William C. Conant

“ This preëminence of "Swedes iron" has been sustained under a singular disadvantage as to fuel. The country is destitute of coal, and pays a monstrous tax on that grand factor of its leading industry in the expense of importing it from England. On the other hand, it possesses inexhaustible stores of peat, which is well adapted to the manufacture of water-gas by the American process, and will henceforward supply the Swedes with that perfected form of fuel at a cost that will seem to them as nothing. ”

“ On the large scale, moreover, we may perhaps live to see such things as gas-locomotives, unburdened with coal or water, rid of their boilers, their annoying smoke, and their destructive sparks, and satisfied with picking up at intervals a plate-iron tender-car full of compressed water-gas. ”

“ In the latter condition—the hydrocarbons—hydrogen is protected from the all-devourer, oxygen, and enters into innumerable uses. As the inflammable ingredient of wood, of bituminous coal, of petroleum and other vegetable and animal oils, we have it sealed up by Providence, as it were, for a temporary and portable fuel, pending the full development of man's proper authority over the elements—temporary, for it has long been a source of anxiety to economists that the resources of forests and coal-fields are so finite and their prospect of exhaustion so definite. ”

“ New movements are almost suspended, and shares in the oldest and most profitable works are no longer the favorite investment. A probability has suddenly appeared that the uncounted millions of irrecoverable capital invested in gas mains, pipes, holders, etc., may eventually find no other employment but to supply fuel-gas to the households that have hitherto depended on them for light. In view of such a prospect the feeling of the gas interest toward water hydrogen must become seriously modified. ”

“ But illuminating gas, and the struggles of half a century to cheapen it by water hydrogen, have interested us but incidentally as leading up to a later and still more important result—the practical availability of water-gas as fuel. In fact, the rapid progress and generally anticipated success of the electric light have given pause to all present enterprise in illuminating gas. ”

“ Turning from the domestic to the business arts, we encounter a prodigious revolution on the threshold with the incoming fuel. The gas-engine already referred to, as recently improved and extensively introduced under the German patents of Otto, supplants the steam-engine completely, on the small scale, even at the present high cost of coal-gas, and with certain other drawbacks peculiar to that somewhat tarry article. ”

“ Scores of patents have been taken out, mostly by French and English inventors, for different methods of obtaining and employing water hydrogen for illuminating purposes; and a number of minor towns and manufactories in Europe have been and are to this day supplied, by as many different methods, with water-gas. Want of space forbids us to review these methods as to their successes or defects. The common inherent obstacle to their progress is the lack of a sufficient margin of economy to overcome the immense vested interests that oppose any departure from the use of bituminous coal. ”

“ Making ample allowance for the expense of appropriating these supplies of coal-dust, and allowing only the lowest price of chestnut coal for the article consumed in our stoves and furnaces, we can multiply the present equivalent for our domestic coal bill at least three times more by the gas process—less the charges for invention and organization, capital and interest, manufacturing management, and distribution. The proprietors propose to have the fuel-gas delivered at fifty cents per one thousand feet, with a good margin of profit, as it can even now be made for ten cents. ”

“ THE satyr in the fable was not more scandalized at the man who blew hot and cold with the same breath, to warm his fingers and to cool his porridge, than the old acquaintances of water as the natural cooler and refresher of the world have been to find it artificially asserted as supreme in the opposite office of heating. It may well seem the extreme of paradox that the same element which tempers the excess of both solar and animal heat should also become the great source of supply for their deficiency. ”

“ The unavoidable waste in burning-solid fuel has been found to range from fifty per cent, as a minimum in the arts up to ninety-five per cent, as a common proportion in stoves, and thus to exceed by several volumes the whole cost of obtaining from water a gaseous fuel which can be used with but insignificant waste. Besides this, the doubted possibility of economizing the carbonic acid has also been realized, and that hitherto worthless incumbrance has been incidentally recarbonized in the process and utilized as carbonic oxide, to an economic success. ”

“ The more stable substances that maintain their solid form in the comparatively moderate terrestrial heat of burning hydrogen until they become intensely bright are called fixed illuminators. Progressive examples may be cited: in platinum, the most non-fusible of metals, which endures and emits in light the intensity of hydrogen burning in air; and in lime, a still more refractory substance, which glows with dazzling power in the fierce combustion of hydrogen with pure oxygen, commonly known under the name of calcium light. ”

“ Siemens's gas—a product saved from the combustion of coal in a furnace invented by that distinguished metallurgist—has long been used with admitted advantage in various branches of iron-working. With this well-known and standard form of gaseous fuel, Professor Moore's report, already quoted, minutely compares the American water-gas, showing that the former is many times more expensive and less efficient than the latter. ”

“ With respect to comparative calorific values, Professor Moore's report shows, by rigorous calculation, that the Strong fuel-gas will produce 2·78 times the practical effect of the amount of coal consumed in its manufacture, supposing the same coal were burned directly by the most perfect methods of combustion and utilization known in the arts. ”

“ It is already available up to thirty horse-power, and at fifteen and under it is universally found a much cheaper source of power than steam, and with gas of five times the cost and much less adaptability than the American water-gas. Thousands of these engines are used in England, and in London it is expected that steam-boilers with their smoke and danger will ere long be prohibited where the gas engine is available. The "silent" gas-engines are also selling rapidly in America on the lines of rural and minor manufactures. ”

“ Carbon may therefore be called a diffused illuminant, and the only one of any importance available at a living temperature, although in the terrific conflagration of the sun all things, even the most stable, are diffused in gaseous incandescence. ”

“ It oxidizes so eagerly, and in such infinite abundance, as to be the only combustible comparatively worth mentioning: nowhere to be found, in fact, but in vehement combustion or in its cold result as water, unless where locked in the embrace of its secondary affinity, carbon, in the various oily products of organic life. ”

“ Strong is so nearly the same with that already described that a repetition is unnecessary, the furnace being fired up until the loose brick contents of the secondary chamber or superheater are at a white-heat, when, as before, gas-making is commenced. ”

“ In hope of closing with a sustained interest, the first actual and one of the greatest possible applications of the new gas-fuel has been left to be last mentioned—that of the manufacture of iron and steel, lately commenced in Sweden, under the American patents and the personal superintendence of a gentleman to whose inexhaustible energy and tact the American water-gas is largely indebted for its difficult yet brilliant progress—Mr. ”

“ The purity of this fuel is a consideration nearly sufficient of itself to revolutionize the manufacture of iron, and especially of steel, for which, in its perfection, few if any mineral coals are sufficiently free from such troublesome ingredients as sulphur, phosphorus, etc. ”

“ Of the refuse dust we have literal mountains accumulated at our coalmines and depots, as well as constant deposits at every coal-yard, which the proprietors would now be glad to have taken away gratis. ”