Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891Various
History
Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891
Various
Science -- Periodicals
In conclusion, let us consider for a moment what is likely to be the
future of gas during the next half century. The labor troubles, bad as
they are and have been, will not cease for many a weary year. The
victims of imperfect education (more dangerous than none at all, as,
while destroying natural instinct, it leaves nothing in its place)
will still listen and be led by the baneful influence of irresponsible
demagogues, who care for naught so long as they can read their own
inflammatory utterances in the local press, and gain a temporary
notoriety at the expense of the poor fools whose cause they profess to
serve. The natural tendency of this will be that every labor-saving
contrivance that can will be pressed into the gas manager's service;
and that, although coal (of a poorer class than at present used) will
still be employed as a source of gas, the present retort setting will
quickly give way to inclined retorts on the Coze principle; while,
instead of the present wasteful method of quenching the red hot coke,
it will be shot direct into the generator of the water gas plant, and
the water gas carbureted with the benzene hydrocarbons derived from
the smoke of the blast furnace and coke oven, or from the creosote oil
of the tar distiller, by the process foreshadowed in the concluding
sentences of my last lecture. It will then be mixed with the gas from
the retorts, and will supply a far higher illuminant than we at
present possess. In parts of the United Kingdom, such as South Wales,
where gas coal is dear, and anthracite and bastard coals are cheap,
water gas highly carbureted will entirely supplant coal gas, with a
saving of fifty per cent. on the prices now existing in those
districts. While these changes have been going on, and while improved
methods of manufacture have been tending to the cheapening of gas, it
will have been steadily growing in public favor as a fuel; and if in
years to come the generation of electricity should have been so
cheapened as to allow it to successfully compete with gas as an
illuminant, the gas works will still be found as busy as of yore, the
holder of gas shares as contented as to-day; for with a desire for a
purer atmosphere and a white mist instead of a yellow fog, gas will
have largely supplanted coal as a fuel, and gas stoves, properly
ventilated and free from the reproaches I have hurled at them
to-night, will burn a gas far higher in its heating power, far better
in its power of bearing illuminating hydrocarbons, and free from
poisonous constituents.
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