Twenty-four dollars a year was a munificent salary in those days. It was the exact sum paid to the assistant clerk of Parliament, and more than the average priest, with cure of souls, received; while the pension allowed by Edward III to his apothecary was only twelve cents a day, and King Edward IV’s allowance to his daughter was but four dollars and eighty cents a week, with an additional two hundred and forty-seven dollars and sixty cents a year for the maintenance of her eight servants.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth prices were still exceedingly modest, and, it is only fair to add, wages low in proportion. From a household book of 1589 we take the following typical prices: Beef, two and a half cents a pound; a neck of mutton, twelve cents; twenty-eight pounds of veal and a shoulder of mutton, fifty-six cents; cheese, four cents a pound; wheat, three dollars and eighty-four cents a quarter ton.
The Story of Anthracite.
Though a Company Was Organized in 1792 to Market “Stone Coal,” As Late as 1817 a Man Who Sold Some was Charged With Swindling by Philadelphians, Who Where Unable to Make it Burn.
An original article written for The Scrap Book.
Coal is such a commonplace article that few people take the trouble to find out what it is and how it came into use. The average householder’s thoughts about coal are mainly confined to questions of price.
One picks up, of course, such interesting facts as that the United States burns three hundred and fifty million tons a year, at a cost to consumers of about seven hundred million dollars. In this estimate all grades of anthracite and bituminous coal are included. One wonders how long the visible supply will last, and whether the men who in future generations are to take up the work begun by Edison and other experimenters will find a new source of practical heat-supply in time to prevent a protracted “cold spell” when the coal gives out.
One is troubled, too, by the relations between miner and operator, and is worried when he learns that the great strike of 1902, for example, involved a total loss to workers, operators, railroads, and business men of about one hundred and fifty million dollars.
But all these matters are problems of the day—mere seconds on the clock of Nature. If we look back over so brief a gap as one hundred and fifteen years, we shall see the discovery of anthracite in America.
In 1791 a hunter, named Philip Ginther, lived on the eastern slopes of the mountains which are drained by the Lehigh River. Late one afternoon he found himself at the summit of Sharp Mountain. A storm was coming up, and Ginther broke into a run, for his home was some distance away. Stumbling over the roots of a fallen tree, he kicked up a black stone, and noticed that the soil in which the tree had grown was mingled with similar specimens of an unusual formation.