Note 155 — Chapter III

In an address by Mr. Lothian Bell (May 1875), late President of the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain, the area of pit coal in the United States is computed at 192,000 square miles, as compared with 8000 square miles in the United Kingdom. Hitherto the expense of working any portion of these vast coal fields was too great to make it remunerative, but, now, the use of coals is being so rapidly substituted for wood in the American steamers that the facilities for working the mines and transporting the coals has marvellously increased within the last twenty years. Mr. Bell remarks, in the same address, that 20,000 tons of coal are sometimes embarked at Pittsburg on a flotilla of flat bottomed boats towed by one steamer and conveyed 1600 miles down the Ohio at something under a shilling a ton, including the cost of bringing back the empty barges.