CLEANING UP ON COAL - That Which Does Not Kill Us

 

I know the recipe almost by heart. Coal, “…a readily combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock”, is simply captured carbon, concentrated out of the air by plants. Take a few hundred million tons of plant material and leave it buried under piles of other dead vegetation for 8 or 9 thousand years, and you get peat. Leave that buried for thirty to sixty million years and you get lignite coal; leave it buried for 200 million years and you get Bituminous coal; cook it for 300 millions years and you get Anthracite, the cleanest burning coal there is ("My gown stays white / From morn till night / Upon the road of Anthracite") - “cleanest” being a very relative term, of course. But once you have coal, it takes just a couple of centuries more to produce greed and monopolies. It was a preview of the turn of the 20th Century when oil made a few millionaires and kept the rest of the population grasping for clean air and financial security.

Humans adapted the best word they already had to describe the burning stone; char-coal. And since it was first recognized washed up on beaches near Durham along the Scottish boarder, they called it sea-coal. It was so rare that it was a prized New Years' gift long before there was a Christmas among the Saxon savages. Its fire was so smoky that thieves carried chunks of it with them to conceal their crimes. Other than as a smoke screen, it had little practical use. But as the forests of England were chopped down to build palaces and forts and fleets, and wood became expensive, the peasants turned to heating their miserable huts with sea-coal. And that is when things started to heat up.

Journalist Edwin Black described the early economics of coal in an article at "The Cutting The News.com" (for 18 May, 2009);  “In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 %, while (the price of ) sea coal increased only 23 %… Londoners had no choice but to resort to sea coal, which was rapidly becoming known simply as "coal." 

By 1300, London's total annual demand for wood was 70,000 acres.  By 1400, it was only 44,000 (acres), despite prodigious industrial, commercial and population growth.” The street in London where merchants sold their cargos still bears the name of “Seacoal Lane”. 

And the math was always in favor of coal. One ton of wood contains about 16 million British Thermal Units, while anthracite coal has almost 29 million BTUs.   But the price stabilization  of coal was caused by two rules of economics; the first that a price increase produces an increase in supply - in this case when miners went looking for sea-coal on the and bellow the land . 

The second economic rule which favored coal is that an increase in profits produces an alteration in the tax codes - as merchants share their new wealth with government bureaucrats, who are hired to protect that wealth.

In this case the merchants were a forgotten class of lobbyists called the “Hostmen”. Originally these were the medieval equivalent of modern day Marriot, Hilton and Motel 6 operators. On 24 July, 1567 Queen Elizabeth I granted a patent to a Mr. William Tipper, making him the sole provider of lodging and meals to “merchant strangers” or “merchant adventurers” (what we would call traveling salesmen) visiting London. 

For that privilege Mr. Tipper paid her Majesty 40 shillings for each traveling salesman who paid him, and that is the origin for the term “a big tipper”, as in an extra payment for service. But the Hostmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne (above) had even bigger plans.

Even earlier, in 1529, to make the tax collector’s job easier, the crown decreed that every commodity harvested or produced within the watershed of the small River Tyne and its tributaries (in the vernacular, the Tyneside), had to be trans-shipped through the port city of Newcastle-on-Tyne. That also made it easier for the hostmen of Newcastle to gain control of the coal market, since “…once the coal was on a boat, it was in the hands of merchants and shippers.” (Ibid)

“By the 1550's , the Hostmen (so) commanded the coal--from ground excavation to river distribution (so) that…in 1590, the Lord Mayor of London complained about “…the monopoly and extortion of the owners of Newcastle coals." (ibid) The tip left on the table for Elizabeth was one shilling paid to the crown for every 36 bushels of coal shipped out of Newcastle and the Tyneside. And it was said that just 10 men - and the Queen - controlled the sale of coal throughout all of England and much of coastal Europe.

After the Virgin Queen’s death in 1603, Parliament moved to cancel the royal monopolies. But by then the Hostmen of Newcastle were too rich to be interfered with, i.e. they were too big to fail. Their profit margins remained as high as 65%.  The price of coal was not coming down until somebody or something broke up the Hostman's monopoly.

