COAL-ALLY OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY 



Following the Nation's Annual Output of 735,000,000 

 Tons of Fuel from Prehistoric Ages to 

 Its Arrival at Tidewater 



By William Joseph Showalter 



ONE who has not wandered 

 through the seemingly endless 

 reaches of the innumerable man- 

 made caverns of the coal regions, and 

 there studied first hand the tremendous 

 industry of harvesting the solidified sun- 

 beams planted for humanity by a boun- 

 teous Providence in the Carboniferous 

 Age, cannot appreciate the vastness of 

 that industry nor its meaning to the 

 American people. 



To see them gathered at the rate of 

 more than two million tons a day, trans- 

 ported hundreds of miles, and then, 

 under the alchemy of science, transmuted 

 into a thousand forms — heat for the fire- 

 side, light for the darkness, motion for 

 the railroad train, power for the factory, 

 fertility for the soil — is an illuminating 

 lesson, showing how man, the creature of 

 Nature, through science makes her won- 

 derful forces his servants. 



Under his touch coal becomes comfort 

 in the home or death at the battle front; 

 yields a corrosive acid that burns like fire 

 or a sweetness that makes sugar seem 

 insipid ; gives off a gas that smells like a 

 bad egg, but is as harmless as a chicken ; 

 is transformed into colors that make the 

 rainbow envious of their brightness and 

 variety, and into explosives that make the 

 thunderbolt jealous of their power. 



THE MAGNITUDE OE AMERICA^ COAI, 

 NEEDS 



The first thing that impresses one who 

 studies the coal situation in America is 

 the well-nigh inconceivable proportions 

 of the nation's demands for fuel. The 

 government estimates that the req-tire- 

 ments for the current year will reach the 

 enormous total of 735,000,000 tons. 



So huge is this figure that it were al- 

 most as futile to use tons as units as to 



measure the distance around the earth in 

 inches. Even the number of carloads 

 mounts so far up into the millions that 

 they become meaningless, and trainloads 

 are only a little better. 



About the only way in which one can 

 visualize this demand is to build a mental 

 bin capable of holding enough to meet the 

 national need. If this bin be made with 

 each of its four sides measuring a thou- 

 sand feet, it will have to be more than 

 thirty-three thousand feet high — overtop- 

 ping Mount Everest, the tallest mountain 

 in the world, by nearly a mile. Or, if the 

 fuel were put into a coal pile of normal 

 slope, with a base of twenty feet, that 

 pile would have to be 96,000 miles long — 

 nearly four times around the earth. 



Little less startling than the size of the 

 national demand for coal are the propor- 

 tions of the excess requirements of war 

 times over peace times. Taking the aver- 

 age annual demands of peace times and 

 comparing them with the demands of the 

 past year of war, one finds that the extra 

 coal required in the United States as the 

 result of the war reached a total of 210,- 

 000,000 tons. 



Here again the -brain reels in its effort 

 to comprehend the meaning of such vast 

 figures. They mean an excess tonnage 

 amounting to 4,333,000 carloads. These 

 cars would require a string of engines 

 nearly a thousand miles long to pull them 

 and would form a train which, moving 

 at a uniform speed of twenty miles an 

 hour and never stopping, would require 

 seventy-five days to pass a given crossing. 



ARMY OE MINERS NOT GREATEY 

 REINEORCED 



And yet the force of miners upon 

 which devolved the task of meeting this 

 almost unbelievable increase in the na- 



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