POWER. 117 



RELATION OF MULTIPLE PRODUCTION TO ELECTRICITY. 



The principle of multiple production and the principle of electricity 

 are the two most important economic forces that have come into play 

 during the current industrial order. Nothing since the introduction 

 of steam power can be compared with either of them in significance. 

 Both are radically at variance w4th the established order; both have 

 a special bearing on the power supply as affording untold possibili- 

 ties for marked betterment. Neither has won recognition in this field 

 provocative of notable change in the basic conventions of procedure. 

 Here each alike has been ignored, except in so far as its advantages 

 have gained lodgment within the establishments of precedent. Of 

 the two electricity has made the greater headway ; multiple produc- 

 tion has not yet found an opening outside the confines of the coke 

 industrj' and has succeeded in preempting only half of that field.^ 

 Neither electricity nor by-product coal utilization has entirely been 

 neglected, but the real possibilities for the common good so bounti- 

 fully contained in each have never been cultivated in the least. 



In the realm of power these two great agencies of economic ad- 

 vance are exactly complementary. Together they present a solution 

 for the transportation aspects of the power problem, not to mention 

 their bearing in other regards. The principle of multiple production 

 enables the full utilization of the whole range of values transported 

 in the form of coal. Electricity makes it possible to transmit energy 

 "where energy alone is required and thus f^-ees the ordinary channels 

 of transportation of a needless burden of bulk haulage. The first 

 would determine the amount of coal needed and insure the adequate 

 emplo3'ment of that amount; the second would make it unnecessary 

 for the railways to haul more than the amount thus determined. The 

 outcome merely waits upon the application of these two economic 

 forces in effective coordination. 



POWER RESOURCES AND ADVANCE ELIMINATION OF WEIGHT.' 

 Before the advent of electricity energy was inseparable from a 

 material expression, and the economics of power usage grew up 



^ The gas industry weighs but lightly in this connection, as this activity consumes only 

 about 1 per cent of the bituminous coal production, and in this field multiple production 

 has scarcely started. The principle of multiple production, however, spells the future — 

 the only future, but that a great one — for the gas Industry, 



* Oil is left out of consideration, for the present purpose, as involving a highly 

 specialized field which can not be gone into here without an unwarranted digression ; 

 besides, this matter is treated in detail in Bulletin 102, part 6, of this series. Counting 

 off the use of gasoline and other light oils for automotive purposes (n field of power 

 application not ordinarily considered in connection with the problem of Industrial power), 

 there is a formidable and growing quantity of fuel oil that Is devoted to steam raising; 

 large areas of the country, indeed, not within easy reach of coal fields, are served by fuel 

 oil to the almost complete exclusion of coal, while even within the coal territory fuel oil 

 has replaced coal to some extent. But the character of the resource indicates that the 

 growth of fuel-oil employment is of a mushroom order; with a capacity for infinitely 

 greater refinement, of function, its use for the brute force of industrial power is a per 

 version which can have no permanent place in the category of progress. Though tran- 

 siently a competitor to coal and water power, oil Is fundamentally a supplementary 

 resource ; its degree of overlap now represents the measure of its perversion. 



79968°— 19— Bull. 102, vol. 1 9 



