August 4, 192 1] 



NATURE 



729 



they were to give trustworthy data, and they would 

 have resulted in the winning of large amounts of 

 peat, for which there would be little prospective 

 market. With the view of decreasing the net expense 

 of the experiments and at the same time of testing, on 

 an adequately large scale, the commercial possibility of 

 utilising peat for the generation of electric power, the 

 Committee suggested the installation of an electric 

 power station on a suitable area of the Bog of Allen, 

 within 25 to 40 miles from Dublin. A portion of 

 this power could be used locally to drive the peat- 

 winning machines or agricultural machinery', in chemi- 

 cal industries, such as the manufacture of calcium 

 cyanamide, and for lighting and power purposes in 

 the neighbouring towns. The excess of electric power 

 could be transmitted in bulk to the power station 

 at Dublin. 



As a result of a conference with the Fuel Research 

 Board the Irish Committee subijiitted a much less 

 ambitious, if less satisfactory, scheme, which con- 



A serious) obstacle which confronts everyone who 

 attempts to devise a scheme for winning peat on a 

 large scale is the labour difficulty. The peat-fuel 

 season, de{>ending on air-drying as it must do for com- 

 mercial reasons, lasts only about four to six months 

 of an average year. It is not easy, therefore, for the 

 peat industry to attract the labourers required by it 

 from other industries which offer them constant employ- 

 ment throughout the year. This applies especially to 

 the men required for cutting and spreading the peat. 

 Much of the work of the drying operations can be done 

 by women and boys, who are in general available 

 during the late summer months in any more or less 

 thickly populated district. One of the chief problems 

 which the Peat Committee had to consider was, there- 

 fore, how to limit so far as possible the number of 

 men necessary for the winning of a definite quantity, 

 say 250 tons, of turf each day of the cutting season 

 (120 days). The same difficulty was experienced 

 abroad, and was, to some extent, met there bv the 



KlG. I. — Baumann's automatic peat machine. 



sisted briefly of the purchase of a bog of about 10,000 

 acres at a price of about 2I. an acre, and the estab- 

 lishment in it of an exf>erimental station to test the 

 various methods proposed for winning peat. Even on 

 this scale a considerable number of labourers would 

 be required, and in order to encourage these to settle 

 in the district the Committee proposed to have experi- 

 ments conducted by the Department of Agriculture for 

 Ireland on the reclamation of cutaway and virgin bog. 

 The Fuel Research Board approved in general of this 

 scheme in 19 18, but the agricultural portion of the 

 scheme was referred to the Irish Department of Agri- 

 culture about two years after the Peat Committee had 

 submitted its report. The present publications contain 

 also the report of the Sub-Committee on agricultural 

 matters appointed by the Department of Agriculture. 

 Owing to this unfavourable, and to. a large extent 

 unjustifiable, report of the Sub-Committee, it is not 

 proposed to carry into effect the recommendations of 

 the Irish Peat Inquiry Committee with regard to the 

 winning of peat. 



NO. 2701, VOL. 107] 



introduction of labour-saving devices such as the auto- 

 matic machines of the Baumann and Wielandt types. 



The Baumann machine consists of a ladder dredger 

 which scrapes the peat off the inclined face of the 

 bank and conveys it to the hopper of the cylindrical 

 mixer and macerator, shown on the right-hand side 

 of Fig. I. The peat is pressed through the mouth- 

 piece of the macerator as a rectangular band 

 which is automatically cut into sods. The latter are 

 caught on plates moving in a lattice girder, extending 

 about 120 metres over the adjacent drying ground. 

 When the lower half of the continuous chain ot 

 plates is completely filled with sods, these are tipped 

 on the drying ground and the emptied plates return to 

 the macerator over the upper portion of the latticed 

 girder. One of these machines in Raubling Bog, 

 Bavaria, attended by a gang of five men, had a daily 

 output of spread sods corresponding to 5^ tons of air- 

 dry turf. Its dredger was driven by a 20-h.p. electro- 

 motor, its macerator by a similar motor of 40 h.p., 

 and the cost of the complete machine was 1500Z. 



