CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES—DOUGLAS. 323 
of getting the highest efficiency out of nature’s forces, with a view to 
turn nature’s resources indirectly to the greatest good for the greatest 
number. 
If we look backward to what has happened within our own day 
and experience we may justly feel some resentment at the harsh 
criticism which is now being so generally aimed by the press and the 
public at technical men. And this is partly true likewise of the 
strictures so indiscriminately passed upon the corporations which are 
instrumental in developing the country’s natural wealth. 
In the middle of the last century less than one-half of the iron made 
in this country was smelted with anthracite, and the balance with 
charcoal or charcoal and coke.t The devastation of the forests was 
awful. Pearse® gives the consumption of wood in Berks County, 
Pennsylvania, in making 19,000 tons of charcoal iron in 1828, 1829, 
and 1830 at 250,528 cords. To secure this amount about 8,000 acres 
of the finest forest land in the country must have been stripped. In 
England, where most of the iron was made with coke as fuel, at the 
same date and until 1875, there were consumed from 35 to 37 hundred- 
weight of coke per ton of pig iron. In 1875, when the Whitwell 
stove was introduced to heat the blast, the quantity of fuel con- 
sumed was reduced by 3 or 4 hundredweight. By improved me- 
chanical and metallurgical appliances that consumption in the Mid- 
dlesbrough district is now lowered to 22 hundredweight.° 
This saving of fuel in the blast furnace has, in this country as 
well as in Europe, been effected through the sleepless activity of 
metallurgists and engineers, by modifying the size and shape of the 
great iron stacks, increasing and regulating the temperature and the 
pressure of the blast, and by the introduction of appliances for utiliz- 
ing the waste heat. The difference between the 37 hundredweight 
of coke formerly needed to make a ton of pig iron and the 22 hun- 
dredweight now consumed, multiplied by the number of tons of pig 
iron made in the United States in 1906, represents a saving (assuming 
1.75 tons of coal as required to make 1 ton of coke) of approximately 
30,000,000 tons of coal. 
The progress along this line in blast-furnace practice has been 
steady and wonderful, and has culminated in the ingenious device 
of James Gayley, which still further economizes fuel, by freezing the 
blast before admitting it to the stove, in order to eliminate moisture, 
@Tn the Iron Manufacturer’s Guide (1866), Lesley gives the total production 
in 1854 at 724,833 tons, of which 417,128 tons was charcoal or charcoal-and-coke 
iron. 
> Concise History of the Iron Manufacture, p. 156. 
¢ A description of Messrs. Bell Brothers’ Blast Furnaces from 1844 to 1908, 
and other papers, Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute, vol. 78. (No. 3, 
1908. ) 
