A few years ago the motive power for most manufactures was steam. Electricity is rapidly taking its place; and if aluminum was good for nothing else save to act as a conductor of electricity in its various applications, there would even then be a great future before it.
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THE OIL IN OUR LAMPS
Probably the first man who went to a spring for a drink and found oil floating on the water was decidedly annoyed. He did not care in the least where the oil came from or what it was good for; he was thirsty, and it had spoiled his drink, and that was enough for him. We know now that oil comes chiefly from strata of coarse sandstone, but we are not quite sure how it happened to be there. The sand which formed these strata was deposited by water ages and ages ago—we are certain of that. Another thing that we are certain of is that where the strata lie flat, there is no oil. Hot substances become smaller as they cool; and as the earth grew cooler, it became smaller. The crust of the earth wrinkled as the skin of an apple does when it dries. In the tops of these great sandstone wrinkles there is often gas; and below the gas is the place where oil is found. There is no use in looking for petroleum where the folds of the strata are very sharp, because in that case the strata crack and let the oil flow away. It is not in pools, but the porous stone holds it just as a sponge holds water. If you drop a little oil upon a stone even much less porous than sandstone, it will not be easy to wipe it off, because some of it will have sunk into the stone.
In many places the gas forces its way out, and is piped to carry to houses for light and heat. Not far above Niagara Falls there was a spring of gas which flowed for years. An iron pipe was put down, and when the gas was lighted, the flame shot up three or four feet. The gas came with such force that a handkerchief put over the end of the pipe would not burn, though the flame would blaze away above it. In the country of the fire worshipers, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, fires of natural gas have been burning for ages, kindled, perhaps, by lightning centuries ago. There is a vast supply of oil in this place; and indeed there is hardly a country that has not more or less of it.
In the United States the colonists soon learned that there was petroleum in what is now the State of New York; but New York was a long way from the Atlantic seaboard in those days, and they went on contentedly burning candles or sperm whale oil, or, a little later, a rather dangerous liquid which was known as "fluid." The Indians believed that the oil which appeared in the springs was a good medicine. They threw their blankets upon the water, and when these had become saturated with the oil, they wrung them out and sold the oil. Those were the times when if a medicine only tasted and smelled bad enough, people never doubted that it would cure all their diseases, and they gladly bought the oil of the Indians.
When at last it became clear to the members of an enterprising company that oil for use in lamps could be made from petroleum, they secured some land in Pennsylvania that seemed promising and set to work to dig a well. But the more they dug, the more the loose dirt fell in upon them. Fortunately for the company, the superintendent had brains, and he thought out a way to get the better of the crumbling soil. He simply drove down an iron pipe to the sandstone which contained the oil, and set his borer at work within the pipe. One morning he found that the oil had gushed in nearly to the top of the well. He had "struck oil."
This was about ten years after the rush to California for gold, and now that this cheaper and quicker method of making a well had been invented, there was almost as much of a rush to Pennsylvania for oil. With every penny that they could beg or borrow, people from the East hurried to the westward to buy or lease a piece of land in the hope of making their fortunes. A song of the day had for its refrain,—