The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-01-07
STARTLING FIGURES.
Marvellous Output of This Land of Coal
 and Iron.

Marvellous Output of This Land of Coal and Iron
 The statement that last year forty per cent. of the pig iron in the world was produced in the United States gives one no very definite realization of the quan- tity of that product, though he be re- minded on every hand by iron and steel ships, bridges, railroads, buildings, ma chinery. tools, nails. tacks, etc, and nauseam, that this is the iron age. Even the statement that the United States last year mined over thirty mil- lion long tons of iron ore gives one no adequate impression of the vastness of this amount. On the other hand, if one should see the entire iron ore produc- ton of the year piled up in a single heap, he would readily comprehend this quantity by a comparison of the pile with similar objects in the landscape. This shows us that it Is large numbers instead of large quantities which con- fuse the mind; for example, the state
 ment that a wagon holds over thirty million grains of coal would give a per- son very hazy idea of the actual quan- 1 tfty specified, but he would immediately comprehend the quantity if told that it represented two tons: for a larger unit of weight would be used, thereby reduc 1 ing the count to a figure well within the mental grasp. Thus in trying to repre- sent to our readers just how large are
 the quantities of materials used in the ] iron and steel industry, we have en-
 deavored to choose larger units of meas
 urement; and finding that our standard
 measures are far too small for the pur-
 pose, we have resorted to the use of fla
 millar landmarks as bases of compari- l son.
 1 As a unit of bulk, no larger single monument has man produced than the
 old pyramid of Cheops, and large
 though it be, it Is all too small when
 used as a unit by which to measure the
 stupendous volume of material used in
 our pig iron production of single year. l Tn the accompanying Illustration, the huge blast furnace shown at the left
 represents furnace which would re-
 ceive at a single charge all our iron ore
 production during the year 1902, togeth-
 CT with the fuel and limestone used. l The charge measures approximately l two billion cubic feet, or to use our pro-
 posed unit of bulk, this would be equiv
 alent to twenty-four pyramids. As
 many individuals may have formed no
 adequate conception of the size of the l great Pyramid, we have used as an ad-
 ditional basis of comparison the tallest
 building in the world, namely, the Park Row building, in New York. This build 1 ing measures three hundred and ninety
 feet in height, and it would require
 thirteen such buildings, placed one
 above the other, to equal the height of
 our hypothetical blast furnace.
 | Of the contents of the blast furnace,
 by far the larger bulk is fuel, though l the weight of the iron ore is almost twice that of the fuel. The square col
 umns in our illustration will serve to
 give one some idea of the amount of
 fuel consumed last year by the blast furnaces of the United States No ex- act figures are available for 1902 but a fair estimate would be about sixteen million tons of coke, one million tons of
 coal and three hundred thousand tons of charcoal Coke is so light that if the
 sixteen million tons were built up in a
 column four hundred feet square, the
 column would reach an altitude of six ty-fve hundred feet. No human monu- ment is large enough to give us, by comparison with this column, any idea
 of such height If the base of the col
 umn were situated at sea level, per-
 son at the top could look down on the
 summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, and it would overtop every
 mountain in this country east of the I Rockies.
 Our column of coal includes both an- Ithracite and bituminous. In the last l two years there has been considerable failing off in the use of anthracite, while
 bituminous coal mixed with coke has shown a great increase over former