Earth and Sky Every Child Should Know Part 11

The deeper beds of coal are better than those formed in comparatively recent time and found lying nearer the surface. In many bogs a layer of embedded root fibres, called peat, is cut into bricks and dried for burning. Deeper than peat-beds lie the _lignites_, which are old beds of peat, on the way to become coal. _Soft coal_ is older than lignite. It contains thirty to fifty per cent. of volatile matter, and burns readily, with a bright blaze. The richest of this bituminous coal is called _fat_, or _fusing coal_. The bitumen oozes out, and the coal cakes in burning. Ordinary soft coal contains less, but still we can see the resinous bitumen frying out of it as it burns. There is more heat and less volatile matter in _steam coal_, so-called because it is the fuel that most quickly forms steam in an engine. _Hard coal_ contains but five to ten per cent. of volatile matter. It is slow to ignite and burns with a small blue blaze.

From peat to anthracite coal I have named the series which increases gradually in the amount of heat it gives out, and increases and then decreases in its readiness to burn and in the brightness of its flame.

Anthracite coal has the highest amount of fixed carbon. This is the reason why it makes the best fuel, for fixed carbon is the substance which holds the store of imprisoned sunlight, liberated as heat when the coal burns. Tremendous pressure and heat due to shrinking of the earth's crust have crumpled and twisted the strata containing coal in eastern Pennsylvania, and thus changed bituminous coal into anthracite. Ohio beds, formed at the same time, but undisturbed by heat and pressure, are bituminous yet.

The coal-beds of Rhode Island are anthracite, but the coal is so hard that it will not burn in an open fire. The terrible, mountain-making forces that crumpled these strata and robbed the coal of its volatile matter, left so little of the gas-forming element, that a very special treatment is necessary to make the carbon burn. It is used successfully in furnaces built for the smelting of ores.

The last stage in the coal series is a black substance which we know as black lead, or graphite. We write with it when we use a "lead" pencil.

This is anthracite coal after all of the volatile matter has been driven out of it. It cannot burn, although it is solid carbon. The beds of graphite have been formed out of coal by the same changes in the earth's crust which have converted soft coal into anthracite.

The tremendous pressure that bears on the coal measures has changed a part of the carbon into liquid and gaseous form. Lakes of oil have been tapped from which jets of great force have spouted out. Such acc.u.mulations of oil usually fill porous layers of sandstone and are confined by overlying and underlying beds of impervious clay. Gas may be similarly confined until a well is drilled, relieving the pressure, and furnishing abundant or scanty supply of this valuable fuel. Western Pennsylvania coal-fields have beds of gas and oil. If mountain-making forces had broken the strata, as in eastern Pennsylvania, the gas and the oil would have been lost by evaporation.

This is what happened in the anthracite coal-belt.

HOW COAL WAS MADE

The broad, rounded dome of a maple tree shades my windows from the intense heat of this August day. The air is hot, and every leaf of the tree's thatched roof is spread to catch the sunlight. The carbon in the air is breathed in through openings on the under side of each leaf. The sap in the leaf pulp uses the carbon in making starch. The sun's heat is absorbed. It is the energy that enables the leaf-green to produce a wonderful chemical change. Out of soil water, brought up from the roots, and the carbonic acid gas, taken in from the air, rich, sugary starch is manufactured in the leaf laboratory.

This plant food returns in a slow current, feeding the growing cells under the bark, from leaf tip to root tip, throughout the growing tree.

The sap builds solid wood. The maple tree has been built out of muddy water and carbon gas. It stands a miracle before our eyes. In its tough wood fibres is locked up all the heat its leaves absorbed from the sun, since the day the maple seed sprouted and the first pair of leaves lifted their palms above the ground.

If my maple tree should die, and fall, and lie undisturbed on the ground, it would slowly decay. The carbon of its solid frame would pa.s.s back into the air, as gas, and the heat would escape so gradually that I could not notice it at all, unless I thrust my hand into the warm, crumbling ma.s.s.