Not even the bloody English Civil War could break their control of coal. “The Hostmen always produced smart defenses, polished cost justifications and retained the best spokesmen to make their case.” (ibid). By 1661 Thomas Fuller could define the popular phrase ‘to carry coals to Newscastle’ as meaning “…to busy one's self in a needless employment.”  No point in shipping coals to Newscastle, no matter how much you could under cut the Hostmen's prices.  Because you couldn't. It was illegal to even try.

The next step was described in “Extracts from the Company of Hostmen, Newcastle-Upon- Tyne (1901): “…(coal) miners soon drove shafts down to underground water levels, and mines had to be drained before production could be raised…In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's first coal-fired, steam-operated pump was installed in a coal mine in the West Midlands. It pumped 600 liters of water (150 gallons) a minute from the bottom of a shaft 50 m (160 feet) deep…”  But unseen, in this technology, was the death of the Hostman's power.

In less than a hundred years that steam engine, used to drain the coal mines, would be placed on wheels and fed coal from the same mines to produce a loco-motive. And it was that invention, intended to further strengthen the wealth and power of the Hostmen, which finally proved the death of their 400 year old monopoly. 

As Edwin Black observed, “With trains, coal mines far beyond Newcastle were finally able to free themselves from river transport….(and) That was how the Hostmen cartel was finally broken up.”  By new technology.

But the final cost of the Hostmen's and coal company monopolies came due two hundred years later, on Saturday, 6 December 1952.   Still carrying the enormous debt from World War Two, England taxed imported oil  much higher than local mined coal powered ones.  

They called it the Great Smog of London. A low pressure zone settled in over the Thames valley and stayed for a week. The exhaust from thousands of steam locomotives and internal combustion engines hung on day after day while air quality plummeted.  

The terrible situation was acerbated by thousands of coal fires heating homes and businesses and powering factories,  

Visibility in London fell to one foot, and “smoke ran like water.”  That Sunday the smokey fog was so thick ambulances could not safely navigate city streets, and 6,500 people died when they were forced to walk to London hospitals.   On Monday, with most people locked in their homes and avoiding all physical effort, only 900 died. 

On Tuesday, 9 December,  the wind finally swept the fog away, leaving a final death toll of 12,000 killed in just four days from simply breathing the coal fouled air.

The rock that burns is a killer. And the sooner we stop burning it, the sooner we can breath easier.

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LUCKY PEOPLE The Lost Dutchman Mine

 

I must tell you that your parents were right; the world is not fair. Some people succeed while you fail because they are more talented than you are, or more persistent or prettier, and some are smarter...and some are just so lucky they could walk through a car wash and not get damp. Jacob Waltz, on the other hand, almost drowned in the middle of a desert.

To be fair it was what was once called a once in a hundred year rainstorm. The clouds above central Arizona opened up on Wednesday, 18 February, 1891, and by the next morning the Salt River, which ran past Jacob’s property north of Phoenix, had risen 17 feet. The channel had grown to a mile wide. In the Rio Satillo Valley, the eighty year old retired miner was forced to lash himself to a tree and spent that night, and the following Friday, day and night, with just his head and shoulders above the cold pounding waters.

The Sacramento, California "Sunday Union" reported on the 22nd, that “The northern edge of this flood…entered the city of Phoenix, flooding out many of the poorer families….About a hundred adobe houses fell in…The churches and public buildings have been thrown open to the shelter-less, and a subscription started for their benefit, but many families are still without protection. The river began to fall Friday afternoon…”

That Saturday, 21 February, 1891, one of Waltz’s neighbors found the old man shivering in the ruins of his home, crouched atop his soaked bed. He refused to leave unless his heavy candle box came out with him. The Samaritan brought Waltz and his meager possession into Phoenix. Luckily, the now destitute Jacob was matched with a compassionate small businesswoman named Julia Elena Thomas, who had a spare room and a bed. In fact, Julia was probably the only lucky thing that ever happened to Jacob.

Because, besides being compassionate Julia was curious, and susceptible. She cared for the difficult old man as best she could, in part because Julia became intrigued by the heavy candle box Jacob insisted on keeping under his new bed.

