predicted. Even
ow, for example. engineers are
Niagara" and in an emery
ncy, this and other waterfalls could
lake amends for a vast deficit in the
oal supply. But the power of Niagara
a mere bagatelle compared with an
Their source of water power which
ntil recently has been utterly neglect
a. The tides which ceaSelessly OScil-
tie in our oceans, under stress of the
rooms attraction, have power which,
0uld we harness it, would run all the
lachinery of the world as readily as
locomotive could haul a toOthpick.
II this tremendous power is going to
aste, but of late more than one
lgineer has been asking how it
light be utilized. and now that we
now how to store energy in batteries
nd by COMPRISING air, and to trans
III it to a distance along wires, there
little doubt that human ingenuity
ould in time find a way of harness