The Romance of Modern Chemistry

NATURE S STORES OF FUEL very little hydrogen and oxygen. When heated, it gives off practically no inflammable vapour, and this makes it very difficult to ignite; for the same reason, even when it has been successfully ignited, it burns with very little flame or smoke. These characteristics make anthracite unsuit- able for domestic use; it can be kept burning only in a strong draught, and is accordingly chiefly employed in boiler furnaces. The solid fuels which have been considered in the fore- going paragraphs are all directly supplied by Nature, and are to be had more or less for the gathering. In this little island we pick up over 200,000,000 tons of coal every year, and we may well ask how long this will continue to be possible. Shall we be able to draw upon Nature’s stores for an indefinite period? Is it time to consider what we should do if the coal supply of the world ran out ? Before attempting to answer these questions, we must recall the fact that Nature supplies us also with liquid fuel, yielding it to us with a very slight expenditure of energy on our part. It has long been known that in certain countries there were indications of the presence of oil in the earth’s crust, but it was only forty or fifty years ago that a systematic search was made. About that time a certain American engineer drove an iron pipe from the surface down through the rock, and was surprised to find that when the pipe had gone down about thirty-four feet, oil rose nearly to the top. He had in fact “ struck oil.11 This discovery, of course, led to other attempts to tap the subterranean oil stores, with the result that to-day whole districts in the United States and Russia—the two countries which supply by far the greater part of the world’s liquid fuel—are given over to “oil-bearing.” 134