CONSERVATION THROUGH ENGINEERING. 9 



As petroleum is being used as a substitute for coal and inasmuch 

 as the whole problem of fuel supply is one we are ultimately com- 

 pelled to an investigation of the ability of our petroleum supply to 

 meet its present drain and to meet the expansion in its use, which is 

 the most surprising development of our day in the study of power 

 creation. 



This spells a program of development and conservation which 

 should challenge the ambitions of this Nation, and on a few of its 

 features perhaps a few further words would be justified. 



SAVING COAL. 



The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are 

 the discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from 

 the ton and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any 

 particular use. 



It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence The rail- 

 roads have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per 

 cent of the heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive 

 boiler, 10 per cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of 

 all the coal mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which 

 our railroads have. This shows how great the problem is to them. 

 Some have adopted a system of paying a bonus for the greatest dis- 

 tance made on a given quantity of a given coal. But this laudable 

 effort has not met with- the cooperation that would be expected from 

 the firemen, for reasons that go far afield. Industries, especially those 

 which generate electric power, have made similar effort to gain from 

 their fuel its greatest potentiality, and with varying success. We 

 can overlook the stoking of the domestic furnace as a national con- 

 cern, for the amount of coal used in this way amounts to not more 

 than 17 per cent of the national coal bill, and this whole charge 

 could be saved, it is estimated, by giving care to the 75 per cent of 

 our coal which is burned under boilers to make steam. Here there is 

 a maximum figure of 13 per cent of the energy of the coal put into 

 harness, and the average is less than 10 per cent, even in the larger 

 plants. 



In one establishment visited by the fuel engineers of this depart- 

 ment during the war a preventable waste of 40,000 tons a year was 

 discovered. By changes in the admission of air to the furnaces and 

 in the " baffling " of the boilers the engineers of the Bureau of Mines 

 are confident that they have been able to increase the economy of 

 coal in the ships of the Emergency Fleet Corporation by 16 per cent, 

 making 6 pounds of coal do the work of 7. If such a percentage 

 of economy could be generally effected it would mean the saving 

 of as much coal as France and Italy together will need in this year 

 of their greatest distress. 



