CHAPTER XLI
"_His Majesty, the King_"
The Doctor was an advocate of leisurely eating, but he impatientlyhurried the boys through their breakfast the next morning and set themat work upon the bank with picks and shovels. He explained to them as hehad before explained to Tom, that "outcrop" coal--that is to say, theedge of a coal seam exposed by any circumstance and left long exposed,deteriorates in quality and value.
"All the combustible parts of this exposed coal have been evaporated,"he said, "until now the stuff is worth scarcely more than so much shale.But unless my knowledge of geology fails me, there lies behind thisstuff, some of the very richest coal in Virginia. Our task is to dig inhere and find out whether we have here a valuable coal mine or nothingat all."
"Suppose it is the kind of coal you think, Doctor," said Jack, "what issuch a mine worth?"
"Nothing and everything. It all depends upon circumstances. A year ortwo ago the finest coal deposit in the world, located where this iswould have been worth no more than the detritus from the hill that ispiled up all around here. Such a mine at this place now, is incalculablyvaluable."
"But what makes so vast a difference?" asked Ed.
"The railroad," answered the Doctor. "A year ago this coal would havebeen worthless, simply because there was no market for it anywherewithin reach. Now the railroad brings the market to the mouth of themine, as it were. But come, let's get to work. If you want me to talkabout King Coal, I'll do it to-night after supper. Just now we must digfor his majesty." Then he grabbed a pick and broke out again singing--
"Old King Coal Was a jolly old soul," etc.
The boys dug with a will and by nightfall they had dug away three orfour feet of the face of the cliff. Every now and then the Doctor wouldtake a bit of the exposed coal and examine it critically under a strongmagnifying glass. Every time he did so, he broke out again into the songabout "Old King Coal." The boys had never seen him so jubilant.
When they quitted the work and began to prepare supper, the Doctor wentinto the shaft they had started, broke out a bushel or two of thedeepest coal yet reached, and placed it on the fire. He watched itintently as it burned, and just as supper was ready he said:
"We've got it, boys, and no mistake. This is a great mine of the verybest coal in the world for making gas, steam and coke, and as thesehills are full of iron ore, the mine is precisely where it ought to be.When we dig a little further into that bank we shall come to coal thatcan be shovelled into a furnace with iron ore on top of it, and used tosmelt iron without the trouble or expense of coking. Or we can make asgood coke of it as there is in the world, and the vein is eight or ninefeet thick, which means a lot, and it has a perfect rock roof, whichmeans a lot more, and the volcanic upheaval which shoved it up here haskindly so placed it that it trends upward, so that in mining it we shallnot have to do any pumping. All we've got to do is to dig trenches oneach side of our coal car tracks and let the water run out by force ofgravitation. I tell you boys, we've discovered the most valuable coalmine in all this region, and as if to make matters still better, it liesjust high enough up the mountain to enable us to chute its product downto the railroad without any expense whatever for hauling."
"Well now," said Jack, "all that is good news. But we boys don'tunderstand the thing the least bit. So you are to explain it to us aftersupper. You are to stop singing 'Old King Coal' and explain to us uponwhat grounds his majesty's authority rests."
"All right," said the Doctor, with truly boyish enthusiasm. "Aftersupper I'll tell you all about my liege lord Old King Coal. Meantimewon't somebody give me another cup of coffee and about a dozen morerashers of that paper-thin bacon? I'm hungry."
Jack replenished the Doctor's cup, and Ed cut for him a dozen or twentyvery thin slices of bacon, leaving him to broil them for himself on theend of a stick and devour them as fast as they were broiled. Tom divideda pone of corn bread with him and the supper proceeded to itsconclusion.
"Now then," called Tom, when the tin plates and tin cups had been washedand set up on the wall shelf which the Doctor had made for them, "we'reready to hear all about 'Old King Coal' and his claims upon ourallegiance."
"Oh, no you're not," said the Doctor. "It would take me weeks to tellyou the little I know on that subject and something like a lifetime foranybody who knows more to tell you 'all about' King Coal. But I'll tellyou a little any how."
"First of all tell us why you call it 'King Coal,'" said Ed.