Before the development of electricity, oil for lamps was expensive to buy and transport. So farm and ranch homes were usually lit by candle. Tallow candles were made from farm animal fat, and every rural home had a candle box. Strength was a requirement, as protection from the rats and mice attracted to the tallow’s odor. So the wood was thin but coated with a paint or varnish. The boxes were usually a foot to a foot and a-half long and a foot deep, but usually no more than six inches wide. The top slid into place, making for a nearly air tight closure without the need for weighty hardware.

But Jacob’s box was too heavy to be holding candles, or papers, or keepsakes. What could a broke, sick, old man hold so dear that he risked his life to stand guard over it, while soaking wet, in a collapsing flooded adobe? Eventually Julia peeked, but all she found inside were about 50 pounds of rocks. But it was enough to start her imagination racing. As the months passed Julia teased out Jacob’s story, and it seemed the old man had spent most of his life chasing gold.

He had been born in Germany. And he had chased the shinny metal across the Atlantic. He had worked in the gold mines of North Carolina and Georgia and Mississippi. He could not mine for himself, however, because only an American citizen could own a mineral claim. In 1848, at 38 years old, in Natchez, Mississippi, Jacob had filed a letter of intent to apply for citizenship. But his intentions were put on hold when he chased the California gold strike of 1849. But again, Jacob was unlucky. Like most of the 49ers, he found no gold.

In July of 1861 Jacob finally became an American citizen, in Los Angeles. In 1863 Jacob joined a wagon train bound for the new gold fields around Phoenix, Arizona. Over the next few years he filed three claims for mines in the Bradshaw Mountains. But they produced nothing. In 1868 he homesteaded 160 acres in the Salt River Valley. Every winter Jacob would wander the bitter wilderness of the nearby Superstition Mountains, searching for gold. And, like a lot of other bearded prospectors in the area, Jacob made ends meet by working the Vulture Mine every summer.

Henry Wickenburg had traveled in the same wagon train that had brought Jacob Waltz to Arizona. but unlike Jacob, Henry was lucky. Within a few weeks of arriving in the Phoenix area, Henry stumbled upon a vein of quartz that eventually produced $200 million worth of gold and silver, what Henry called the Vulture Mine. But very little of that fortune went to Henry, in part because Henry sold the mine after a few years (and eventually died broke), but mostly because of something called “highgrading”.

“Freighters would line up at the mine with wagons to transport the gold ore. As soon as they were out of sight of the mine, the freighters would begin picking through the ore, pocketing the best nuggets. "Highgrading" was the name of this practice, stealing the highest grade pieces of ore. In fact, freighting for the Vulture was more profitable than mining it. Several nearby mine owners closed down their mines to become freighters for the Vulture…It was widely known among the prospectors that working at the Vulture for a few months could provide them with a grubstake for the rest of the year…Miners would often work the mine during evenings and weekends for their own benefit. The early owners of the mine treated harshly anyone caught doing personal mining. Later owners may have silently condoned personal mining when they were not able to pay their workers.”

(http://www.jpc-training.com/vulture.htm)

Every successful hard rock mine in the nineteenth century suffered these deprivations, and that is why all modern mines include stamps and smelters on their premises. Nothing leaves the mine site except at least slightly refined gold - now small enough to be under guard.

Jacob never told Julia he highgraded the ore in his candle box from an established mine like the Vulture. If he had, she probably would not have believed him, for Julia, like Jacob, had been bitten by the gold bug. Instead, she pressed the old man for more details about his hidden mine in the mountains. Eventually the sick old coot was forced to admit that he had a mine. But where was this bonanza? Although he never produced a map, in infuriating slowness the old man confided obscure details, almost as if he were stringing Julia along to ensure he kept a roof over his head. He told Julia that with a short climb from his mine you could see the peak known as Weever’s Needle, but from the Needle you could not see his mine…You could see the military trail that ran through the Mountains from his mine, but you could not see the mine from the trail…You had to crawl through a hole to see the gold in his mine…that near his mine was a rock shaped like a face…and that the setting sun shown on the entrance of his mine. This was about all that Jacob shared about the source of the ore in his candle box, before he died of pneumonia in Julia's spare bed, on 25 October, 1891.

The ore in Jacob’s box brought $4,800 from the assay office – a lot of money in those days. And that proved the case for Julia. Jacob had a mine hidden in the mountains; where else could the ore have come from? A year later the "Arizona Enterprise" noted in its pages that Julia had sold her business (an ice cream parlor) and was actively prospecting the Superstitions, searching for Jacob’s “missing” mine. She even attracted a few financial backers. But after a few more unproductive seasons, Julia lost her financing. I guess Julia was just not very lucky.

