TREASURES IN COAL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20644, 16 February 1929, Page 20

TREASURES IN COAL

STOREHOUSE OF ENERGY. THOUSAND AND ONE RICHES. “NECESSARY TO CIVILISATION,” In words more picturesque than thoughtful a well-known cynic has been telling the miners in Britain that if he had his way he would close every coalmine in Great Britain. He would harness the tide and would thereby generate sufficient power to serve the entire coilntry. An English writer says:—But the truth is that even if we had power enough to drive all our machinery wo should still need Coal, and miners to win it for us. The part coal plays in warming houses, cooking food, driving ships and trains, and providing current for electrical plant, does not represent nearly all its value to mankind. Coal stores energy from the sun which was absorbed by forests millions of years ago. When we liberate that energy we liberate at the same time properties which J might almost suggest that a benevolent magician had packed the coal with 'miracles. The things that householders waste when they burn coal in an open fire are of far greater worth than the heat derived from the fire.

Even if our climate changed to one of groat warmth, rendering fires for comfort unnecessary, we should still have to mine coal for its by-products. The gas it yields is only the beginning of the volume of marvels. All the best dyes, most of the best scents, and the essences which flavour cakes and sweets Come from coaltar. The invalid who cannot take ordinary sugar safely uses saccharine made from coal; the invalid faint and suffering from headache employs smelling salts which have been distilled' from coal. Carbolic acid and all the most powerful disinfectants which prevent the spread of infectious diseases are derived from tlio same source.

Benzine for cars, creosote to render timber enduring, naphthalene, to keep moths from clothes, sulphuric, hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids, oils for lamps and furnaces and for lubricating, pitch for many purposes, the foundation of plaster of paris for use in surgery and art—those and scores of other indispensable substances spring ■ from the treatment of coal.

If we closed our mines our fields might become barren, fbr some of the most important of fertilisers are derived from coal. The great furnaces which made steel for half the world .rely in the main on coke, which is coal from which all chemically aluable elements have been extracted. Then there are explosives which defended olir shores from invasion and our armies from annihilation during the Great War, but now serve a beneficent purpose in peaceful days in engineering, even, when used in small quantities, in curing sickness. Coal is one of the supreme riches of Nature, as necessary to civilisation as the sunlight from which it originally derived its manifold efficiency. We should have to keep the mines open even if we could to-morrow bid the tides transfer their power to the service of man. Coal is the treasury of a thousand and one riches, and has no known substitute.