Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

Tom's Journey

The Doctor was an advocate of leisurely eating, but he impatiently hurried the boys through their breakfast the next morning and set them at work upon the bank with picks and shovels. He explained to them as he had before explained to Tom, that "outcrop" coal – that is to say, the edge 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 this stuff, some of the very richest coal in Virginia. Our task is to dig in here and find out whether we have here a valuable coal mine or nothing at all."

"Suppose it is the kind of coal you think, Doctor," said Jack, "what is such a mine worth?"

"Nothing and everything. It all depends upon circumstances. A year or two ago the finest coal deposit in the world, located where this is would have been worth no more than the detritus from the hill that is piled up all around here. Such a mine at this place now, is incalculably valuable."

"But what makes so vast a difference?" asked Ed.

"The railroad," answered the Doctor. "A year ago this coal would have been worthless, simply because there was no market for it anywhere within reach. Now the railroad brings the market to the mouth of the mine, as it were. But come, let's get to work. If you want me to talk about King Coal, I'll do it to-night after supper. Just now we must dig for 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 or four feet of the face of the cliff. Every now and then the Doctor would take a bit of the exposed coal and examine it critically under a strong magnifying glass. Every time he did so, he broke out again into the song about "Old King Coal." The boys had never seen him so jubilant.

When they quitted the work and began to prepare supper, the Doctor went into the shaft they had started, broke out a bushel or two of the deepest coal yet reached, and placed it on the fire. He watched it intently 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 very best coal in the world for making gas, steam and coke, and as these hills 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 that can be shovelled into a furnace with iron ore on top of it, and used to smelt iron without the trouble or expense of coking. Or we can make as good coke of it as there is in the world, and the vein is eight or nine feet thick, which means a lot, and it has a perfect rock roof, which means a lot more, and the volcanic upheaval which shoved it up here has kindly so placed it that it trends upward, so that in mining it we shall not have to do any pumping. All we've got to do is to dig trenches on each side of our coal car tracks and let the water run out by force of gravitation. I tell you boys, we've discovered the most valuable coal mine in all this region, and as if to make matters still better, it lies just high enough up the mountain to enable us to chute its product down to the railroad without any expense whatever for hauling."

"Well now," said Jack, "all that is good news. But we boys don't understand the thing the least bit. So you are to explain it to us after supper. You are to stop singing 'Old King Coal' and explain to us upon what grounds his majesty's authority rests."

"All right," said the Doctor, with truly boyish enthusiasm. "After supper I'll tell you all about my liege lord Old King Coal. Meantime won't somebody give me another cup of coffee and about a dozen more rashers of that paper-thin bacon? I'm hungry."

Jack replenished the Doctor's cup, and Ed cut for him a dozen or twenty very thin slices of bacon, leaving him to broil them for himself on the end of a stick and devour them as fast as they were broiled. Tom divided a pone of corn bread with him and the supper proceeded to its conclusion.

"Now then," called Tom, when the tin plates and tin cups had been washed and set up on the wall shelf which the Doctor had made for them, "we're ready to hear all about 'Old King Coal' and his claims upon our allegiance."

"Oh, no you're not," said the Doctor. "It would take me weeks to tell you the little I know on that subject and something like a lifetime for anybody who knows more to tell you 'all about' King Coal. But I'll tell you 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. "Without it every one of our industries would come to an end; every factory would stop; every steamship would be laid up forever; every electric light would go out; every railroad would become 'two streaks of rust and a right of way'; in short the whole fabric of modern civilization would tumble to the ground. You see every age has its key note. When men had no better implements than rough stones those people who had most stones were the easy conquerors of the rest. When they began to fashion stones into arrowheads, axes and the like, the people who lived in stony countries had a still greater advantage. When men learned to work metals – well you see the way it went. In the pastoral ages the man whose land produced most grass was the 'king pin' of his community and owned more cattle than anybody else. In the military ages the people who fought best were the supreme ones, and the rest were their dependants. In ecclesiastical ages the great prelates dominated, and so on through a long catalogue. Now ours is an industrial age and coal lies at the very root of productive industry. Without it we can't make steam or get power enough for any of the vast enterprises of modern civilization. It smelts iron out of rocks that would not give it up without King Coal's command. It enables us to make steel and to fashion metals to answer our requirements in a thousand ways. It runs our steamships, our factories, our railroads and pretty much everything else that we depend upon to make life easy, to enable us to interchange our products with people at a distance and generally to make ourselves comfortable. In short our whole civilization depends upon coal. That's why I call coal 'king.' If there ever was a monarch in this world whose authority could not be questioned without destruction to those revolting against it, that monarch 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 are using up our supply of wood much too rapidly already, and there coal is rendering us another important service. It is enabling us to use iron and steel for building materials, and a thousand other purposes for which 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 fuel of any kind, is simply so much sunshine stored up for us and released by burning?"

"I confess I didn't know that," said Tom. "Or at any rate I never thought of it. Now that I do think of it, I see how it is with wood. But what has sunshine to do with coal, buried as it is deep under rocks and earth?"

