USE OF COAL

Evening Star, Issue 19787, 10 February 1928, Page 6

USE OF COAL

Pungent criticism of British methods of using coal, and of backwardness in fuel research was expressed by Sir Alfred Mond at a meeting of the Institute of Fuel (says the ‘Daily News’). He announced at the. outset that Mr Frank Hodges had become the chairman of tho Council ot the Institute. Sir Alfred Mond declared that while at one end of the scale they saw the most advanced methods of using fuel in this country, there were, at the other end, the most crude and out-of-date practices, more worthy of the beginning of tho nineteenth century than the first quarter of the twentieth.

He referred to tho inquiries ol the National Fuel and Power Committee, of which lie is chairman, and stated that lie was impressed with the evidence of the need for handling coal with much greater care at every stage of production and transport. “ When you see it in the mine or on tho railway,” he said, “still more when it is being loaded on to _ tho ship, it seems that a fiendish delight is taken in lifting it np to a great height and throwing it down.” He commended a new plant designed by the chief engineer of the Manchester Ship Canal, and described it as_ a great advance in the method of placing coal in tho holds of ships. Sir Alfred declared that there was urgent need for replacing small and adequate cooking plants in this country by installations similar to those in America and Germany.

There was a still greater need for co-ordination in research work. “ If,” he said, “we consider the research work set up in Germany before Hie war, and continued ever since, and compare it with the efforts in this country, it will really make us blush. “The ideas in this country as to tho amount which should be spent on research are entirely fantastic. In Germany enormous results had been obtained by mass research—not by putting two people on to one problem, hut by putting one hundred people on to it.' They get through the work in a fiftieth of the time.

“ I do not think their people are better or more brilliant that ourselves or that they work harder, but_ they organise much more systematically, and they are prepared to spend a great deal of money on the chance of something coming out of it. “The industries of this country, unless they are going to tackle these problems on a scale and with a seriousness which many of them do not yet realise is necessary, will find themselves, in time, displaced in the industries of the world, and rightly displaced, simply by higher technical efficiency and better scientific work.”