Heat (20 page)

Carboniferous coal—coal from three hundred million years ago—underlies the whole region in layers as thick as fifteen feet.

Mining here started in 1847 with a shaft five hundred feet deep. The shaft flooded and was abandoned. Another shaft was dug. And a third. Pumps were introduced. By World War II, two thousand workers lived here, miners and plant personnel and engineers and bookkeepers. When the mine closed in 1986, the shafts had passed three thousand feet in depth, deep enough to feel the warmth of the earth, 104 degrees at the mine face. The miners here experienced heat cramps, dehydration, and occasionally heatstroke.

The entrance to the museum—the entrance to the washing plant—is through the shaker room, with black and dark red pipes and steel chutes and giant gears and shaker trays where larger coal was separated from smaller coal and from dust.

Coal came from the ground and into the plant on black conveyor belts. The belts remain intact, part of the museum. Rusting small-gauge railway tracks run through the building. Wooden platform wagons, five feet long and three feet wide, sit in corners, their purpose forgotten. Now the machinery lies idle and rusting, an industrial tomb turned museum. In life, the motion was unceasing, the noise overwhelming, rocks tumbling against rocks or sliding down steel chutes, rattling conveyor belts, grinding gears, beating engines. Black dust filled the air—dust full of solar energy captured by plants that became peat that became coal that became a portable climate and industrial power.

The Iron Age smelter, the Iron Age blacksmith, transported here when the plant was alive, would have been terrified. Likewise, the average modern office worker, transported here when the plant was alive, would be terrified.

In addition to sorting and cleaning, some of the coal was baked to become coke, using the same process that converts wood to charcoal, heating in the absence or near absence of oxygen. The coking process is a cooking process, the two words related. Coking, or cooking, drives off moisture and volatiles. Coking cooks out the smells. The coal melts, becoming plastic and then tar. It migrates toward the edges of the oven. It contracts and moves back toward the middle of the oven. Around 1,500 degrees, the coke has been cooked into a glowing lump of almost pure carbon. Coke burns without the odor of coal, and in blast furnaces coke provides the carbon needed for smelting, the carbon needed in the chemical reactions that separate the iron from the ore.

Most signs are in German, but a few are translated into English: “Fire and the underground world can be termed as the original myths of the Industrial Revolution,” and “the raw call” in front of a display case with raw coal, and “slack” in front of a piece of slag, a piece of coal ash, the burned-out remains of a tree that lived millions of years ago.

Electronic billboards display current unemployment numbers for the Ruhr. The valley of the Ruhr, it turns out, is no place to find a job. It was worse after World War II. Coal production suddenly dropped 90 percent. The mines themselves were damaged by the war, but more damaging was the unavailability of food and housing. Equipment suffered from neglect. Bridges had been bombed, railroads destroyed.

From Chauncy Harris, writing in 1946: “Most of the homes of Europe have been cold this winter. They lacked the coal needed for heating. Most of the factories have lain idle. They lacked coal for power. The coldness, idleness, and darkness of Europe are due to many causes, but the most important single factor is the breakdown of coal production in the vital Ruhr coal-mining district of northwest Germany.”

Glass cases hold curiosities that came up from the coal mines. One holds a white and brown tube of silica and quartz with bubbly edges. It is three feet long and maybe an inch wide, and eighty million years old. It is a
Blitzröhre,
a thunder tube, but in English a fulgurite, a piece of ground struck by lightning, three hundred kilowatt-hours delivered in an instant. There are fossils: mussels from 300 million years ago, an ammonite snail from 100 million years ago, a whale bone from 26 million years ago, fern fossils from 315 million years ago, an undated chunk of lava.

My best find is an equisetum stalk, a roadside weed, common along marsh edges, also common as a fossil in the abandoned mine cuts north of Anchorage, often called horsetail, which today grows to the size of a dandelion. It is a primitive plant, a nonflowering relative of the more advanced plants, evolutionarily closer to a fern than a pine tree. But unlike today’s horsetail, the one in this museum is five inches in diameter and six feet tall, a small tree. Three hundred million years ago, it would have been possible to walk through a forest of equisetum trees and tree ferns with canopies of club moss. It would have been possible to touch the related lepidodendron tree, ten stories tall, and to feel its alligator-skin bark. But there were no people.

My son, bored, leads me to the cafeteria. We eat overpriced bratwurst. On the table, a flowerpot holds water-soaked coal and two sickly flowers, someone’s idea of a decorative accent. I pocket a piece of coal, black and shiny, a half ounce in weight. And another. Two Germans look on in wonder, or perhaps disapproval, their mouths bulging with bratwurst.

We retreat up a flight of stairs to emerge outside, on top of the plant. The view is one of pipes and block-shaped buildings and silver tanks and pulleys the size of Ferris wheels with cables that run underground, interspersed with thick stands of trees. Among them we see houses, green and yellow and white, and apartment blocks with roofs of red and brown. Three church spires, built well before the mines, stand above the trees. More may be hidden in the smog.

