Part 19
What, then, would be the course of the mining engineer when all the existing difficulties presented by water-bearing strata should be removed, and their place taken by a new and totally different obstacle, viz., high temperature? Obviously to reverse the present mode of working—to sink on the upper part of the range and drive downwards. In such a system of working the ventilation of the pit will be most powerfully aided or altogether effected by natural atmospheric currents. An upcast once determined by artificial means, it will thereafter proceed spontaneously, as the cold air of the downcast shaft will travel by a descending road to the workings, and then after becoming heated will simply obey the superior pressure of the heavy column behind, and proceed by an upward road to the upcast shaft. As the impelling force of the air current will be the difference between the weight of the cool column of air in the downcast shaft and roads and the warm column in the upcast, the available force of natural ventilation and cooling will increase just as demanded, _i.e._, it will increase with the depth of the workings and the heat of the rocks. A mining engineer who knows what is actually done with present arrangements, will see at once that with the above-stated advantages a gale of wind or even a hurricane might be directed through any particular roads or long-wall workings that were once opened. Let us suppose the depth to be 5000 feet, the rock temperature at starting 133°, and that of the outer air 60°, we should have a torrent of air, 73° cooler than the rocks, rushing furiously downwards, then past the face of the heated strata, and absorbing its heat to such an extent that the upcast shaft would pour forth a perpetual blast of hot air like a gigantic furnace chimney.
But this is not all; the heat and dryness of these deep workings of the future place at our disposal another and still more efficient cooling agency than even that of a hurricane of dry-air ventilation. In the first part of the sinking of the deep shafts the usual water-bearing strata would be encountered, and the ordinary means of “tubbing” or “coffering” would probably be adopted for temporary convenience during sinking. Doorways, however, would be left in the tubbing at suitable places for tapping at pleasure the wettest and most porous of the strata. Streams of cold water could thus be poured down the sides of the shaft, which, on reaching the bottom, would flow by a downhill road into the workings. The stream of air rushing by the same route and becoming heated in its course would powerfully assist the evaporation of the water. The deeper and hotter the pit, the more powerful would be these cooling agencies.
As the specific heat of water is about five times that of the coal-measure rocks, or the coal itself, every degree of heat communicated to each pound of water would abstract one degree from five pounds of rocks. But in the conversion of water at 60° into vapor at say 100°, the amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to that required to raise the same weight of water about 1000°, and thus the effective cooling power on the rock would be equivalent to 5000°.
The workings once opened (I assume as a matter of course that by this time pillar-and-stall working will be entirely abandoned for long-wall or something better), there would be no difficulty in thus pouring streams of water and torrents of air through the workings during the night, or at any suitable time preparatory to the operations of the miner, who long before the era of such deep workings will be merely the director of coal-cutting and loading machinery.
Given a sufficiently high price for coal at the pit’s mouth to pay wages and supply the necessary fixed capital, I see no insuperable difficulty, _so far as mere temperature is concerned_, in working coal at double the depth of the Royal Commissioners’ limit of possibility. At such a depth of 8000 feet the theoretical rock-temperature is 183°.
By the means above indicated, I have no doubt that this could be reduced to an _air_ temperature below 110°—that at which Mr. Tyndall’s shampooers ordinarily work. Of course the newly-exposed face of the coal would have its initial temperature of 183°; but this is a trivial heat compared to the red-hot radiant surfaces to which puddlers, shinglers, glassmakers, etc., are commonly exposed. Divested of the incumbrance of clothing, with the whole surface of the skin continuously fanned by a powerful stream of air—which, during working hours need be but partly saturated with vapor—a sturdy midland or north-countryman would work merrily enough at short hours and high wages, even though the newly-exposed face of coal reached 212°; for we must remember that this new coal-face would only correspond to the incomparably hotter furnace-doors and fires of the steamship stoke-holes.
The high temperature at 8000 or even 10,000 feet would present a really serious difficulty during the first opening of communications between the two pits. A spurt of brave effort would here be necessary, and if anybody doubts whether Englishmen could be found to make the effort, let him witness a “pot-setting” at a glass-house. Negro labor might be obtained if required, but my experience among English workmen leads me to believe that they will never allow negroes or any others to beat them at home in any kind of work where the wages paid are proportionate to the effort demanded.
If I am right in the above estimates of working possibilities, our coal resources may be increased by about forty thousand millions of tons beyond the estimate of the Commissioners. To obtain such an additional quantity will certainly be worth an effort, and unless we suffer a far worse calamity than the loss of all our minerals, viz., a deterioration of British energy, the effort will assuredly be made.
