Sturtevant
fans and blowing engines, which supplied necessary air for cupolas and
converters. Electricity furnished all the power requisite to handle
innumerable cranes and cars. As easily as a magnet picks up tacks,
electricity also handled ingots or finished steel. Five thousand tons of
finished steel per day were made and the labor and fuel account had been
reduced over one-half.

While the huge steel plant at Harrisville was being constructed, a large
force of men were building a conduit to protect copper tubes, from the
steel plant to the coal fields. At the mines hundreds of miners were set
at work, several shafts were sunk, and tunnels, levels, and winzes were
developed.

George Ingram believed that all the force in the world available for
man's use was derived from the sun; so he heroically resolved to hitch
his wagon, if not to a star, to the mighty sun. With this purpose in
view, he had bought the 20,000 acres of coal land. Half of this area was
located in Jefferson, Harrison, and Belmont counties on the Ohio River,
and thus title was secured to vast quantities of fossil power in the
upper coal measures, which ignites quickly and burns with a hot fire. The
other 10,000 acres were valuable because nearer to Harrisville. This coal
came from lower measures or seams.

George Ingram had made a thorough study of coal, or fossil fuel, its
formation and value. The coal of the carboniferous age is derived almost
entirely from the family of plants called _Lycopods_, or club mosses, and
the ferns, which back in high antiquity attained gigantic size. The
microscope has clearly developed this vegetable origin of coal. The great
Appalachian and other coal fields are without doubt, the long continued
and vigorous forest growths, and subsequent fossilization of the same in
the marginal swamps of ancient gulfs or seas.

The agency of transfer for solar energy is the vegetable kingdom. The
vegetable cell has the surprising property through the sun's agency of
being able to live and multiply itself on air alone. The carbon of
carbonic acid, a constituent of the atmosphere, is so liberated and
appropriated, as to become fixed in the forming tissues of plants. Thus
the plant is a storer of light and heat, a reservoir of force. It
mediates between the sun's energy and the animal life of the world. Thus
coal seams are the accumulations of the sun's energy for thousands of
centuries, requiring the patient growth and slow decay o