TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY.

Evening Star, Issue 7628, 2 June 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY.

[By Andrew Carnegie.] CHAPTER XI. MINING. Deep In unfathomable mines 01 never-failine skill, He treasures up his vast designs And works his wondrous will. In preceding chapters the superlative form of adjectives has been so often applied to America when contrasted with other lands that many a foreign reader, who now for the first time realises the magnitude and greatness of the Republic, may not unnaturally begin to feel dubious about it all. He may be inclined to believe that it is not a veritable nation to which such magnificent attributes are ascribed, but some fabled land of Atlantis. Nevertheless, it is all real and true. The Republic is surely, as we have already seen, the largest, most populous, wealthiest civilised nation in the world, and also the greatest agricultural, pastoral, and manufacturing nation. And now we have one more claim to make—it is the greatest mining nation as well. Greatest on the surface of the soil, as she undoubtedly is, her supremacy below the surface is yet more incontestible. Over every part of the vast continent Nature has lavished her bounties in a profusion almost wasteful. Beneath fields of waving corn, ripening in a perfect climate, are layers upon layers of mineral wealth. Deposits of gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, are found in quantities unknown elsewhere, and the rocks yield every year rivers of oil. To crown her bounty and aid in its utilisation, and, as if in pursuance of the law "To him that hath shall be given," Nature has lately bleased her with a gift as remarkable as it is rare—an agent rich in beneficial influences, and helpful to a degree which renders every other natural gift prosaic in comparison—natural gas, a fluid distilled by nature deep in the earth, and stored in her own vast gasometers, requiring only to be led into workshops and under boilers to do there the work of a thousand giants. Let me describe this new wonder first. Seven years ago a company was drilling for petroleum at Murraysville, near Pittsburg. A depth of one thousand three hundred and twenty feet had been reached when the drills were thrown high into the air, and the derrick broken to pieces and scattered around by a tremendous explosion of gas, which rushed with hoarse shriekings into the air, alarming the population for miles around. A light was applied, and immediate! j there leaped into life a fierce, dancing demon of fire, hissing and swirling around with the wind, and scorching the earth in a wide circle around it. Thinking it was but a temporary outburst preceding the oil, men allowed this valuable fuel to waste for five years. Coal in that region cost only two or three shillings per ton, and there was little inducement to sink capital in attempts to supersede it with a fuel which, though cheaper, might fail as suddenly as it had arisen. But as the years passed, and the giant leaped and danced as madly as at first, a company was formed to provide for the utilisation of the gas. It was conducted in pipes under the boilers of iron works, where it burned without a particle of smoke. Stokers and firemen, and all the laborers who had been required to load and unload coal, became superfluous. Boring began in other districts, and soon around Pittsburg were twenty gas wells—one yielding thirty million cubic feet a day. A single well has furnished gas equal to twelve hundred tons of coal a day. Numerous lines of pipes, aggregating six hundred miles, bow convey the gas from the wells to the manufacturing centres of Pittsburg and Alleghany City and their suburbs. The empty coal bunkers are being white-washed; and where in some works one hundred and twenty coalbegrimed stokers worked like black demons in Hades feeding the fires one man now walks about in cleanly idleness, his sole care that of watching the steam and watergauges. The erstwhile "Smoky City" is now getting a pure atmosphere; and one would little suspect that the view from the cliffs above the Monongahela River included the thousand hitherto smoky furnaces of the Iron City. Private residences in Pittsburg are supplied with natural gas, and all heating and cooking are done with this cheap fuel Already ten thousand tons of coal per day are displaced by it; and slack, which even before the application of natural gas was worth only three shillings per ton in Pittsburg, is now almost worthless. At present gas wells in and around Pittsburg are so numerous as to be counted by hundreds. The number of companies chartered to supply natural gas in Pennsylvania up to February 5, 1884, was one hundred and fifty, representing a capital stock of many millions. Since that date numerous other charters have been granted. More than sixty wells have been drilled at Erie (Penn.) Gas has also been