PAPERS OF GENERAL INTEREST 27 



Kene Masse, a French fuel authority, writing in 

 Chemie and Industrie for 1918 (page 665) proposes a 

 plan for conserving the coal resources of France by gasi- 

 fying the entire production, recovering the by-products 

 and utilizing the gas and tar oils in engines for the pro- 

 duction of electric power, placing all the plants under 

 centralized control at stations located at the mines. Xote 

 that this is a conservation measure and is not prompted 

 primarily as might be supposed from an artistic or sani- 

 tary motive. 



Here is another reference of the same import. Samuel 

 Wellington, writing in the London Gas World for 1919 

 (page 405) says "From the analysis of thermal efficien- 

 cies given there is every attraction for the consideration 

 of the claims of gas as a profitable process in the conser- 

 vation of coal for whatever purpose it is required. ' ' In- 

 deed, we are even now coming around to the point where 

 it is in place to brash otf the dust of time and burnish 

 up the statement of Sir William Siemens, made in a lec- 

 ture delivered in 1881, which reads as follows: "1 am 

 bold enough to go so far as to say that raw coal should 

 not be used as a fuel for any purpose whatever, and that 

 the first step toward the judicious and economic produc- 

 tion of heat is the gas retort or gas producer, in which 

 coal is converted either entirely into gas or into gas and 

 coke ' '. 



Have you ever stopped to figure some of our extrava- 

 gances along these lines ? The annual output of pig iron 

 in the United States for 1916-1917 was approximately 

 40,000,000 tons. This called for 40,000,000 tons of coke, 

 50 per cent of which was made in ovens of the beehive 

 type which either buin the volatile gases or send them 

 off as waste into the air. The sum of this waste per an- 

 num amounts to approximately 300 biUion cubic feet, 

 ecpiivalent to ^2 of the total natural gas output of the 

 entire country. 



But, we need not go so far from home for a horrible 

 example. Of the coal mined annually in Hlinois, approxi- 

 mately 25,000,000 tons are burned in domestic appliances, 

 and something less than that amount in factories and in- 