If my tree should be cut down to-day and chopped into stove wood, it would keep a fire in my grate for many months.

Burning destroys wood substance a great deal faster than decay in the open air does, but the processes of rotting and burning are alike in this: each process releases the carbon, and gives it back to the air. It gives back also the sun's heat, stored while the tree was growing. There is left on the ground, and in the ashes on the hearth, only the mineral substance taken up in the water the roots gathered underground.

If my tree stood in swampy ground and fell over under a high wind, the water that covered it and saturated its substance would prevent decay.

The carbon would not be allowed to escape as a gas to the air; the woody substance would become gradually changed into _peat_. In this form it might remain for thousands of years, and finally be changed into coal.

Whether it was burned while yet in the condition of peat, or millions of years later, when it was transformed into coal, the heat stored in its substance was liberated by the burning. The carbon and the heat went back to the air.

Every green plant we see spreads its leaves to the sun. Every stick of wood we burn, and every lump of coal, is giving back, in the form of light and heat, the energy that came from sunshine and was captured by the green leaves. How long the wood has held this store of heat we may easily compute, for we can read the age of a tree. But the age of coal we cannot accurately state. The years probably should be counted by millions, instead of thousands.

The great inland sea that covered the middle portion of the continent during the Silurian and the Devonian periods, became shallow by the deposit of vast quant.i.ties of sediment. Along the lines of the deposits of greatest thickness, a crumpling of the earth's crust lifted the first fold of the Alleghany Mountains as a great sea wall on the east, and on the western sh.o.r.e another formed the beginning of the Ozark Mountain system in Missouri. An island was lifted out of the sea, forming the elevated ground on which the city of Cincinnati now stands. Various other ridges and islands divided the ancient sea into much smaller bodies of water. Hemmed in by land these shallow sea-basins gradually changed into fresh-water lakes, for they no longer had connection with the ocean, and all the water they received came from rain. After centuries of freshets, and of filling in with the rock debris brought by the streams, they became great marshes, in which grew water-loving plants. Generation after generation of these plants died, and their remains, submerged by the water, were converted into peat. In the course of ages this peat became coal. This is the history of the coal measures.

There is no guesswork here. The stems of plants do not lose their microscopic structure in all the ages it has taken to transform them to coal. A thin section of coal shows under a magnifier the structure of the stems of the coal-forming plants. Moreover, the veins of coal preserve above or below them, in shales that were once deposits of mud, the branching trunks of trees, perfectly fossilized. There are no better proofs of the vegetable origin of coal than the lumps themselves. But they are plain to the naked eye, while the coal tells its story to the man with the microscope.

The fossil remains of the plants that flourished when coal was forming are gigantic, compared with plants of the same families now living. We must conclude that the climate was tropical, the air very heavy with moisture, and charged much more heavily than it is now with carbonic acid gas.

These conditions produced, in rapid succession, forests of tree ferns and horsetails and giant club mosses. These are the three types of plants out of which the coal was made. They were all rich in resin, which makes the coal burn readily. The ferns had stems as large as tree trunks. Some have been found that are eighteen inches in diameter. We know they are ferns, because the leaves are found with their fruits attached to them in the manner of present-day ferns. The stems show the well known scar by which fern leaves are joined. And the wood of these fossil fern stems is tubular in structure, just as the wood of living ferns is to-day.

Among the ferns which dominated these old marsh forests grew one kind, the scaly leaves of which covered the stems and bore their fruits on the branching tips. These giants, some of them with trunks four feet in diameter, belong to the same group of plants as our creeping club mosses, but in the ancient days they stood up among the other ferns as trees forty or fifty feet high.

The giant scouring rushes, or horsetails, had the same general characteristics as the little reed-like plants we know by those names to-day.

The highest plants of the coal period were leafy trees with nut-like fruits, that resemble the yew trees of the present. These gigantic trees were the first conifers upon the earth. They foreshadowed the pines and the other cone-bearing evergreens. Their leaves were broad and their fruits nut-like. The j.a.panese ginkgo, or maidenhair fern tree, is an old-fashioned conifer somewhat like those first examples of this family.

