ON THE EXPLOSIBILITY OP COAL OILS. 99 



hole in the rocky strata on the banks of the Kanawha river, in West- 

 ern Virginia, perforated to the depth of about 1,000 feet to obtain 

 salt water, sufficient coal gas to light a city has continued for several 

 years to rush forth, commingled with the salt water. The gas is used 

 as fuel to boil the salt water for the production of salt. In a 

 furnace beneath a salt pan, 100 feet long and five feet in width, the 

 writer beheld the flame of burning coal gas, sweeping throughout in 

 one continuous sheet, waving and flashing in wreaths of resplendent 

 brilliancy, whilst at the same time a steam-engine was operated 

 briskly by the same natural flow from the earth into an adjacent fur- 

 nace beneath a steam-boiler. Sufficient coal gas was here discharged 

 to evaporate the brine for making about 400 bushels of salt per day. 

 Happening to arrive at a spot where another similar drill-hole had 

 just been completed, an equal volume of coal gas and salt water ap- 

 peared jetting upwards from the drill-hole in the rock thirty or forty 

 feet into the air, with loud belching sounds resembling the asthmatic 

 pantings of a powerful locomotive engine. The coal gas here naturally 

 elaborated, was perfectly pure and free from the disagreeable odour 

 which characterises the coal gas artificially elaborated in city gas-works. 

 The petroleum being separable by distillation from the coal at a 

 more moderate tenq^erature than coal gas, there is reason to believe 

 from aualogy that the same process of elaboration of petroleum goes 

 on naturally beneath the earth as is artificially accomplished on its 

 surface. The fact of the increased heat of the interior of the earth, 

 in the vicinity of both the gas -springs and oil-springs in the valleys of 

 the Alleghany mountains is manifested in the numerous "hot-springs," 

 which gush forth unceasingly between the adjacent mountains in 

 Western Virginia, together with numerous " sulphur springs." Indeed, 

 this distillation of the carburetted hydrogen gas and oil from the 

 bituminous coal, under intense pressure at great depths in the earth, 

 constitutes a natural process of coking, whereby the flaming bitu- 

 minous coal becomes gradually converted into anthracite or flameless 

 coal. 



The constantly decreasing supply of whale oil, and correspondingly 

 increasing price of it, has recently stimulated industrial enterprises to 

 seek out other sources of supply of this necessary article. The long- 

 neglected oil-springs freely offered in tiny streams naturally flowing 

 from the earth, have at last attracted attention. Impatient, however, 

 of the stinted supply thus freely offered without labour, even some of 

 the same resolute men who have pursued the whales among the icebergs 

 of the polar seas and to the remotest waters of the globe, have laid 

 down their harpoons and taken up steel drills to tap the very fountains 

 of coal oil, in the hidden depths of the earth, in the western valleys of 

 Pennsylvania. 



The results of some of the attempts to obtain a more abundant 

 supply of coal oil, or petroleum, have proved so successful as to appear 



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