240 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
Whether Mond gas will ever be found advantageous for distribu- 
tion to long distances is questionable, because its heating value per 
cubic foot is rather less than that of ordinary water gas, but this does 
not interfere with its efficient use in internal-combustion engines. 
In general, our methods for producing or utilizing gas in our cities 
do scant justice to the extended opportunities indicated by our newer 
knowledge. 
Good fuel gas could be manufactured and distributed to the indi- 
vidual household consumer at considerably cheaper rates, if it were 
not for antiquated municipal specifications, which keep on prescribing 
photometric tests instead of insisting on standards of fuel value, which 
makes the cost of production unnecessarily high, and disregards the 
fact that for lighting the Welsbach mantle has rendered obsolete the 
use of highly carbureted gas as a bare flame. But for those unfortu- 
nate specifications, cheap fuel gas might be produced at some advan- 
tageous central point, where very cheap coal is available; such heat- 
ing gas could be distributed to every house and every factory where 
it could be used cleanly and advantageously like natural gas, doing 
away at once with the black coal smoke nuisance, which now prac- 
tically compels a city like New York to use nothing but the more 
expensive grades of anthracite coal. It would eliminate at the same 
time all the bother and expense caused through the clumsy and ex- 
pensive methods of transportation and handling of coal and ashes; 
it would relieve us from many unnecessary middlemen which now 
exist between coal and its final consumer. 
The newer large-sized internal-combustion engines are introducing 
increasing opportunities for new centers of power production where 
waste gas of blast-furnaces or coke-ovens, or where deposits of 
inferior coal or peat are available. 
Jf such centers are situated near tide water this may render them 
still more advantageous for some electrochemical industries, which, 
until now, were compelled to locate near some inland water powers. 
Nor should we overlook the fact that the newer methods for the 
production of cheap fuel gas offer excellent opportunities for an in- 
creased production of valuable tar by-products, and more particu- 
larly of ammonium salts; the latter would help to a not inconsiderable 
extent in furnishing more nitrogen fertilizer. 
It is somewhat remarkable that a greater effort has already been 
made to start the industrial synthesis of nitrogen products than to 
economize all these hitherto wasted sources of ammonia. 
In fact, science indicates still other ways, somewhat of a more 
radical nature, for correcting the nitrogen deficiencies in relation 
to our food supply. 
Indeed, if we will look at this matter from a much broader stand- 
point we may find that, after all, the shortage of nitrogen in the 