I have said repeatedly that it is not physical difficulties but market value that will determine the limits of our coal-mining. This, like all other values, is of course determined by the relation between demand and supply. Fuel being one of the absolute necessaries of life, the demand for it must continue so long as the conditions of human existence remain as at present, and the outer limits of the possible value of coal will be determined by that of the next cheapest kind of fuel which is capable of superseding it.
We begin by working the best and most accessible seams, and while those remain in abundance the average value of coal will be determined by the cost of producing it under these easy conditions. Directly these most accessible seams cease to supply the whole demand, the market value rises until it becomes sufficient to cover the cost of working the less accessible; and the average value will be regulated not by the cost of working what remains of the first or easy mines, but by that of working the most difficult that must be worked in order to meet the demand. This is a simple case falling under the well-established economic law, that the natural or cost value of any commodity is determined by the cost value of the most costly portion of it. Thus, the only condition under which we can proceed to sink deeper and deeper, is a demand of sufficient energy to keep pace with the continually increasing cost of production. This condition can only be fulfilled when there is no competing source of cheaper production which is adequate to supply the demand.
The question then resolves itself into this: Is any source of supply likely to intervene that will prevent the value of coal from rising sufficiently to cover the cost of working the coal seams of 4000 feet and greater depth? Without entering upon the question of peat and wood fuel, both of which will for some uses undoubtedly come into competition with British coal as it rises in value, I believe that there are sound reasons for concluding that our London fireplaces, and those of other towns situated on the sea-coast and the banks of navigable rivers, will be supplied with transatlantic coal long before we reach the Commissioner’s limit of 4000 feet. The highest prices of last winter, if steadily maintained, would be sufficient to bring about this important change. Temporary upward jerks of the price of coal have very little immediate effect upon supply, as the surveying, conveyance, boring, sinking, and fully opening of a new coal estate is a work of some years.
The Royal Commissioners estimate that the North-American coal-fields contain an untouched coal area equal to seventy times the whole of ours. Further investigation is likely to increase rather than diminish this estimate. An important portion of this vast source of supply is well situated for shipment, and may be easily worked at little cost. Hitherto, the American coal-fields have been greatly neglected, partly on account of the temptations to agricultural occupation which are afforded by the vast area of the American continent, and partly by the barbarous barriers of American politics. Large amounts of capital which, under the social operation of the laws of natural selection, would have been devoted to the unfolding of the vast mineral resources of the United States, are still wastefully invested in the maintenance of protectively nursed and sickly imitation of English manufactures. When the political civilization of the United States become sufficiently advanced to establish a national free-trade policy, this perverted capital will flow into its natural channels, and the citizens of the States will be supplied with the more highly elaborated industrial products at a cheaper rate than at present, by obtaining them in exchange for their superabundant raw material from those European countries where population is overflowing the raw material supplies.
When this time arrives, and it may come with the characteristic suddenness of American changes, the question of American _versus_ English coal in the English markets will reduce itself to one of horizontal _versus_ vertical difficulties. If at some future period the average depth of the Newcastle coal-pits becomes 3000 feet greater than those of the pits near the coast of the Atlantic or American lakes, and if the horizontal difficulties of 3000 miles of distance are less than the vertical difficulties of 3000 feet of depth, then coals will be carried from America to Newcastle. They will reach London and the towns on the South Coast before this, that is, when the vertical difficulties at Newcastle plus those of horizontal traction from Newcastle to the south, exceed those of eastward traction across the Atlantic.
As the cost of carriage increases in a far smaller ratio than the open ocean distance, there is good reason for concluding that the day when London houses will be warmed by American coal is not very far distant. We, in England, who have outgrown the pernicious folly of “protecting native industry” will heartily welcome so desirable a consummation. It will render unnecessary any further inquiry into the existence of London “coal rings” or combinations for restricted output among colliers or their employers. If any morbid impediments to the free action of the coal trade do exist, the stimulating and purgative influence of foreign competition will rapidly restore the trade to a healthy condition.
The effect of such introduction of American coal will not be to perpetually lock up our deep coal nor even to stop our gradual progress towards it. We shall merely proceed downwards at a much slower rate, for in America, as with ourselves, the easily accessible coal will be first worked, and as that becomes exhausted, the deeper, more remote, thinner, and inferior will only remain to be worked at continually increasing cost. When both our own and foreign coal cost more than peat, or wood, or other fuel, then and therefore will coal become quite inaccessible to us, and this will probably be the case long before we are stopped by the physical obstacles of depth, density, or high temperature.
