If the aeronaut were quite clear on this point—could calculate accurately how long his balloon would float—he might venture with deliberate calculation on journeys that without such knowledge are mere exploits of blind daring.
The varnishes at present used are all permeable by hydrogen gas and hydrocarbon coal-gas, as might be expected, à priori, from the fact that they are themselves solid hydrocarbons, soluble in other liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons. Nothing, as far as I can learn, has yet been done with silicic or boracic varnishes,[22] which are theoretically impermeable by hydrogen and its carbon compounds; but whether they are practically so under ballooning conditions, and can be made sufficiently pliable and continuous, are questions only to be solved by practical experiments of the kind above named. Now that the best man for making these experiments is gone, somebody else should undertake them. Unfortunately, they must of necessity be rather expensive.
THE LIMITS OF OUR COAL SUPPLY.[23]
Estimating the actual consumption of coal for home use in Great Britain at 110 millions of tons per annum, a rise of eight shillings per ton to consumers is equivalent to a tax of 44 millions per annum. These are the figures taken by Sir William Armstrong in his address at Newcastle last February. As the recent abnormal rise in the value of coal has amounted to more than this, consumers have been paying at some periods above a million per week as premium on fuel, even after making fair deduction for the rise of price necessarily due to the diminishing value of gold.
Are we, the consumers of coal, to write off all this as a dead loss, or have we gained any immediate or prospective advantage that may be deducted from the bad side of the account? I suspect that we shall gain sufficient to ultimately balance the loss, and, even after that, to leave something on the profit side.
The abundance of our fuel has engendered a shameful wastefulness that is curiously blind and inconsistent. As a typical example of this inconsistency, I may mention a characteristic incident. A party of young people were sitting at supper in the house of a colliery manager. Among them was the vicar of the parish, a very jovial and genial man, but most earnest withal in his vocation. Jokes and banterings were freely flung across the table, and no one enjoyed the fun more heartily than the vicar; but presently one unwary youth threw a fragment of bread-crust at his opposite neighbor, and thus provoked retaliation. The countenance of the vicar suddenly changed, and in stern clerical tones he rebuked the wickedness of thus wasting the bounties of the Almighty. A general silence followed, and a general sense of guilt prevailed among the revellers. At the same time, and in the same room, a blazing fire, in an ill-constructed open fire-place, was glaring reproachfully at all the guests, but no one heeded the immeasurably greater and utterly irreparable waste that was there proceeding. To every unit of heat that was fully utilized in warming the room, there were eight or nine passing up the chimney to waste their energies upon the senseless clouds and boundless outer atmosphere. A large proportion of the vicar’s parishioners are colliers, in whose cottages huge fires blaze most wastefully all day, and are left to burn all night to save the trouble of re-lighting. The vicar diligently visits these cottages, and freely admonishes where he deems it necessary; yet he sees in this general waste of coal no corresponding sinfulness to that of wasting bread. Why is he so blind in one direction, while his moral vision is so microscopic in the other? Why are nearly all Englishmen and Englishwomen as inconsistent as the vicar in this respect?
There are doubtless several combining reasons for this, but I suspect that the principal one is the profound impression which we have inherited from the experience and traditions of the horrors of bread-famine. A score of proverbs express the important practical truth that we rarely appreciate any of our customary blessings until we have tasted the misery of losing them. Englishmen have tasted the consequences of approximate exhaustion of the national grain store, but have never been near to the exhaustion of the national supply of coal.
I therefore maintain most seriously that we need a severe coal famine, and if all the colliers of the United Kingdom were to combine for a simultaneous winter strike of about three or six months’ duration, they might justly be regarded as unconscious patriotic martyrs, like soldiers slain upon a battle-field. The evils of such a thorough famine would be very sharp, and proportionally beneficent, but only temporary; there would not be time enough for manufacturing rivals to sink pits, and at once erect competing iron-works; but the whole world would partake of our calamity, and the attention of all mankind would be aroused to the sinfulness of wasting coal. Six months of compulsory wood and peat fuel, with total stoppage of iron supplies, would convince the people of these islands that waste of coal is even more sinful than waste of bread,—would lead us to reflect on the fact that our stock of coal is a definite and limited quantity that was placed in the present storehouse long before human beings came upon the earth; that every ton of coal that is wasted is lost for ever, and cannot be replaced by any human effort, while bread is a product of human industry, and its waste may be replaced by additional human labor; that the sin of bread-wasting does admit of agricultural atonement, while there is no form of practical repentance that can positively and directly replace a hundredweight of wasted coal.
Nothing short of the practical and impressive lesson of bitter want is likely to drive from our households that wretched fetish of British adoration, the open “Englishman’s fireside.” Reason seems powerless against the superstition of this form of fire-worship. Tell one of the idolaters that his household god is wasteful and extravagant, that five-sixths of the heat from his coal goes up the chimney, and he replies, “I don’t care if it does; I can afford to pay for it. I like to see the fire, and have the right to waste what is my own.” Tell him that healthful ventilation is impossible while the lower part of a room opens widely into a heated shaft, that forces currents of cold air through doors and window leakages, which unite to form a perpetual chilbrain stratum on the floor, and leaves all above the mantel-piece comparatively stagnant. Tell him that no such things as “draughts” should exist in a properly warmed and ventilated house, and that even with a thermometer at zero outside, every part of a well-ordered apartment should be equally habitable, instead of merely a semicircle about the hearth of the fire-worshiper; he shuts his ears, locks up his understanding, because his grandfather and grandmother believed that the open-mouthed chimney was the one and only true English means of ventilation.