THE COMING OF COAL
The making of all the coal in the earth began when the sun hurled the
earth into its orbit. Before there were vertebrates in the sea, or
animals, or plants of any kind on land--fully one hundred and fifty
million years ago--low foldings and depressions appeared on the earth
where the Appalachian Mountains now are. Following the lines of what has
become the Atlantic, vast ridges appeared. Ages later swamp forests grew
in the intervening valleys, bearing and shedding the spores and thick,
somber leaves still traceable in the lower carboniferous strata. In that
time, a shallow sea covered what is now the Mississippi Valley in whose
sludgy shoals more swamp forests grew. Along the inland seas and ocean
beaches of Europe and Asia, the tides, the winds, and rains slowly
spread the clay for still other swamp forests. When the lush plant life
of the carboniferous age came out of the marshy ooze, it spread along
the edges of the land, crept up the long estuaries between the rising
and sinking hills and on into the landlocked seas. The rocks beneath and
about these carboniferous forests rose and sank age through age, cycle
through cycle. When they sank slowly, tangled morasses formed; when they
sank rapidly, the inrushing water killed the plants and buried them
under a covering of silt. When the rocky strata rose again, the swamp
forests crept back to their old places, and again bore and shed their
fernlike leaves, their spores and great scarred trunks upon the oozy
bottom now scores or hundreds of feet above the level on which their
ancestors had stood ages before.
Then, some seventy million years ago, a geographical revolution
convulsed what is now northeastern America. The great trough running
parallel to the Atlantic, where swamp forests had grown and died and
grown again, gave way under the ever-increasing load. The ridges at its
sides pressed in upon it, crumpled it into giant folds, broke it, pushed
its shattered edges out in mighty over-thrusts, released molten rock to
flow up and over its torn surface. The whole titanic mass was racked and
twisted with pressure and heat until what had been a slowly subsiding
sea-bottom, covered with decaying swamp vegetation, rose on the
shoulders of the newborn Appalachian Mountains, then a lofty range of
clean, stark peaks stretching from Newfoundland to Arkansas,--two
thousand miles.
And with this great geographical revolution, the work of making coal in
eastern North America was finished. From the softest bituminous to the
hardest anthracite, that work was done.
But in other parts of the world, the dense carboniferous forests
continued to grow for another fifty or more million years. In the
shallows of the Mississippi Valley, on the shores of the island that is
now Colorado, the coal plants grew and died with the seasonal march of
the sun. In parts of Europe, Russia, and China, coal continued to form.
And then came another geographical revolution, some twenty million years
ago, that raised up the Rockies and the Andes along the western border
of the Americas, tore and twisted and upturned the rocks of Europe and
Asia, until with the exception of a few odd pockets where small swamp
forests lived on for a time, the coal making of the whole earth was
ended.
Twenty million years ago, all the coal we have or shall have had been
packed away beneath the ribs of the earth, in seams varying in height
from sixty feet to the thickness of a blade of grass. In many places the
flat layers in which it was first deposited had been thrown into
overlapping folds. Some of it had been subjected to comparatively little
heat and to the pressure only of the rocky strata above it; this is the
bituminous, which is still rich in oils, gas, tar--unreleased volatile
matter. Some had been crushed by the weight of uplifted mountains,
roasted, fused, and burned by molten lava and volcanic flame; this is
anthracite, which is almost pure carbon and ash. Some had been exposed
to greater pressure still, to intenser heat; this is graphite, which can
no longer be burned at all.
The distribution of coal in the world by quality and quantity has been,
next to climate and the fertility of the soil, the physical fact of most
decisive importance in the history of modern civilization. For countless
ages coal lay practically unused in the earth. Then, sometime between
1750 and 1760, an intricate interlocking of circumstances set coal to
rule the world, not through new discoveries of coal itself but rather
through improvements in spinning and weaving machinery which made
possible the massing of large numbers of spinners and weavers for
large-scale production if power could be found to drive the new machines
for them. The steam engine had already been invented, but it was still a
tentative thing, a primitive type, wondered at and experimented with.
