Mohave County miner., 1912-10-05
Coming Age of Oil.

local circumstances to which that greatest of living engineers, Dr. Ru- dolph Diesel, has lately directed atten- tion. As between coal and oil. America seems to Doctor Diesel to lag behind the old world. He attributes this partly to the fact that coal is yet abundant here. This tends, he says. to encourage waste and inetficiency in all forms of applied science. It parti- cularly promotes the manufacture of low.priced and inefficient engines, as the statistics of boiler explosions here demonstrate. He also attributed our tardiness in entering the oil age to the great demand for quick manufacture and the turning out of very large quantities of product. He predicts, however, that America will, like Europe, discover oil. Our resources in oil are so vast that the failure of this country to understand it and utl. lze 1t suggests the proverb that shoe. makers child is never shod.
 Coal, then. in it's crude raw shape is doomed. The statement was made in an article written a month before his death by the late William T. Stead. The statement IS endorsed by London Engineering. Goal will survive as a motor power only by consenting to be converted into tar and tar oils Doc tor Diesel maintains that tar and tar oil produce three to five times as much power in the famed Diesel engines as the coal from which the tar is gener- ated would produce if fed direct into the furnace. All our coal mine towns will became gas-works yielding tar. The gas will drive dynamos, supplying the towns with electricity. The coke will remain, but the motive force for the steamships of the world will be fed by pipe lines from the coal mines to the ports" What a new world is opened to our view! Thus Mir. Stead, an outburst which our scientific con. temporary does not deem unjustifed. No wagons, no stokers, no smoke! Dr. Diesel is thus the master magician of the world.
 "Think of it! The invention of one comparatively simple engine has dou bled the power of man over Nature Imagine all the steam-driven engines in the world with their millions upon millions of horsepower generating al most inconcelvable force at the ser vice of men, and then imagine this mighty power suddenly doubled. How paltry seem the conquests of warriors. the annexations of provinces compared with this sudden duplication of the power of production of the world! Man has, as it were, in moment been invested with sovereignty over an en- pire vaster in it's unimaginable re. sources than any of which Napoleon dreamed.
 "The Diesel engine is an engine which is driven by oil. Not oil fed Tn. to furnace to generate steam, but oil used direct. And it is not, like the motor omnibus, dependent upon petrol. It can be worked with almost any kind of oil; mineral oil, tar oil, even castor oil will do at pinch. Dr.. Diesel cal. led my attention to the probable effect Of his engine in increasing the value of our tropical possessions. You may exhaust your coal, you may empty your oil wells, you may cut down your for ests, but in the earthnut which can be cultivated to an lllimitable extent in the tropics you have an inexhaustible supply of force drawn year by year from the sun which will never fail you
 Every year we are burning 100000 tons of oil in our navy. If instead of feeding that oil into boiler furnaces we applied it direct to the Diesel motor we would multiply its driving force by 250 per cent. That is to say that 2OO,- 900 tons would become as it were by some strange alchemy supplied with the power of 5OO,OOO tons. For the Diesel engine working side by side with an oil-fired steam engine of the latest type at Turin Exhibition did the same amount of work with ten tons of oil that was one with twenty-five tons by it's steam rival.
 "This being the case, it is only