Coal Oil from CoalSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 16, No. 6 (Jun., 1923), pp. 667-669Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/6331 .

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T'HE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 667

COAL OIL FROM COAL WHEN kerosene first came in.to use

as a lamp illuminant it was called ''coal oil,'" for it used to be sup- posed that petroleum had somehow been formed from coal. Later that theory was called in question and geologists are still disputinig the oirigin of oil. We seem likely to use it up bef ore we finid out where it came froni. Butt. even if coal oil. turns out to have been an inappro- pria.te naime in the past, it mamy prove to be true in the future. For petroo- leum can be made fromn coal and sonlic day we Imay hav-e to a):ike it that way.

For the less oil we have time moore we use. The lower the suppl\- in the groums(d the higher the output of our refineries. The report of the Bureau of Minies for . January coI1es to niv table to-day aand I find that twenty smillions gallons of gasoline were turned out every day on the average, wllile for the same month in 1922 the outp?ut was fourteen millioni. gallons. This inerease can ni.ot keep up for- ever, however liberally you may- esti- ma.te our unseen supply underground.

The countries that are short of petroleum are already contriving sub- stitutes. The Germans, who were well supplied,with coal, but had little oil, began before the war experimeent- iag oni methods of mnaking artificial petroleum. Since they haae lost some of their best coal fields through the war anid oil is harder to get than ever, they have been still more active in such research, and it is rumored by, returnied travelers that they have beeni. more successful in that quest tlhas lsas appeared ini prihst. What little has leaked out. lias mostly come through the patents which Freidrich Bergius has taken out iii Ger many asid the Uni.ted States from 19:[4 to 1922. But a pateint, especially a Germnams patent, is by no mLieasms so ''patent'" as it is supposed to be, so Iiot mliuch is knowIm by the out- side world about the details or the practicability of the process.

Theoretically it is simiple enough. Petroleuin is a miixture of compounds of hydrogeni and carbon. Just hitch up these two elements aiid there you are!

But there are other hiteches in the proceeciiigs. Either earbon or hydro- geii will unite readily with oxygen, but thiey have little liking foi each other. Oinly Awhen1 stirred up bh high kent aind, forced inito coaitact bhy higlh pressure w'6ill they comi-ibine. Besides the expenise of the process there is the expense of the niaterials. Car- bon is cheap anid abunldaint enough in the for m of coal, but hyiirogen has to le obtained b)y tearing it away from the oxygeni witlh wihich it is cofibined in water. This main be donie by jmassinlig steam oir r ed hot iron tulrnings which pick up the oxy- geil antd release the hydrogen. Or steamii may be piassecd throuogh beds of hot coal which give whlat is known as ''water gas," a m-ixtuire of hy- drogeni annd carbon molo6xide, both *good coombustibles.

In makinig synthetie petroleumii it a' pears that the coal is first pow- derIed anid imii-xed with heavv oils. This pasty mess is put inito a tight steel retort anld a currenit of hydro- gen or water gas is run through the vessel at a temnperature of some 700 degreels Fahrenheit and a pressure of a hundred a,tmospheres.

IUnider these conditions the carbon andl the hydrogen gas unite in all solrts of w-ays and formn liquid prod- ucts, anld an oil much. like natural petroleum distills off from the re- tort. This is redistilled; the lighter fractions collected as gasoline, kero- sene, benzene and the like, and the heavy residue returned to the retort and miiixed with the next batch of coal.

It is clainiied that by such a proc- ess as high as 87 per cent. of the carbon in the coal can be con- verted into liquid hydrocarbons, such as are found iii natural petro- leuin aid also the coal-tar products wihich caii be used as material for

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668 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

dyes and drugs, preservatives an( perfumes. The niitrogen in th coal, which is lost in ordinary com bustion, is here obtained in the valu able form of ammonia.

The coal for this process does no have to be of a special qualitv as ii required in making gas or coke by our present methods. Any kind o

Iform of coal can be used and high yields of the hydrogenated products are said to be obtained from the brown coal and lignite of which Ger- many has an abundance. Peat may be thus worked up inito gasoline and other marketable compounds, also pitch, tar, sawdust and any vegetable material.

__

BOARD OF VISITORS TO THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS Left to right-front row-Ambrose Swasey, of Cleveland, Ohio; F. W. McNair, president of the Michigan School of Mines; Samuel W. Stratton, formerly director of the Bureai of Standards and now president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Back row-John R. Freeman, of Providence, and Wilder D. Bancroft, professor of physical chemistry at

Cornell University.

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 669

Although there is little likelihood at present that such a complicate( process will come into use here sc long as our oil wells continue to flow it is reassuring to know that wher they do run out we shall not be alto gether deprived of the efficient fue that has made the auto, the airplane and the motor boat possible. We should not know how to get along without the paraffin, vaseline, lubri eating oil and innumerable othe, petroleum products that enter int( our daily life. Mineral oil contaim so many such valuable substalnces that it is a pity to burn it up in running steam engines where other fuels ma- serve. As petroleum gets scarcer, w( nmay expect to see the burning of th(

HOW OLD IS DIISEASE ? THERE is a curious belief still lin-

gering in the popular mind that dis- eases came in with civilization; that primitive men and animals lived in a state of perpetual health and died a natural death-though it is hard to see what is meant by "natural'' in this sense. Even Mrs. Charlotte Per- kins Gilman, who is very much of a moidernist, falls into this folk fallacy, for in her poem on "'the little Eohippus" she makes the cave-man prophesy:

WVe are going to wear great piles of stuff

Outside our proper skins! We are going to have diseases!

And accomplishments! ! and sins! ! !

"It was a clinching argument to the Neolithic mind,'" but really it was not so. The Neolithic manl was all too familiar with diseases and doubtless had also his accomplish- menits and sins. He suffered from rheumatism and "cave gout" and toothache, for caverns are danmp and chillyv lodgings. He shared the clis- eases as he did the lodgings of the cave bear and saber-toothed cats. The earliest human bones, if indeed they can be called human-those of the ape-man who lived in Java somiwe half

million years ago, bears the marks of a painful malady. The skull of the Dawn Man of Piltdown, England, a hundred thousand years old, is de- formed by disease.

The men of the Stone Age must have suffered frightfully from head- ache for they allowed the tribal doctor to cut holes in their skulls with flint knives to let out the demon that was causing the pain. And if the patient was not cured or killed by this treatment he sometimes tried it again when he had another head- ache. Dr. Roy L. Moodie, of the University of Chicagc, in his new book, "'The Antiquity of Disease," says: "A few ancient skulls reveal five cruel operations, which had all healed. The patient had survived them all. But he suggests that since this custom of trepanning was practiced most commonly in Peru the patient may have had the relief of a local alnesthetic in the form of a few leaves of coca, the plant that gives us cocaine.

But eons before the human era the dumb animals had to endure all manner of diseases. The dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era had "misery in the bones I '-and such bolnes as they were! You have seen them in the museum. It must have been worse than a giraffe's sore throat. "Pott's disease"' was doing its wicked work millions of years before Dr. Pott was born, though this sounds like an an- achronism. This is shown by the dis- covery of backbones of saurians that had been stiffened by tuberculosis. Tumors are to be seen on reptile skeletons buried in the rock chalk of Kansas, and broken bones showing signs of bacterial infection have been found as far back as the Permian of Texas.

Geologists have to depend mostly upon bones for their knowledge of ancient diseases since the softer parts do not leave fossil remains, but the stems of crinoids in the coal fields are found bored into by worms and it is apparent that the mollusks,

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