power: its significance and needs. 
21 
RELATION OP MULTIFLE PRODUCTION AND 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 with 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 
industry and has succeeded in preempting only half of that field . 1 
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 frees 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 
employment 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 OP WEIGHT. 2 
Before the advent of electricity energy was inseparable from a 
material expression, and the economics of power usage grew up 
1 The gas industry weighs hut 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. 
2 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 (a 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. 
