One secret of the unprecedented late growth of cities is
discovered in the steam engine, or the coal which feeds it.
A pound of good coal, used in a good engine, stands for the work of six
horses for an hour; a ton of coal for the work of thirteen hundred horses
for a day of ten hours; ten thousand tons of coal, used in a day by
single lines of railways, stand for the work of thirteen million horses,
working ten hours a day. In 1894 the English mines produced 188,277,525
tons of coal. In Great Britain alone, coal does the work of more than a
hundred millions of men, and adds proportionately to the fabulously
increasing wealth of those fortunate islands.
The Ingrams had solved two important problems, and on their practicable
application depended the success of the great Harris-Ingram experiment.
The more important of the two was the unlocking of the sun's stored
energy, electricity, at the coal mines. The second was a device for
conveying this energy from the mines to the steel plant, and it had been
patented to protect it.
Since electricity possibly travels on the surface of wires or metals, the
Ingrams patented a valuable device of small corrugated copper tubes,
strengthened in the center by steel wires, and thus the carrying capacity
of electricity was greatly increased, and the amount of costly copper
much decreased.
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