ON MECHANICAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS OF THE COAL QUESTION. 611 



Tlie Mechanical and Economic Problems of the Goal Qaestion. 

 ByT. FoRSTER Brown, M.Inst.G.E. 



[Ordered by the General Committee to be printed i?* extenso.'] 



Within the limits of a Paper it is pi-acticable only to touch upon some of 

 the more important of these problems ; and the writer would refer those 

 who desire to investigate more fully the economic side of the question to 

 Prof. Jevons' work, ' The Coal Question,' Prof. Hull's ' Coal Resources at 

 the Close of the Nineteenth Century,' Mr. Leonard Courtney's Address to 

 the Statistical Society in December, 1897, a Paper by the present writer 

 read before the Economic Section of the British Association in 1891, and 

 ' The Coal Supplies of the World,' by Mr. Benjamin Taylor, a Paper pub- 

 lished in the July number of the ' Nineteenth Century.' 



To discuss all the suggestions as to substitutes for coal which have 

 been made from time to time, up to and including the present meeting of 

 the British Association, would require an exhaustive paper on that 

 subject alone ; but it is confidently submitted that so long as coal can be 

 produced at a moderately cheap cost, having regard to the carbon it con- 

 tains, it will always remain by far the most economical and convenient of 

 power producers. 



Coal Resources. 



It is general knowledge that our coal resources extend over wide 

 areas in several parts of this kingdom in beds or seams of varying thick- 

 ness and quality existing at various depths below the surface, and gene- 

 rally situate at no great distance from the seaboard ; and it may be 

 assumed that the public are also aware that the most available and 

 valuable of these resources are the first to be attacked and exhausted. 

 The coal seams which are workable by free drainage levels, without 

 pumping or winding, are naturally the first to be worked in a virgin coal- 

 field ; and such resources as these were probably the main source of our 

 coal supply up to about the middle of the present century. Next follow 

 the best of the thick seams of coal accessible at a reasonable depth, 

 varying from a few yards to two thousand feet or thereabouts ; and these 

 resources, which were originally much larger than they are now, are, and 

 will be for a considerable time, the principal source of our coal supply ; 

 and, lastly, the thin and inferior seams existing at shallow depths, and 

 all the seams below two thousand feet or so down to the extreme limit of 

 workable depth, and these larger resources are still practically intact. 



It is difficult to induce the public to realise the supreme importance 

 of the fact that it is only the best and cheapest of our coal resources 

 which supply our existing output. The writer has pointed out in a 

 previous paper that, without some great and radical change in our internal 

 policy, applied to counteracting an increasing cost, the amplitude of the 

 total estimated coal resources and their duration is not the probable true 

 limit, in time, of our commercial supremacy ; for, under ordinary circum- 

 stances, this will be measured by the duration of the best and cheapest 

 of our coal resources only, and from which we now derive probably 95 per 

 cent, of our annual coal outputs. 



It is suggested that the position in figures, adopting Professor Hull's 



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