Trunks sixty to seventy feet long, crowned with broad leaves and a spike of fruit, have been found lying in the upper layers of the coal-seams, and in sandstone strata that lie between the strata of coal. Peculiar circular discs, which the microscope reveals along the sides of the wood fibres of these fossil trees, prove the wood structure to be like that of modern conifers.

Generation after generation of forests lived and died in the vast spreading swamps of this era. The land sank, and freshets came here and there, drowning out all plant life, and covering the layers of peat with beds of sand or mud. When the water went down, other forests took possession, and a new coal-bed was started. It is plainly seen that flooding often put an end to coal formation. Fifteen seams of coal, one above another, is the greatest number that have been found. The veins vary from one inch to forty feet in thickness. These are separated by layers of sandstone or shale, which acc.u.mulated as sediment, covering the stumps of dead tree ferns and other growths, and preserving them as fossils to tell the story of those bygone ages as plainly as any other record could have done.

Fresh-water animals succeeded those of salt water in the swamps that formed the coal measures. Overhead, the first insects flitted among the branches of the tree ferns. Dragon-flies darted above the surface and dipped in water as they do to-day. Spiders, scorpions, and c.o.c.kroaches, all air-breathing insects, were represented, but none of the higher, nectar-loving insects, like flies and bees and b.u.t.terflies, were there.

Flowering plants had not yet appeared on the earth. Snakelike amphibians, some fishlike, some lizard-like, and huge crocodilian forms appeared for the first time. These air-breathing swamp-dwellers could not have lived in salt water.

Fresh-water molluscs and land sh.e.l.ls appear for the first time as fossils in the rocks of the coal measures. On the sh.o.r.es of the ocean, the rocks of this period show that trilobites, horseshoe crabs, and fishes still lived in vast numbers, and corals continued to form limestone. The old types of marine animals changed gradually, but the coal measures show strikingly different fossils. These rocks bear the first record of fresh-water and land animals.

THE MOST USEFUL METAL

It is fortunate for us all that, out of the half-dozen so-called useful metals, iron, which is the most useful of them all to the human race, should be also the most plentiful and the cheapest. Aluminum is abundant in the common clay and soil under our feet. But separating it is still an expensive process; so that this metal is not commercially so plentiful as iron is, nor is it cheap.

All we know of the earth's substance is based on studies of the superficial part of its crust, a mere film compared with the eight thousand miles of its diameter. n.o.body knows what the core of the earth--the great globe under this surface film--is made of; but we know that it is of heavier material than the surface layer; and geologists believe that iron is an important element in the central ma.s.s of the globe.

One thing that makes this guess seem reasonable is the great abundance of iron in the earth's crust. Another thing is that meteors which fall on the earth out of the sky prove to be chiefly composed of iron. All of their other elements are ones which are found in our own rocks. If we believe that the earth itself is a fragment of the sun, thrown off in a heated condition and cooling as it flew through s.p.a.ce, we may consider it a giant meteor, made of the substances we find in the chance meteor that strikes the earth.

Iron is found, not only in the soil, but in all plant and animal bodies that take their food from the soil. The red colour in fruits and flowers, and in the blood of the higher animals, is a form in which iron is familiar to us. It does more, perhaps, to make the world beautiful than any other mineral element known.

But long before these benefits were understood, iron was the backbone of civilization. It is so to-day. Iron, transformed by a simple process into steel, sustains the commercial supremacy of the great civilized nations of the world. The railroad train, the steel-armoured battleship, the great bridge, the towering sky-sc.r.a.per, the keen-edged tool, the delicate mechanism of watches and a thousand other scientific instruments--all these things are possible to-day because iron was discovered and has been put to use.