Coal had been used, but only in a few favored spots where it cropped
out on the earth's surface, or was washed ashore by the sea, and then
only as a domestic fuel. It was at the call of the master weavers and
spinners of England that the steam engine was set to run the machines;
then to furnish a blast so that coal might be used to cheapen the
smelting of iron and steel so that more machines might be made; then to
pump out the deepening mines so that more and more power to keep the
machines running might be won. Steam raising was coal's first great play
for power and it is the work through which it still holds its industrial
supremacy. Between 1800 and 1900 coal-driven engines multiplied until by
the end of the century they were producing energy equivalent to seventy
million horse-power; during the first twenty years of the twentieth
century, their power-producing capacity more than doubled. So coal
wrought the industrial revolution, the greatest revolution in all human
history, which transformed social and economic life as radically as the
geographical revolution transformed the earth's surface.
"It introduced a new race of men," writes H. de B. Gibbins, "men who
work with machinery instead of with their hands, who cluster together in
cities instead of spreading over the land, men who trade with those of
other nations as readily as with those of their own town, men whose
workshops are moved by the great forces of nature and whose market is no
longer the city or country but the world itself."
Measured by the crude standards of gross wealth and numbers, the people
of the earth have flourished mightily since the dominion of coal began.
The aggregate wealth of the world has increased to fabulous proportions.
The average expectation of life among Western peoples has doubled.
Between 1800 and 1910 the world's population rose from approximately
640,000,000 to 1,616,000,000. The population of England, which had
increased only fifteen per cent from 1651 to 1751, increased two hundred
per cent during the next century. Between 1816 and 1910, the population
of France increased fifty per cent, of Germany three hundred per cent,
of the United States seventeen hundred per cent.
Moreover the drive of coal's energy immensely stimulated men's inventive
faculties. It transformed Kay's "flying shuttle" and Hargreaves'
"spinning jenny" from clever toys into instruments of large-scale
production, the crude steam engines of Newcomen and Watt into the great
modern locomotive and the turbine engine; it made possible the
large-scale production of telegraph wires and ocean cables, the cylinder
press and typesetting machines, the electrical dynamo, the
internal-combustion engine, the aeroplane, and even the space-ranging
modern telescope. It lifted the veil from the seven seas, broke down the
physical barriers between the peoples of the earth, forged the steel
framework of national and international government. The commercial and
political primacy which England held for more than one hundred and fifty
years rested upon her abundant fields of easily accessible coal. The
cosmic energy flowing out from her mines spread her trade and her
surplus population to the four corners of the earth and made her
triumphant over Spain and Holland--nations poor in coal. The coal of
Westphalia, associated with the iron ores of Lorraine, welded the States
of Germany into the empire of the latter nineteenth century and hurled
her green-grey armies across her frontiers in the mad adventure of 1914.
The vast, rich coal fields of North America have transformed the United
States from an agricultural appanage of Europe into the foremost
manufacturing and commercial nation in the world. The future of Russia
lies largely in the coal fields of the Donetz basin. The imperfectly
surveyed coal and ore fields of China and Siberia are probably the
strongest of the magnets drawing the Powers into the problem of the
Pacific. Coal and the continuing industrial revolution are still shaping
the destiny of mankind.
But in the history of the human race the fact of transcending
significance is the presence in man of instincts, emotions, mind,
reason, will, conscious hunger, and conscious love of one's
neighbor,--all the constituents of that personality of supreme worth
whose ceaseless struggle for mastery over the forces of nature, for
escape from hunger, want, and war into a world of plenty, beauty, mutual
aid, and service is the epic of civilization. The value of coal, as of
all material things, finds its true measure not in numbers or
horse-power units, but in its effect upon the soul of man, the fullness
of opportunity enjoyed by each individual for self-realization and
service, the progress of the race toward brotherhood. The ultimate
appraisal of the coal age will be determined by the issue of the
struggle between bread hunger and love in the soul of man--the struggle
between his acquisitive instinct and his growing consciousness of kind.