But she finally made money off Jacob’s mine, once she gave up trying to find it herself, once she switched to selling maps to Jacob’s “Lost” mine, for $7 apiece. And because Jacob had been born in Germany, making him a “Deutsch man” or ‘Dutchman’ to parochial American ears, the magical mystery was marketed as the “Lost Dutchman Mine.”

You too can find the Lost Dutchman Mine. All you need is a map and an understanding of the intricate and complicated stories weaved to explain how once located, a source of immense and instant wealth could have become lost again, and why, with some 2,000 people every year search for it in the Superstition Mountains Wilderness Area, "The Lost Dutchman Mine" could have remained lost for a hundred years. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is that all those people before you have just been more unlucky than you. And just around the next bend, up the next canyon, or after the next scratch off lottery ticket, you too could be the luckiest person in the world. It could happen.

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FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE - The Doomed Andre Expedition

 

I imagine myself standing in a topless hut on the rocky shores of Spitsbergen, half way between the fjords of Norway and the North Pole. It is Sunday, 11 July, 1897, and most of the hut is taken up by a huge inflated hydrogen balloon. 

In the basket suspended beneath that leaking gas bag is a jar headed Swedish engineer named Salomon Andree.

It was Andree (above) who had dreamed up a flight to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon.  And he sold the idea to investors, from average patriotic Swedes to scientific geniuses like Afred Nobel. Now, as he reaches out to shake my hand, a puzzled look comes over Andree's face. Where, he must be wondering, did I come from? But there is no time for explanations. I grasp his hand and pull him close. I whisper in his ear a final warning, “Ekholm was right. And you are the biggest idiot within ten thousand miles.” Andree nods and smiles absently. After all, he doesn’t speak English. 

He shouts, “Strindberg! Fraenkel!” Instantly, obediently, the slender Nils Strindberg (above, centrer) and bullet shaped Knute Franknel leap into the basket, like two eager well trained sacrificial lambs. The ropes are cut, and the Ornen (the Eagle) rises into the cold clear air and floats away. The three men are never seen alive again. What idiots.

Nils Ekholm had joined Andree in Spitsbergen for his first attempt at floating a balloon to the North Pole in 1896, but the southerly winds Andree had confidently predicted never showed up. The delay gave Ekholm time to come to the disturbing revelation that the balloon named the Eagle ("Ornen" in Swedish)  was leaking like a kitchen sieve. It would never, he realized, stay inflated long enough to reach the Pole, let alone safety on to a farther shore like Alaska or Russia. When he expressed his reservations, Andree expressed disappointment with Ekholm’s lack of enthusiasm. After the flight was cancelled for the year Ekholm made alternative travel plans for the summer of 1897.

And that was how Knut Fraenkel earned a chance at immorality and trichinosis; lucky him.

If the leaking gas bag had been properly sealed,  the expedition would have have still been in trouble. In truth there was an almost endless list of mistakes and false assumptions that insured doom, and all of them lead straight back so Salomen Andree.

Andree had invented a clever and simple device for steering the balloon by dragging ropes along the ice or water (note the trailing lines, above).  Their weight would keep the balloon from rising too high, or being carried too fast into trouble. The only problem was, they didn't work.

Bryan Swope, from his web site "This Day in Aviation" explains that "Problems began immediately. As the guide ropes dragged through the water, they became heavier. (After takeoff) They pulled the balloon down to the surface and the gondola actually touched the water. The aeronauts frantically began dumping ballast. Three of the four ropes became entangled and were pulled loose. Örnen began to rise again, but having lost ballast and the weight of the three guide ropes, it climbed to about 1,600 feet (490 meters). The loss of hydrogen accelerated."

"The Eagle floated northward above a fog bank. It sank into the fog and sunlight shining on the envelope decreased. 