It was probably one of the cave men, poking about in his fire among the rocks, who discovered a lump of molten metal which the heat had separated from the rest of the rocks. He examined this "clinker" after it cooled, and it interested him. It was a new discovery. It may have been he, or possibly his descendants, who learned that this metal could be pounded into other shapes, and freed by pounding from the pebbles and other impurities that clung to it when it cooled. The relics of iron-tipped spears and arrows show the skill and ingenuity of our early ancestors in making use of iron as a means of killing their prey. The earliest remains of this kind have probably been lost because the iron rusted away.

Man was pretty well along on the road to civilization before he learned where iron could be found in beds, and how it could be purified for his use. We now know that certain very minute plants, which live in quiet water, cause iron brought into that water to be precipitated, and to acc.u.mulate in the bottom of these boggy pools. In ancient days these bog deposits of iron often alternated with coal layers. Millions of years have pa.s.sed since these two useful substances were laid down. To-day the coal is dug, along with the bog iron. The coal is burned to melt the iron ore and prepare it for use. It is a fortunate region that produces both coal and iron.

Bituminous coal is plentiful, and scattered all over the country, while anthracite is scarce. The cheapest iron is made in Alabama, which has its ore in rich deposits in hillsides, and coal measures close by, furnishing the raw material for c.o.ke. The result is that the region of Birmingham has become the centre of great wealth through the development of iron and coal mines.

Where water flows over limestone rock, and percolates through layers of this very common mineral, it causes the iron, gathered in these rock ma.s.ses, to be deposited in pockets. All along the Appalachian Mountains the iron has been gathered in beds which are being mined. These beds of ore are usually mixed with clay and other earthy substances from which the metal can be separated only by melting. The ore is thrown into a furnace where the metal melts and trickles down, leaving behind the non-metallic impurities. It is drawn off and run into moulds, where it cools in the form of "pig" iron.

The first fuel used in the making of pig iron from the ore was charcoal.

In America the early settlers had no difficulty in finding plenty of wood. Indeed, the forests were weeds that had to be cut down and burned to make room for fields of grain. The finding of iron ore always started a small industry in a colony. If there was a blacksmith, or any one else among the small company who understood working in iron, he was put in charge.

To make the charcoal, wood was cut and piled closely in a dome-shaped heap, which was tightly covered with sods, except for a small opening near the ground. In this a fire was built, and smothered, but kept going until all the wood within the oven was charred.

This fuel burned readily, with an intense heat, and without ashes.

Sticks of charcoal have the form of the wood, and they are stiff enough to hold up the ore of iron so that it cannot crush out the fire. For a long time American iron was supplied by little smelters, scattered here and there. The workmen beat the melted metal on the forge, freeing it from impurities, and shaping the pure metal into useful articles.

Sometimes they made it into steel, by a process learned in the Old World.

The American iron industry, which now is one of the greatest in the world, centres in Pittsburg, near which great deposits of iron and coal lie close together. The making of c.o.ke from coal has replaced the burning of charcoal for fuel. When the forests were cut away by lumbermen, the supply of charcoal threatened to give out, and experiments were made in charring coal, which resulted in the successful making of c.o.ke, a fuel made from coal by a process similar to the making of charcoal from wood. The story of the making of c.o.ke out of hard and soft coal is a long one, for it began as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In 1812 the first boat-load of anthracite coal was sent to Philadelphia from a little settlement along the Lehigh River. A mine had been opened, the owner of which believed that the black, shiny "rocks" would burn.

His neighbours laughed at him, for they had tried building fires with them, and concluded that it could not be done. In Philadelphia, the owners of some c.o.ke furnaces gave the new fuel a trial, in spite of the disgust of the stokers, who thought they were putting out their fires with a pile of stones. After a little, however, the new fuel began to burn with the peculiar pale flame and intense heat that we know so well, and the stokers were convinced that here was a new fuel, with possibilities in it.

But it was hard for people to be patient with the slow starting of this hard coal. Not until 1840 did it come into general favour, following the discovery that if hot air was supplied at the draught, instead of cold, anthracite coal became a perfect fuel.