I count nineteen smokestacks. They stand higher than the church spires. Most appear to be relics, disused and dead. But some, painted white, emit billowing clouds of steam. One, in the distance, emits a yellow flare. Together they emit the smell of industrious burnings, of dark, sulfurous vapors that have been locked underground for three hundred million years, the aroma of a portable climate.

James Watt, making his fortune from licensing fees based on coal saved when his engines replaced the atmospheric engines that Newcomen developed, occasionally ran into miners who powered their pumps with horses. Watt made calculations. Like Savery and Morland before him, he compared the power of his engines to the power of horses. Watt’s horse, harnessed to a crank and walking in a circle, could lift thirty-three thousand pounds to a height of one foot in one minute. A steam engine could do the work of one horse for twenty-four hours by burning less than two hundred pounds of coal.

Coal was cheap. Cheap coal and Watt sent horses out to pasture.

Ten typical human workers can do the work of one horse. A human runs, sustainably, at about one-tenth of a horsepower. Two hundred pounds of coal would do the work of thirty humans for a day, assuming that a human is good for an eight-hour workday, while the steam engine runs nonstop, never sleeping, never eating, never complaining.

In 1889, seventy years after Watt’s death, during the Second Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Watt was recognized. A unit of power was named after him. It was defined as one joule per second, or about a quarter of a calorie per second. One horsepower equated to about 750 watts. Watt, alive, harnessed to a crank and walking in a circle, could provide seventy-five watts of power without coal.

I have business in London on the way home that necessitates a day of waiting around. The newspapers talk of record heat again, of heat waves throughout western Europe, of 125 degrees in Saudi Arabia and 128 degrees in Pakistan. Smoke is drifting into Moscow, coming from peat fires that exist because swamps outside the city were drained by miners digging peat used to generate electricity. Customers are running their air conditioners in Virginia, using the heat from coal to cool their homes. About 40 percent of Virginia’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants.

I take a train to Kew Gardens station and walk to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum. The museum boasts running steam pumps and a working steam train. “Marvel at the world’s largest collection of steam pumping engines,” the brochure says, “many of which you can see working every weekend.”

I arrive sweating. The museum sits in a brick building left over from the nineteenth century. Near the front door—near what would have been the front door before this place became a museum—a sign says that Charles Dickens visited the plant in April 1850. He passed through this rusticated doorway to marvel over the engines then in use, engines now on display, that pumped water all over Dickens’s London, water for drinking and baths and industry.

I walk into the Number One Boiler House, where Lancashire boilers used coal to generate steam until they were shut down in 1942. The boilers, long since removed, would have stood in rows, each a cylinder lying down, each with a diameter as tall as a man. In front of each, someone would have stood shoveling coal in through doors near the bottom. The doors opened into chambers lined with tubes that ran the length of the boilers. Through the tubes, water circulated, boiling, generating steam.

It is possible to imagine Dickens standing here amid the noise and the heat, watching the men shoveling coal, noting their language, their posture, their clothes. It is possible to imagine Dickens converting living men into literary characters.

Dickens knew the smell of London air. From his novel
Hard Times
: “It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.”

In this building where Dickens once walked, a great collection of steam engines has accumulated. There is an Easton and Amos engine from 1863, with a flywheel sixteen feet across, tastefully painted in cream and brown. There is a Dancer’s End engine built in 1867, with two cylinders, each one four feet tall and two feet across. There is a Waddon engine, built in 1911, its cylinders lying on their sides and painted black.

A placard tells me that the Waddon engine could generate 198 horsepower. It pushed three million gallons of water each day into a water tank that stood 282 feet tall. This little engine, with steam and ingenuity and coal, could do the work of two thousand men.

Signs hang on each of the machines: “This engine will not be working until 4th July due to scheduled maintenance.” On steam valves, another sign: “Equipment out of action. Do not use.”

I find a docent sitting in a quiet corner. He tells me that even the steam train is out of commission, not running. He tells me that I should come back another time.

All the engines here are variations of Watt’s machine. I ask where I might find a Newcomen engine, an atmospheric engine. The docent does not move from his chair. They have no Newcomen engines here. “They didn’t run very well,” he says. “Not very efficient, you see?”

I find more engines. The largest, built in 1847, just three years before Dickens came to visit, had a piston that would travel upward eleven feet on each stroke, eight strokes per minute. It sits in an open room with black iron stairs leading to the top of the cylinder. I climb the stairs and lean dangerously far over a guardrail to touch the piston itself. The piston is shining steel, oily, as big around as an elephant’s leg. Another flight of stairs takes me to the Beam Room, where the engine’s rocker beam transferred its power to a pump. The floor here is timber, worn in places from engineers walking back and forth, perhaps worn by the boots of Dickens himself.