34 
BULLETIN 102, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
that such interests as already occupied the field were inclined to* 
oppose the provision of special facilities for the transportation of 
energy, while in respect to oil the interests concerned in advancing 
its transportation were sufficiently strong and organized to overcome 
the factors inhibiting the establishment of the modern pipe line. 
Hence the energy needs of the country are now served by two carrier 
systems instead of three. 
A special type of transportation equipment in the way of electrical 
transmission lines is urgently needed to serve the energy require- 
ments of this country, but these special facilities may be advan- 
tageously established only on the basis of a common carrier. In 
close analogy to the railroads, though in contradistinction to oil 
pipe lines, the service to be rendered is strictty distributive and of 
a public-service order; hence competition here is out of place to 
precisely the extent that it is inexpedient in the case of the railways. 
The railroads of this country wrought havoc with industrial life 
until the element of special-interest preference was eliminated and 
the whole , system was placed on a common-carrier, public-utility 
basis,, We may profit in this matter b}^ that experience, and arrange 
to skip the period of adjustment that proved so costly and disastrous 
in connection with railway development. The railroads, therefore, 
provide a warning example from which may be determined the 
status that should be accorded the new development. Hauling coal 
is a problem of transportation ; hauling energy in the form of elec- 
tricity involves the same range of principles but requires merely a 
different set of physical means. In point of fact, the whole ad- 
vancement contemplated is but a further refinement in transporta- 
tion equipment, just as the modern steel gondola 1 is a refinement of 
the old-fashioned coal car. 
The railroads themselves have a prime interest in this matter of 
establishing more facile means for the transportation' of energy. 
Not only are they the chief haulers of energy in bulky form, but they 
likewise constitute the chief single consumer of this material energy 
which burdens their lines. The railroads bum approximately a 
fourth of all the coal produced in this country , 2 this item along rep- 
resenting at least a tenth of their total operating expense . 3 Thus an 
improvement in energy transportation would not only relieve the 
railways from a needless burden of bulk haulage, but would at the 
X A self-dumping car now in common use for hauling coal, 
2 In 1915 the railways of the country used 24 per cent of the total output, or 28 per 
cent of the bituminous production (C. E. Lesher, Coal, Mineral Resources of the United 
States for 1915, United States Geological Survey, pt. 2, 1917, p. 473). This has nothing 
to say of the fact that about one-eight of the petroleum output is consumed by railways. 
3 A determination of 11.05 per cent is given as an average of all the railroads in the 
United States States having operating revenues greater than $100,000 in the year, by 
L. B. Stillwell, Relation of water power to transportation, Proc. Amer. Inst. Electr. Eng., 
May, 1910, p. 562. 
