20 BULLETIN 102, PART 4, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
these coals are not suitable for transportation like ordinary coal. 
Efforts toward burning them in powdered form, with the effect of 
gaseous fuel, or of compressing them into briquets have met with 
some success, but their greatest possibilities are afforded through 
complete gasification in gas producers, 1 or by carbonization with 
by-product recovery. The Bureau of Mines has demonstrated in 
respect to the last that 1 ton of air-dried lignite may be made to 
yield 8,000 to 10,000 cubic feet of gas, 17 pounds of ammonium 
sulphate, 1 gallon of oil, 50 pounds of tar, and one-half to two-thirds 
ton of carbon residue convertible into briquets approaching the value 
of anthracite. 2 Thus may even coals lowest in rank be raised to 
meet the social needs for smokeless fuel and economy. 3 
V. 
While the greatest improvements, with most telling consequences, 
'are possible and necessary in the utilization of coal; the conditions of 
coal production are likewise not best adapted to the nature of the 
resource and offer opportunities for advantageous changes. Passing 
over anthracite, because it is not inherently a necessity and because, 
moreover, its production is effective both as to engineering practice 
and coordination of operations, we find that the mining of bituminous 
coal is so widely scattered and loosely cooperative that the aggre- 
gated activities are to be looked upon as an “industry” only in 
respect to their common purpose. 4 The country’s most basic resource, 
indeed, is produced through the medium of a thousand disintegrated 
units, working without concert and under conditions of destructive 
competition. 
Bituminous coal mining as an industry is beset by conditions 
which are the occasion of present wastefulness and the justification 
1 A few producer-gas plants are in service in the lignite areas. A specific instance of the applicability 
of suction gas-producers would be in connection with the motor boats in service along the Alaskan coast 
which now use gasoline brought from California, but instead might employ the low-grade coals so plentifu 
in parts of the Alaskan coastal region. The present attempts at fuel economy seem superficial, when 
the real points of wastefulness are held in mind. 
2 “ There seems little doubt but that the briquetting and the production of gas from lignite can in the 
near future be put on a commercially satisfactory basis.” Babcock, E. J., Economic Methods of Utilizing 
Western Lignites: Bull. 89, Bureau of Mines, 1915, p. 65. 
3 We may profit by the words of a distinguished British engineer and chemist, the late V. B. Lewes, 
who writes of the coal of England: 
“Among the factors that lead to the commercial supremacy of a country by far the most important is 
the command of fuel or other source of power; and England’s position in the past has been governed largely 
by her coal fields, which in little more than a century raised her to the forefront as a commercial power 
The very abundance of our coal supplies was a source of weakness, as it led to outrageous waste, polluted 
our atmosphere to a criminal extent, and so encouraged uneconomical methods of using it as seriously to 
deplete our available stock, the result of which has been the increase in price during the last few years, 
and the certainty that the future will see further advances but no fall to the old rates. The day of cheap 
coal has gone, never to return.” 
4 The coal industry in its operations is more comparable to the brickmaking industry than, for example, 
to the iron industry. 