"Then you don't know what coal is, and where it comes from?" asked the Doctor. "Let me explain. There was a period in the world's remote history when the earth was much warmer than it is now – almost hot in fact. The atmosphere was filled with the gases of carbon, and the rains were an almost continuous cataclysm. Human life was impossible in these conditions. No man could have breathed such an atmosphere and lived. But the conditions were peculiarly favorable to abundant vegetable life. There were forests such as we do not dream of now even in tropical swamps. Ferns grew to the height of great trees, vines and cane and grass and air plants filled up every available inch of space, and they all grew in that carbonized atmosphere with a rapidity and luxuriance quite impossible now. All this vegetation died of course and fell to the ground as all vegetation does and has done from the beginning of time. Wherever it fell into water and was thus shielded from the air, and wherever it managed to get itself covered with earth or rock, as in that highly disturbed volcanic age often happened, it was converted into coal by pressure and by losing certain of its volatile elements, just as charcoal is made by expelling the volatile parts from wood. So, without going any further into details, you see that the coal is preserved vegetation which grew many thousands of years ago, and that the heat we get from it is simply the sunshine it stored up at a period before ever human life existed. What a pity it is that we have to waste so much of it!"

"How do you mean, Doctor?" asked Jack.

"Why you see we waste almost all the heat that coal gives us. If we could make effective use of it all, the burning of a single pound of coal would give us force enough to lift more than eleven and a half millions of pounds a foot from the earth; but the most that we actually get 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 the earth thousands of years ago. Curious, isn't it?"

"It's simply astounding," said Jack. "But why do we burn coal so wastefully, Doctor? Why can't we utilize more of its heat? And what becomes of the waste heat?"

"Our methods are imperfect," answered the Doctor. "In a big manufacturing city thousands of tons of coal, or what is essentially the same 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 other words coal. Then again think of the heat that goes up every smoke stack and is wasted in the air. It would run hundreds of great engines if it could be turned to account. And there is all the heat that makes an engine room so horribly torrid. Every bit of that is wasted power. Little by little, however, we are learning to save the power that coal gives us. A high pressure engine, like an ordinary locomotive, besides wasting coal, wastes greatly more than half the expansive force of its steam. It uses the steam only once and that very imperfectly, and then lets it escape into the open air and go to waste. But the big steamships and many factories have what they call triple or quadruple expansion engines which use the same steam three or four times in propelling the machinery, and then condense it into hot water and send it back into the boiler, thus saving a vast deal of the heat that would otherwise be wasted. Still even they waste most of the heat that their coal produces."

"By the way, Doctor," interrupted Tom, "how much coal does it take to drive one of the big steamers across the Atlantic?"

"From fifteen hundred to three thousand tons," answered the Doctor, "and think what a waste that is when a few hundred tons give force enough to do the work if only the force developed could all be used."

"But how do they manage to carry any freight when they must carry such an enormous load of coal?" asked Ed.

"That is another serious waste," answered the Doctor. "For every ton of coal carried means one ton less of freight. And then, too, think of the expense incurred in putting all that coal aboard. And think too of the cost of feeding and paying wages to a large company of men to handle it after it is on board! For you know besides the stokers who shovel the coal into the furnaces, there are the 'coal trimmers' as they are called, whose duty it is to keep the coal heap properly distributed in the ship. You see a ship is not stiff and rigid like a coal pocket. It would never do to begin at one end of a coal heap and use it as it comes. That would presently leave one part of the ship with no coal load at all, while thousands of tons would burden other parts. No ship that ever was built could stand that. It would twist her out of shape, warp her seams open and send her to Davy Jones in a very little time. So from the moment the stokers begin to shovel coal into the furnaces under a steamship's boilers the coal trimmers and coal carriers must busy themselves with the night and day work of so shifting the coal as to keep its weight properly distributed. But now to come back to what I was saying. Little by little we are learning to save some small part of the enormous waste in the burning of coal. One example will illustrate. In smelting iron – that is melting it out of the ore and separating it from the rock stuff, – the waste twenty-five years ago was simply appalling. The furnaces were mere pots built of fire clay brick, and filled with coal or coke beneath and iron ore on top. A blast of steam or hot air was sent into them from below to make the fire burn as hotly as possible. Sometimes this blast was strong enough to blow bushels of unburned coal or coke out at the top. That however was a mere trifle as compared with the other waste. For great flames, nearly hot enough to melt 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 the winds. All that has been greatly improved since. The flames and heat that escape from the blast furnaces are now very generally harnessed and made to do further work. They are used to heat great steam boilers and thus create the power that operates rolling mills and gigantic forges, and vast machine shops. But we still waste very much more than half the heat 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 stop then?"

"There are three answers to that," replied the Doctor: "1st. That we shall more and more learn to economize in this matter of heat wasting;

"2nd. That our coal supply in this country seems to be sufficient to last for millions of years yet; and

"3rd. That long before it is exhausted the ingenuity of man will probably discover means of securing power from some other source than coal."

"What, for example?"

"Well, perhaps we shall learn how to utilize terrestrial magnetism directly. You know this earth of ours is a gigantic magnet, and magnetism is the raw material of electricity, if I may so express it. At present we get all the electricity we use out of the earth, but we have to do it by burning coal to run dynamos. Perhaps we shall find ways to save that expense by drawing the electricity directly from the earth. We have already done something closely resembling that, with the result of a great saving."

"How was that?"

"Why when the telegraph was first invented it was necessary to double the wire lines, putting up two wires every time by way of completing the circuit. You know electrical energy will not manifest itself, or as we say, the electric current will not flow, unless there is a circuit established. Well at first they established the circuit by running two parallel wires, one to carry the current one way and the other to bring it back. That's a clumsy way to put it, but it will answer my purpose in explanation. After a while somebody found out that the earth is a better conductor of electricity than any wire could be, and so the circuit was established simply by running each end of a single wire into the ground, making the earth do the work formerly done by the other wire. That simple discovery saved exactly one half the expense of telegraph companies for wires."

By this time it was growing late and as the boys had a hard morrow's work before them the Doctor ceased talking and all went to their bunks.

CHAPTER XLII

In the Service of the King