Special Consular Reports Volume 26 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 Excerpt: ...unprofitable for briquette-making purposes. Briquettes made from bituminous slack, although not smokeless, are much more nearly so than ordinary bituminous coal. When burned in locomotives or any well-constructed boiler or other furnace with a good draft, they create only a thin, translucent mist, which contains relatively little soot, and is very different from the inky clouds that roll up from most factory chimneys al metric ton=2,205 pounds. where soft coal is shoveled indiscriminately into the furnaces. The one notable defect of such briquettes is that the mineral pitch, which is used as a binder, contains more or less creosote; this renders dust and fumes from such fuel acrid and sometimes irritating to the skin when confined in a close, hot boiler room. Soft-coal briquettes are made from the dust and waste of mines, and, when the composition of the coal is such as to permit a low percentage of binder to be used, they are the cheapest and easiest kind of briquettes to produce. They are made in machine presses more or less similar to the one shown in the third illustration (p. 90), which is a typical machine of the Zeitz pattern, with a capacity of 90 tons of briquettes per day. The output of soft-coal briquettes in western Germany is controlled by a syndicate called the Briquette Sale Syndicate of Dortmund, which includes among its members 31 factories, located in Westphalia and the Rhine provinces. These establishments employ, collectively, 112 machine presses of the Couffinhal type, besides 1 French machine of the Bourriez model and 3 so-called "eggrollers," or machines, which produce small, oval briquettes of egg size which are burned in certain kinds of tubular boilers. The syndicate claims a maximum annual capacity of 2,100,000 tons, and...