found in small quantities in the States of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Kansas, Dakota, and California. It is used for manufacturing purposes upon a small scale in eight towns in New York, in twenty-four towns in Pennsylvania, and in five in Ohio; but so far the region around Pittsburg is the only one in which the much-desired fuel has been found iu abundance. New uses are constantly being discovered. Glass is made purer by means of the gas, the covered pots formerly used in the furnaces being found unnecessary. Iron and steel plates are cleaned and prepared for tinning by passing a current of gas over them while red-hot. The old process of pickling in acid solutions caused partial corrosion of the plates, which required to be carefully cleaned from the acid. It is also useful in cleansing delicate fabrics. The dephosphorisation of iron through the agency of natural gas is being attempted, with partial success. The attempts, however, have resulted in the formation of carbon, which has been found suitable for electric light carbons. In every department of industry discoveries are constantly being made, which, if not so important as those named, are yet of great value. The gas at present running to waste within piping distance of Pittsburg is estimated at seventy million cubic feet per day! Closely allied to natural gas is natural oil

or petroleum, for gas is probably the distilled product of the oil, forced by subterranean heat and pressure out of the carbonaceous deposits which abound throughout Pennsylvania. Though rock-oil was known to the early Chaldeans, and is referred to by Herodotus, Pliny, and other ancient writers, it was not utilised for manufacturing purposes until 1847, when Young (of Glasgow) made lubricating oil from petroleum obtained from Derbyshire (England). Then began in England and America the distillation of oil from coal; and in 1860 there were in the United States not less than forty factories, producing about five hundred barrels per day. But these were doomed to speedy extinction, for in the preceding year a company had been formed in Pennsylvania to drill for the oil, which was seen oozing in various places from the river banks and floating on the water. The Indians, by spreading blankets over the surface, used to collect small quantities of this oil to mix with their war-paint and for medicinal purposes. Crude petroleum, under the name of Seneca oil, had, so late as thirty years ago, the reputation of a universal curative. The quack advertisements which set forth the virtues of this medicine began : | IThe healthful balm, (rom Nature's secret spring, The bloom of bealtb and life to man will bring; As from ber depths the migio liquid flows, To calm our sufferings and assuage our noes. It sold then for 2dol (8s) per bottle. Alas for human credulity ! Since the oil, which once eured everything, brings but one dollar per barrel it has lost all virtue, and cures nothing. The first drilling in Pennsylvania resulted in a flow of ten barrels a day, which was sold for fifty cents a gallon. A period of wild excitement followed. Wells were sunk all over the country. Some were failures, but oil was often reached. Of one well it U recorded that it yielded four hundred and fifty thousand barrels of oil in a little more than two years, while another is said to have given not less than half-a-million barrels in a twelvemonth. An oil property, Storey Farm, Oil Creek, with which I was intimately connected, has a remarkable history. When, about twenty-two years ago, in company with some friends I first visited this famous well, the oil was running into the creek, where a few flat-bottomed scows lay filled with it, ready to be floated down to the Alleghany River upon an agreed-upon day each week, when the creek was flooded by means of a temporary dam. This was the beginning of the natural oil business. We purchased the farm for 40,000d0l (L 8,000), and so small was our faith in the ability of the earth to yield for any considerable time the hundred barrels per day which the property was then producing that we decided to make a pond capable of holding one hundred thousand barrels of oil, which we estimated would be worth, when the supply ceaßed, 1.000.000d0l (L 200,000). Unfortunatelj for us the pond leaked fearfully; evaporation also caused much loss, but we continued to run oil in to make the losses good day after day until several hundred thousand barrels had gone in this fashion. Our experience with the farm may be worth reciting. Its value rose to 5,000,000d0l (Ll.ooo,ooo)—that is, the shares of the company sold in the market upon this basis; and one year it paid in cash dividends 1,000,000d0l (L 200.000) rather a good return upon an investment of eight thousand pounds. So great was the yield in the district that in two years oil beeame almost valueless, often selling in bulk as low as thirty cents