The balloon cooled and the gas inside began to contract. Buoyancy decreased and the balloon sank further into the fog...After the explorers passed over the Arctic ice pack, the gondola would alternately bounce across the broken ice, then rise again into the sky. At about 10:00 p.m., 12 July , the gondola settled on to the ice and remained there for the next thirteen hours"

At 10:55 a.m., Tuesday, 13 July, the Eagle became airborne once again..."Drizzle and fog caused ice to form on the envelope. The gondola dragged behind. After jettisoning hundreds of pounds of ballast and equipment, Örnen rose higher, but again settled toward the ice. The remaining guide rope was lost. Realizing that the end of the flight was inevitable, the crew opened to valves to release the hydrogen. "

The balloon settled to the ice for the last time, at 8:11 p.m., Wednesday, 14 July 1897. The crew climbed down from the gondola onto the ice floe. The total elapsed time of the journey was 65 hours, 35 minutes. In that time, Andrée, Frænkel and Strindberg had traveled 295 miles (475 kilometers) from their starting point..." .

Anticipating such a problem, Andree had designed three clever sleds that folded away for easy storage in the balloon. But they proved so rigid you could break your back trying to pull them across the pressure ridges in the ice.

The three intrepid explorers ended up dragging the boats across the endless ice ridges until they collapsed. 

Andree had also stocked the balloon with more than a ton of food, almost none of which could be easily transported by foot, should the balloon go down. 

Their tiny cook stoves often failed, filling their tiny tent with toxic fumes. 

Luckily they had also brought guns, assuming they would be able to feed themselves on seal and polar bear meat if they were forced down on the ice. But when prepared upon the inefficient stoves, they undercooked the meat, contracted trichinosis and died of dysentery; not the fate most 19th century explorer-romantics usually envisioned for them selves -  death by constant toilet.

After they disappeared into the sky on 11 July  1897, for  33 years the assumption was that the brave trio had made it to the Pole but crashed while floating to make landfall in Russia or Alaska, a thousand miles beyond rescue. Then in August of 1930 a Norwegian scientific ship stumbled on the remains of their last camp, not more than 200 miles from their starting point. 

The Norwegians found only what little the polar bears had left of the three bodies, but Andree and Franknel's journals and Strindberg's extraordinary photographs of the dead men remained. That was when the whole truth became known.

On July 14th, the Ornen had crashed onto the ice, after just 51 hours in the air. (Stridberg took extensive photos of the 'landing'.) The three men then spent a week unpacking and deciding what to do. Only then did they set out for home.

They left behind the champagne and beer, but struggled to carry the cans of condensed milk and sausages and cheese. A week’s trek across the ice taught them the lesson and they abandoned almost half of their burden in big pile, and kept going. They had worn no furs but rather heavy woolen clothing, covered at times by oilskins, that trapped the moisture underneath until they were swimming in their own sweat.

As they marched, each two steps they took to the south were countered by the floating ice pack which carried them one and a half steps toward the north and east.

They clambered over two story high pressure ridges, sometimes reduced to crawling on all fours. They struggled over broken ice alternating with water leads that forced them into and then out of their clumsy boat, soaking their woolen clothing again and again.

Slowly they came to the realization that, for all the effort,  they were not making much progress. By the middle September they decided they were going to have to winter on the ice. They built an elaborate snow hut and prepared to float southward on the ice, which they finally realized by watching the shores of White Island (now called Kvitoya Island) drift slowly past their camp, was carrying  them away from safety.

But in early October the pack ice cracked right down the middle of their new home, and they were forced to drag their gear onto the rocky shores of Kvitoya island, barely 200 miles to the northeast of their starting point. They used the last of their strength to build a final camp on the island.

 Shortly after they landed thin and graceful Strindberg died of an apparent heart attack. His comrades buried him under stones in a cleft in the rocks. 

Within a few days Franknel and Andree also died in their little hut. A hunk of frozen polar bear meat found near their stove thirty-three years later was infected with trichinosis spores.  And then the bears came in to claim their winnings.

They had survived for 11 weeks on the open ice, perhaps the most ill-prepared polar explorers in history. But they had transcended their own stupidity with courage and tenacity. In the end they were killed by a bad plan and bad planning. 

But as one writer has since noted, “Posterity has expressed surprise that they died on Kvitøya, surrounded by food…The surprise is rather that they found the strength to live so long".

I would put it slightly differently. I find it unimaginable that Saloman Andree would ever admit defeat, even as he was dying.

- 30 -