As this rise of value must of necessity be gradual, and as the superseding of British by foreign coal, as well as the final disuse of coal, will gradually converge from the circumference towards the centres of supply, from places distant from coal-pits to those close around them, we shall have ample warning and opportunity for preparing for the social changes that the loss of the raw material will enforce.
The above-quoted writer, in the “Edinburgh Review,” expresses in strong and unqualified terms an idea that is very prevalent in England and abroad: he says that, “The course of manufacturing supremacy of wealth and of power is directed by coal. That wonderful mineral, of the possession of which Englishmen have thought so little but wasted so much, is the modern realization of the philosopher’s stone. This chemical result of primeval vegetation has been the means by its abundance of raising this country to an unprecedented height of prosperity, and its deficiency might have the effect of lowering it to slow decline.”
*** “It raises up one people and casts down another; it makes railways on land and paths on the sea. It founds cities, it rules nations, it changes the course of empires.”
The fallacy of these customary attributions of social potency to mere mineral matter is amply shown by facts that are previously stated by the reviewer himself. He tells us that “the coal-fields of China extend over an area of 400,000 square miles; and a good geologist, Baron Von Richthofen, has reported that he himself has found a coal-field in the province of Hunau covering an area of 21,700 square miles, which is nearly double our British coal area of 12,000 square miles. In the province of Shansi, the Baron discovered nearly 30,000 square miles of coal with unrivaled facilities for mining. But all these vast coal-fields, capable of supplying the whole world for some thousands of years to come, are lying unworked.”
If “the course of manufacturing supremacy of wealth and of power” were directed by coal, then China, which possesses 33·3 times more of this directive force than Great Britain, and had so early a start in life, should be the supreme summit of the industrial world. If this solid hydrocarbon “raises up one people and casts down another,” the Chinaman should, be raised thirty-three times and three tenths higher than the Englishman; if it “makes railways on land and paths on the sea,” the Chinese railways should be 33·3 times longer than ours, and the tonnage of their mercantile marine 33·3 times greater.
Every addition to our knowledge of the mineral resources of other parts of the world carries us nearer and nearer to the conclusion that the old idea of the superlative abundance of the natural mineral resources of England is a delusion. We are gradually discovering that, with the one exception of tin-stone, we have but little if any more than an average supply of useful ores and mineral fuel. It is a curious fact, and one upon which we may profitably ponder, that the poorest and the worst iron ores that have ever been commercially reduced, are those of South Staffordshire and the Cleveland district, and these are the two greatest iron-making centres of the world. There are no ores of copper, zinc, tin, nickel, or silver in the neighborhood of Birmingham, nor any golden sands upon the banks of the Rea, yet this town is the hardware metropolis of the world, the fatherland of gilding and plating, and is rapidly becoming supreme in the highest art of gold and silver work.
These, and a multitude of other analogous facts, abundantly refute the idea that the native minerals, the natural fertility, the navigable rivers, or the convenient seaports, determine the industrial and commercial supremacy of nations. The moral forces exerted by the individual human molecules are the true components which determine the resulting force and direction of national progress. It is the industry and skill of our workmen, the self-denial, the enterprise, and organizing ability of our capitalists, that has brought our coal so precociously to the surface and redirected for human advantage the buried energies of ancient sunbeams, while the fossil fuel of other lands has remained inert.
The foreigner who would see a sample of the source of British prosperity must not seek for it in a geological museum or among our subterranean rocks; let him rather stand on the Surrey side of London Bridge from 8 to 10 A.M. and contemplate the march of one of the battalions of our metropolitan industrial army, as it pours forth in an unceasing stream from the railway stations towards the City. An analysis of the moral forces which produce the earnest faces and rapid steps of these rank and file and officers of commerce will reveal the true elements of British greatness, rather than any laboratory dissection of our coal or ironstone.
Fuel and steam-power have been urgently required by all mankind. Englishmen supplied these wants. Their urgency was primary and they were first supplied, even though the bowels of the earth had to be penetrated in order to obtain them. In the present exceptional and precocious degree of exhaustion of our coal treasures, we have the _effect_ not the _cause_ of British industrial success.
If in a ruder age our greater industrial energy enabled us to take the lead in supplying the ruder demands of our fellow-creatures, why should not a higher culture of those same abundant energies qualify us to maintain our position and enable us to minister to the more refined and elaborate wants of a higher civilization? There are other necessary occupations quite as desirable as coal-digging, furnace-feeding, and cotton-spinning.
