Show DOJSFT WASTE COAL The World Is Burning Up Its Fuel Supply Too Fast John Clark Ridpath in Brooklyn Times The whole system of locomotion locomo-tion is threatened with imminent revolution revo-lution The two horses one of flesh and one of iron one eating oats and the other coal find their vocations going away together Science threatens to burn their carcasses on the same pyre Electricity offers Itself as a locomotive force for the nations The steam locomotive vaunted emblem and token of the greatest of centuries finds itself at the close about to be relegated to the great ash heap of curiosities before be-fore which civilization stands laughing But the thins is not yet certain We cannot make haste to dig q grave for the locomotive I may be that the twentieth century will still demand that heavy clumsy but very efficient brute whose office i has been for two generations to carry man and his products prod-ucts to the ends of the earth The substitution sub-stitution of electricity for steam as a motive fore on the great railways of the United States which now seems so imminent will be I it comes the most marvelous single change that has sIrgle chang ever occurred among the physics of the civilized life of man Oddly enough the event is held back by one of the caprices of progress The strength of the locomotive is its imperfection im-perfection The application of steam to enginery is accompanied with an error which has cost civilization more dearly than any other flaw In her apparatus ap-paratus The acceptance of electricity as the one great mote force Is strongly Impeded by a circumstance whichaccord to all logical deduction deduc-tion oujjht long since td have been obviated This circumstance lies in the application of heat or rather In I the evolution of heat and its economy in the production of power Fully four fifths of all the fuel of the world Is thrown away The 70000000 of people In the United States are burning up their own most precious resources with an absolute waste of more than 80 percent per-cent of the whole Victor Hugo chided I the Parisians for sending annually through the sewers 25000000 of francs I into the sea What shall we say of the whole world shoveling coal Into the roaring throats of 100000000 furnaces There is not an engine anywhere ever wasthat economizes more than 20 per cent of the fuel which It devours de-vours |