WATER AS FUEL. 661 



five per hour. This (at fifty cents per one thousand feet) was three 

 and a quarter cents per hour for the full running of the cooking appa- 

 ratus or one and five eighths cent for cooking the entire dinner. 



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-en- 

 (rine 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. 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. What new 

 stride this important substitution may take with gas at fifty cents and 

 free of tarry ingredients, one hardly dares conjecture. But its abso- 

 lute safety, automatic operation, and slight displacement, open to the 

 gas-engine a vast sphere of common and household uses for which no 

 motor had before been adapted. 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 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 diflScult yet 

 brilliant progress — Mr. George S. Dwight, of Montclair, New Jersey. 

 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. In fact, water-gas made under all the old dis- 

 advantages of method is said to have been in use twenty years ago at 

 the Oldbury furnaces near Birmingham, England, and was introduced 

 nearly as long ago in the Yorkshire blast-furnaces. It has also been 

 used with marked preference in France, by workers in the finer metals 

 particularly. Of the American water-gas. Dr. Moore says that its 

 special advantages in metallurgy are, besides its great economy in cost 