The approaching exhaustion of our coal supplies should therefore serve us as a warning for preparation. Britain will be forced to retire from the coal trade, and should accordingly prepare her sons for higher branches of business,—for those in which scientific knowledge and artistic training will replace mere muscular strength and mechanical skill. We have attained our present material prosperity mainly by our excellence in the use of steam-power; let us now struggle for supremacy in the practical application of brain-power.
We have time and opportunity for this. The exhaustion of our coal supplies will go on at a continually retarding pace—we shall always be approaching the end, but shall never absolutely reach it, as every step of approximation will diminish the rate of approach; like the everlasting process of reaching a given point by continually halving our distance from it.
First of all we shall cease to export coal; then we shall throw up the most voracious of our coal-consuming industries, such as the reduction of iron-ore in the blast-furnace; then copper-smelting and the manufacture of malleable iron and steel from the pig, and so on progressively. If we keep in view the natural course and order of such progress, and intelligently prepare for it, the loss of our coal need not in the smallest degree retard the progress of our national prosperity.
If, however, we act upon the belief that the advancement of a nation depends upon the mere accident of physical advantages, if we fold our arms and wait for Providence to supply us with a physical substitute for coal, we shall become Chinamen, minus the unworked coal of China.
If our educational efforts are conducted after the Chinese model; if we stultify the vigor and freshness of young brains by the weary, dull, and useless cramming of words and phrases; if we poison and pervert the growing intellect of British youth by feeding it upon the decayed carcases of dead languages, and on effete and musty literature, our progress will be proportionately Chinaward; but if we shake off that monkish inheritance which leads so many of us blindly to believe that the business of education is to produce scholars rather than men, and direct our educational efforts towards the requirements of the future rather than by the traditions of the past, we need have no fear that Great Britain will decline with the exhaustion of her coal-fields.
The teaching and training in schools and colleges must be directly and designedly preparatory to those of the workshop, the warehouse, and the office; for if our progress is to be worthy of our beginning, the moral and intellectual dignity of industry must be formally acknowledged and systematically sustained and advanced. Hitherto, we have been the first and the foremost in utilizing the fossil forces which the miner has unearthed; hereafter we must in like manner avail ourselves of the living forces the philosopher has revealed. Science must become as familiar among all classes of Englishmen as their household fuel. The youth of England must be trained to observe, generalize, and _investigate_ the phenomena and forces of the world outside themselves; and also those moral forces within themselves, upon the right or wrong government of which the success or failure, the happiness or misery of their lives will depend.
With such teaching and training the future generations of England will make the best and most economical use of their coal while it lasts, and will still advance in material and moral prosperity in spite of its progressive exhaustion.
“THE ENGLISHMAN’S FIRESIDE.”
During the investment of Paris, the _Comptes Rendus_ of the Acadamy of Sciences were mainly filled with papers on the construction and guidance of balloons; with the results of ingenious researches on methods of making milk and butter without the aid of cows; on the extraction of nutritious food from old boots, saddles, and other organic refuse; and other devices for rendering the general famine more endurable. In like manner, our present coal famine is directing an important amount of scientific, as well as commercial, attention to the subject of economizing coal and finding substitutes for it.
A few thoughtful men have shocked their fellow-sufferers very outrageously by wishing that coal may reach 3_l._ per ton, and remain at that price for a year or two. I confess that, in spite of my own empty coal-cellar and small income, I am one of those hard-hearted cool calculators, being confident that, even from the narrow point of view of my own outlay in fuel, the additional amount I should thus pay in the meantime would be a good investment, affording by an ample return in the saving due to consequent future cheapness.
Regarded from a national point of view, I am convinced that 3_l._ a ton in London, and corresponding prices in other districts, if thus maintained, would be an immense national blessing. I say this, being convinced that nothing short of pecuniary pains and penalties of ruinous severity will stir the blind prejudices of Englishmen, and force them to desist from their present stupid and sinful waste of the greatest mineral treasure of the island.
One of the grossest of our national manifestations of Conservative stupidity is our senseless idolatrous worship of that domestic fetish, “the Englishman’s fireside.” We sacrifice health, we sacrifice comfort, we begrime our towns and all they contain with sooty foulness, we expend an amount far exceeding the interest of the national debt, and discount our future prospects of national prosperity, in order that we may do what? Enjoy the favorite recreation of idiots. It is a well-known physiological fact that an absolute idiot, with a cranium measuring sixteen inches in circumference, will sit and stare at a blazing fire for hours and hours continuously, all the day long, except when feeding, and that this propensity varies with the degree of mental vacuity.