per barrel, and not unfrequently ic was suffered to run to waste as utterly worthless. But as new uses were found for the oil, prices roae again, and to remove the difficulty of high prices pipes were laid, first for short distances, and then to the seaboard, a distance of about three hundred miles. Through these pipes, of which six thousand two hundred miles have been laid, the oil is now pumped from two thousand one hundred wells. It costs only ten cents to pump a barrel of oil to the Atlantic. The present daily yield of the oil-producing district is about seventy thousand barrels, and the supply, instead of diminishing, goes on increasing yearly. More than thirtyeight million barrels of thirty-three gallons each were in store ene day in November, 1884. The value of petroleum and its products exported up to January, 1884, exceeds in value 625,000,000d0l (L 125,000,000). In the Pittsburg district we find another mineral deposit of immense value, a remarkable coal seam of great thickness, which makes a coke of such quality as to render it famous throughout the continent. It is so easily mined that a man and a boy can dig and load nearly thirty tons in ten hours. In Chicago, and in St. Louis, in the blast furnaces of Pittsburg and in the silver and lead mines of Utah, this coke, " compact, silvery, and lustrous," is an important factor in the metallic industries of the Republic. It gives Pittsburg advantages which cause it to rank as an iron producer in advance of towns situated on the very beds of iron-stone. Well may the Iron City burst into song— I am monarch of all the forges, I have solved the riddle of Are; The amen otNature to need of man Echoes at my desire. I search with the subtle soul of flame The heart of the rocky earth. And hot from my anvils tbe p ophecies Of the miracle years blaze fortb. I am swart with the soot of my chimneys, I drip with the sweat of toil; I quell and sceptre the savage wastes And charm the curse from the soil. I fling the bridges across the mills That hold us from the To Be, And build the roads for the bannered march Of crowned Humanity. In the same lucky State of Pennsylvania are deposits of valuable anthracite coal, which, though including in all an area of only four hundred and seventy square miles, are of immense thickness. These deposits, which in parts vary from fifty to seven hundred feet thick, and average about seventy feet, make this wonderful region of greater value than many coal fields of ten times the area. Near Pottsville there is a thickness of three thousand three hundred feet of coal measures. The cubic contents of the anthracite coalfield, allowing fifty per cent, for loss in working, is estimated at thirteen billion one hundred and eighty million five hundred and thirty-five thousand tons of merchantable coal—a store capable of furnishing the present consumption, or thirty million ton 9 per year, for four hundred and thirty-nine years. By that time men will probably be burning the hydrogen of water, or be fully utilising the solar rays, or the tidal energy, or using some undiscovered means of profitably getting heat and power by diverting natural phenomena. They will probably not feel the want of anthracite coal. At present, however, this fuel is especially precious on account of its hardness, density, and purity, which render it available for iron smelting without ooking; while to its freedom from smoke is due the pure atmosphere of Eastern American cities. The view from Brooklyn Bridge would delight a Londoner, used to the murky atmosphere of the English metropolis. He would see the " roofs and chimneys of two great cities for rr iles, but hardly a particle of smoke to mar the purity of the bright air, or sully a sky which rivals that of Italy in clearness. In twenty-five States and Territories, distributed all over the continent—north, south, east, and west, from Alabama to Rhode Island and thence to California and Oregon—coal is now being mined, while it is known to exist in several others. The future value of this extensive distribution of coal can be but vaguely estimated ; but taken in connection with the fact that iron ore is found in nearly every State of the Union and is mined in twenty-nine of them, it is clear that its value in the near future will be enormous. A vast expansion is taking place in the coal industry. In 1850 the total product was but seven and a quarter million tons; in 1880 it was seventy-one million tons, and in 1884 it reached ninety-seven and a-half million tons. Including the local and colliery consumption, the figures for 1884 approximate one hundred and seven million tons. That of Great Britain for the same year was one hundred and sixty million tons. The rest of the world produced only one hundred and thirty million tons; so that mother and child lands together produced more than twice as much coal as all the world beside. (To be continued. J