Conservation Through Engineering / Extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior

by Franklin K. Lane

HAVE WE TOO MANY MINES AND MINERS?

The problem of the miner and his industry may be stated in another way. We consume all the coal we produce. We produce it with labor that upon social and economic grounds works as a rule too few days in the year. We therefore must have a longer miners' year and fewer miners or a longer miners' year and additional markets. One or the other is inevitable unless we are to carry on the industry as a whole as an emergency industry, holding men ready for work when they are not needed in order that they may be ready for duty when the need arises. There are too many mines to keep all the miners employed all of the time or to give them a reasonable year's work. This conclusion is based on the assumption that we now produce only enough coal from all the mines to meet the country's demand, which is the fact. More coal produced would not sell more coal, but more coal demanded would result in greater coal production. With the full demand met by men working two-thirds or less of the time in the year there can not be a longer year given to all the miners without more demand for coal. This seems to be manifest. Therefore the miners must remain working but part time as now, or fewer miners must work more days, or market must be found for more coal and thus all the miners given a longer year. If we worked all of our miners in all of our mines a reasonable year, we would have a great overproduction. And to have all our mines work a longer period means that we must find some place in which to sell more coal, either at home or abroad.

Why have we so many mines working so many miners? There can be no one-word reply to this question. It penetrates into almost every social and economic condition of the country—the initiative of capital, the size of the country, the pride of localities, the intense competition between railroads, their inability to furnish cars when needed, the manner in which cars are apportioned between mines, the manner in which the railroads are operated so that movement is slow and equipment is short, and this runs into the need for new facilities, such as more yards, more tracks, more equipment, which brings us into the need for more capital and so on and on.

We have none too many mines or too many miners to supply our need if the mines are operated as at present. But we have too many to fill that need if they are operated on a basis nearer to 100 per cent of possible production.

THE LONG VIEW.

Passing from the labor phase of the coal situation to the larger aspect of our coal supply as related to the whole problem of the economical production of light, heat, and power, which Sir William Crookes has characterized as "first among the immediate practical problems of science," we find ourselves both rich and wasteful, following the primrose path, heedless of the morrow and not yet conscious that the morrow is to be a day of battle.

In the first place we treat coal as if it were a thing which was exclusively for home use, a nonexportable commodity which must be used "on the farm," whereas it should be treated with profound respect, because we know from Paris that sacred treaties and national boundaries turn on its presence. The world wants our coal, envies us for having it, fears us because of it. It is not only useful to us, but it has a cash value in the markets of the world. Therefore it should be saved.

In the next place we treat coal as if it were all alike, not selected by nature for specific uses; whereas we should choose our coal with as scientific a judgment as we choose our reading glasses. There is coal for coke and coal for furnaces and coal for house use and coal adapted for one kind of boiler and a different kind of coal for a different kind of boiler. Therefore we should discriminate in coal.

And again we have shown little willingness to dignify coal by seeking to draw out by improved mechanical processes all the stored content of heat in this lump of carbon. Instead we content ourselves by giving it a mere pauper touch, driving off the greater volume of its value into the air. This is a task for the mechanical engineer.

Then, too there is the problem of using coal in the form of steam or in the more exalted form of electric current. The lifting, bobbing lid of James Watt's teakettle did not speak the last word in power. We are only beginning to know how we may move on from one form of motive power to another. The wastefulness of steam power as contrasted with electric power is a real challenging problem in conservation by itself.