Article January 1, 1903 Issue

Power for the World's Work

A. E. Dolbear

Congregationalist and Christian World

The primary sources of energy for doing the world's work are gravity and heat. All the forms of energy we are familiar with are resolvable into these. Even what we call water power is derived from the evaporation on the surfaces of the oceans due to heat, and only ocean tides are independent sources, and even these are dependent upon heat; for if the oceans were frozen there would be no tides. The working power of the tides as they now are is vast enough, taken as a whole, but on a limited area of a few acres such as can be controlled by man is much less than popularly supposed, and has always disappointed enthusiastic inventors who went so far as actually to test it without taking the trouble to compute it. One may be sure that the tides will never do much of the world's work.

The idea that electricity can be used as a substitute for heat or water power is seen to be illusory when it is remembered that steam or water power are antecedents of electric power, which in the absence of the antecedents does not exist. We therefore are compelled to consider heat as the source of energy for all the work of the world.

During the past hundred years the steam engine has been so perfected as to have increased enormously the amount of work done in the world. But the steam engine depends upon coal for its efficiency, and the supply is limited. To maintain her supremacy among nations England has drawn heavily upon her coal banks. At the present rate of consumption her supply may last a hundred years. Some of her enlightened men have been warning her of the danger, and she has been advised of the necessity for economy and especially of the advisability of appointing a committee of competent scientific men to devise methods of increasing the efficiency of steam engines; for it is a fact that the average steam engine utilized only about five per cent of the energy that is in coal.

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