"Because in our age it is king," quickly answered the Doctor. "Withoutit every one of our industries would come to an end; every factory wouldstop; every steamship would be laid up forever; every electric lightwould go out; every railroad would become 'two streaks of rust and aright of way'; in short the whole fabric of modern civilization wouldtumble to the ground. You see every age has its key note. When men hadno better implements than rough stones those people who had most stoneswere the easy conquerors of the rest. When they began to fashion stonesinto arrowheads, axes and the like, the people who lived in stonycountries had a still greater advantage. When men learned to workmetals--well you see the way it went. In the pastoral ages the man whoseland produced most grass was the 'king pin' of his community and ownedmore cattle than anybody else. In the military ages the people whofought best were the supreme ones, and the rest were their dependants.In ecclesiastical ages the great prelates dominated, and so on through along catalogue. Now ours is an industrial age and coal lies at the veryroot of productive industry. Without it we can't make steam or getpower enough for any of the vast enterprises of modern civilization. Itsmelts iron out of rocks that would not give it up without King Coal'scommand. It enables us to make steel and to fashion metals to answer ourrequirements in a thousand ways. It runs our steamships, our factories,our railroads and pretty much everything else that we depend upon tomake life easy, to enable us to interchange our products with people ata distance and generally to make ourselves comfortable. In short ourwhole civilization depends upon coal. That's why I call coal 'king.' Ifthere ever was a monarch in this world whose authority could not bequestioned without destruction to those revolting against it, thatmonarch is 'Old King Coal.'"
"But if we had no coal, why couldn't we do all these things with wood?"asked Jim.
"First, because we haven't enough wood," answered the Doctor. "We areusing up our supply of wood much too rapidly already, and there coal isrendering us another important service. It is enabling us to use ironand steel for building materials, and a thousand other purposes forwhich we once used wood, and thus to spare our wood."
"What is your 'secondly,' Doctor?" asked Ed.
"Why secondly, wood cannot do the work."
"Why not?"
"Because it hasn't enough sunshine in it."
"How do you mean?"
"Why you know, don't you, that all the heat we get out of burning fuelof any kind, is simply so much sunshine stored up for us and released byburning?"
"I confess I didn't know that," said Tom. "Or at any rate I neverthought of it. Now that I do think of it, I see how it is with wood. Butwhat has sunshine to do with coal, buried as it is deep under rocks andearth?"
"Then you don't know what coal is, and where it comes from?" asked theDoctor. "Let me explain. There was a period in the world's remotehistory when the earth was much warmer than it is now--almost hot infact. The atmosphere was filled with the gases of carbon, and the rainswere an almost continuous cataclysm. Human life was impossible in theseconditions. No man could have breathed such an atmosphere and lived. Butthe conditions were peculiarly favorable to abundant vegetable life.There were forests such as we do not dream of now even in tropicalswamps. Ferns grew to the height of great trees, vines and cane andgrass and air plants filled up every available inch of space, and theyall grew in that carbonized atmosphere with a rapidity and luxuriancequite impossible now. All this vegetation died of course and fell to theground as all vegetation does and has done from the beginning of time.Wherever it fell int
o water and was thus shielded from the air, andwherever it managed to get itself covered with earth or rock, as in thathighly disturbed volcanic age often happened, it was converted into coalby pressure and by losing certain of its volatile elements, just ascharcoal is made by expelling the volatile parts from wood. So, withoutgoing any further into details, you see that the coal is preservedvegetation which grew many thousands of years ago, and that the heat weget from it is simply the sunshine it stored up at a period before everhuman life existed. What a pity it is that we have to waste so much ofit!"
"How do you mean, Doctor?" asked Jack.
"Why you see we waste almost all the heat that coal gives us. If wecould make effective use of it all, the burning of a single pound ofcoal would give us force enough to lift more than eleven and a halfmillions of pounds a foot from the earth; but the most that we actuallyget out of it is force enough to lift one and a half million pounds."
"What? All that from one pound of coal?" asked Jim.
"Yes, all that, and it all means so much sunshine which fell upon theearth thousands of years ago. Curious, isn't it?"
"It's simply astounding," said Jack. "But why do we burn coal sowastefully, Doctor? Why can't we utilize more of its heat? And whatbecomes of the waste heat?"
"Our methods are imperfect," answered the Doctor. "In a bigmanufacturing city thousands of tons of coal, or what is essentially thesame thing, go off into the air every day in the shape of black smoke.You see the blackness of smoke is nothing but pure carbon or in otherwords coal. Then again think of the heat that goes up every smoke stackand is wasted in the air. It would run hundreds of great engines if itcould be turned to account. And there is all the heat that makes anengine room so horribly torrid. Every bit of that is wasted power.Little by little, however, we are learning to save the power that coalgives us. A high pressure engine, like an ordinary locomotive, besideswasting coal, wastes greatly more than half the expansive force of itssteam. It uses the steam only once and that very imperfectly, and thenlets it escape into the open air and go to waste. But the big steamshipsand many factories have what they call triple or quadruple expansionengines which use the same steam three or four times in propelling themachinery, and then condense it into hot water and send it back into theboiler, thus saving a vast deal of the heat that would otherwise bewasted. Still even they waste most of the heat that their coalproduces."
"By the way, Doctor," interrupted Tom, "how much coal does it take todrive one of the big steamers across the Atlantic?"
"From fifteen hundred to three thousand tons," answered the Doctor, "andthink what a waste that is when a few hundred tons give force enough todo the work if only the force developed could all be used."
"But how do they manage to carry any freight when they must carry suchan enormous load of coal?" asked Ed.
"That is another serious waste," answered the Doctor. "For every ton ofcoal carried means one ton less of freight. And then, too, think of theexpense incurred in putting all that coal aboard. And think too of thecost of feeding and paying wages to a large company of men to handle itafter it is on board! For you know besides the stokers who shovel thecoal into the furnaces, there are the 'coal trimmers' as they arecalled, whose duty it is to keep the coal heap properly distributed inthe ship. You see a ship is not stiff and rigid like a coal pocket. Itwould never do to begin at one end of a coal heap and use it as itcomes. That would presently leave one part of the ship with no coal loadat all, while thousands of tons would burden other parts. No ship thatever was built could stand that. It would twist her out of shape, warpher seams open and send her to Davy Jones in a very little time. So fromthe moment the stokers begin to shovel coal into the furnaces under asteamship's boilers the coal trimmers and coal carriers must busythemselves with the night and day work of so shifting the coal as tokeep its weight properly distributed. But now to come back to what I wassaying. Little by little we are learning to save some small part of theenormous waste in the burning of coal. One example will illustrate. Insmelting iron--that is melting it out of the ore and separating it fromthe rock stuff,--the waste twenty-five years ago was simply appalling.The furnaces were mere pots built of fire clay brick, and filled withcoal or coke beneath and iron ore on top. A blast of steam or hot airwas sent into them from below to make the fire burn as hotly aspossible. Sometimes this blast was strong enough to blow bushels ofunburned coal or coke out at the top. That however was a mere trifle ascompared with the other waste. For great flames, nearly hot enough tomelt iron, poured out of every furnace top and were lost in the air.Every bit of that heat represented power that was literally cast to thewinds. All that has been greatly improved since. The flames and heatthat escape from the blast furnaces are now very generally harnessed andmade to do further work. They are used to heat great steam boilers andthus create the power that operates rolling mills and gigantic forges,and vast machine shops. But we still waste very much more than half theheat that coal gives us--often more than nine-tenths of it."
"But, Doctor," said Tom, "If we go on wasting our coal at such a rate,won't we use it all up presently? And will not civilization have to stopthen?"
"There are three answers to that," replied the Doctor: "1st. That weshall more and more learn to economize in this matter of heat wasting;
"2nd. That our coal supply in this country seems to be sufficient tolast for millions of years yet; and
"3rd. That long before it is exhausted the ingenuity of man willprobably discover means of securing power from some other source thancoal."
"What, for example?"
"Well, perhaps we shall learn how to utilize terrestrial magnetismdirectly. You know this earth of ours is a gigantic magnet, andmagnetism is the raw material of electricity, if I may so express it. Atpresent we get all the electricity we use out of the earth, but we haveto do it by burning coal to run dynamos. Perhaps we shall find ways tosave that expense by drawing the electricity directly from the earth. Wehave already done something closely resembling that, with the result ofa great saving."
"How was that?"
"Why when the telegraph was first invented it was necessary to doublethe wire lines, putting up two wires every time by way of completing thecircuit. You know electrical energy will not manifest itself, or as wesay, the electric current will not flow, unless there is a circuitestablished. Well at first they established the circuit by running twoparallel wires, one to carry the current one way and the other to bringit back. That's a clumsy way to put it, but it will answer my purpose inexplanation. After a while somebody found out that the earth is a betterconductor of electricity than any wire could be, and so the circuit wasestablished simply by running each end of a single wire into the ground,making the earth do the work formerly done by the other wire. Thatsimple discovery saved exactly one half the expense of telegraphcompanies for wires."
By this time it was growing late and as the boys had a hard morrow'swork before them the Doctor ceased talking and all went to their bunks.