The Big Idea/Chapter 7

HE unpleasant scene that fate seemed preparing for Mr. Wentworth in his office that Tuesday afternoon was avoided by the president's unexpected return on Tuesday morning. Mr. Leffingwell Hope, with his plans all carefully laid, had taken advantage of his employer’s supposed absence, and stayed away on business of his own.

These two occurrences caused an eleventh-hour change in the plans of Jimmy and the office manager. Jimmy was for avoiding trouble if it were possible.

“Why not go right ahead now, just as if Hope wasn’t in this at all?” he urged. They talked it over, and decided that would be the better way.

“He’ll have a fine chance coming along all alone after us.” Jimmy chuckled at the prospect. “Let’s do it right now, George, if we can see Mr. Wentworth.”

Mr. Wentworth would see them in half an hour. Then they hastily phoned Merkle; the chemist promised to hurry right down.

That half-hour of waiting was the hardest of Jimmy’s life. He went over, seemingly for the hundredth time, all he planned to say to Mr. Wentworth; and he chewed down all his finger-nails. It was decided Jimmy was to do most of the talking; he wanted it that way; wanted to put the idea over himself.

The half-hour seemed interminable; but it was over at last, and again Jimmy found himself in the president’s office ready to tell his big idea.

This second interview with Mr. Wentworth was as different from the first as it well could be. For one thing, the president was in a more receptive mood than he would have been before. Six months had put him just that much nearer completion of his plans regarding the new factory for the making of optical glass. The site had not yet been selected; indeed, it looked as though finding a satisfactory one would prove a difficult task.

This time, too, Jimmy knew what he was going to talk about. He had the facts—and he had the ability now to present them forcibly and intelligently. Also he had George Cooper with him; and the technical knowledge of Isaac Merkle to call upon.

So Jimmy tackled the president with an assurance that lent force to his arguments. The office manager sat with his chair tilted back against the wall. Mr. Wentworth occupied his usual seat at his desk, and Jimmy faced him across it.

Jimmy had expected to ignore Mr. Leffingwell Hope and the part he had played, but the secretary was injected into the conversation almost immediately. Jimmy began by announcing that he realized Mr. Wentworth had not been impressed with his idea when he had heard it before. Then he went ahead and outlined it briefly.

Whereupon the president, with a directness characteristic of business men of his type, immediately rang his buzzer to summon Mr. Hope.

“Is this what you told my secretary that first morning you were here, Mr. Rand?”

“Why—why yes, sir—nearly the same,” said Jimmy, surprised.

Mr. Hope’s secretary announced that he had not come in that morning. The president frowned, tapping his desk with a lead pencil thoughtfully. Mr. Cooper, scenting something wrong, spoke up quickly.

“Pardon me, chief. There’s something peculiar about this that you don’t exactly understand. We’d rather not speak of it now; Mr. Rand just wanted you to consider his plan in relation to our new factory. This other matter—about Mr. Hope—we know a good deal about that, too, but we’d rather let it go till some other time.”

“Strange, very strange,” said the president musingly.

“Mr. Hope did tell you what I wanted that day, didn’t he?” Jimmy ventured.

“He told me about your mother’s potential gas-well in—Alberta, I think it was.”

Jimmy gasped. “Why—what—why, I never—”

Again Mr. Cooper interposed.

“Chief, listen,” he began vigorously. “Here are the facts: Mr. Rand came into the company that morning to tell you what he has just told you. At your direction he told it to Mr. Hope.”

“How do you know what he told Mr. Hope?” the president snapped.

“He repeated it all to me ten minutes afterward,” declared the office manager unblushingly. “I was enthusiastic; I thought there was something in it. Then, later, when Mr. Hope reported that you were not interested, Rand and I thought we’d work it out together. That’s what we’ve done, and now he’s ready to ask your opinion of it again. That’s all we know about it.”

Mr. Cooper waved his hand to silence Jimmy, and went on swiftly:

“What Mr. Hope told you about it we don’t know. Evidently he didn’t describe it very accurately, but perhaps that was because he thought it unimportant, any way. But Mr. Hope isn’t here now to explain his actions if you think they need explanation. And, chief, I happen to know that he’s coming in to consult you this afternoon on this very matter. That’s a fact, chief, he is. You wait and hear what he has to say, then you’ll understand it all. And Rand and I will both be here; just send for us if you want us.”

The president stared searchingly at his two employees an instant. Then abruptly be resumed his former manner of attentive listening.

“Go on with your scheme, Mr. Rand; you interest me.”

Jimmy suppressed with an effort the anger that this new proof of Mr. Hope’s duplicity had aroused in him, and resumed:

“You understand, Mr. Wentworth,” he interrupted himself when he had been talking perhaps five minutes, “I’m not going to try and talk to you in technical language. I’ve only studied these engineering problems a little with George. I think I can make the thing clear in a general way, but I can’t talk technically.”

“I couldn’t understand you very well if you did,” the president observed. “That’s always been up to my technical men.”

“As I said, sir,” Jimmy went on, “the—”

“The first problem is how you propose to burn the coal,” Mr. Wentworth interrupted. “Tell me about that first.”

Jimmy explained how they would bore down to the coal measures, just as borings are made in promoting. “This would be a small vertical shaft,” he added.

“How big in diameter?”

“About twelve or fourteen inches. Then this shaft would be lined with iron casing—”

“Like an oil-well,” Mr. Cooper interjected.

The president nodded.

“At the top of this shaft we put a fan—just like the fan-house of a coal mine, only very much smaller—to blow the air down. This is the air-shaft; parallel with that we bore another just like it.”

“How far away?” asked Mr. Wentworth.

“The distance wouldn’t make much difference—say fifty feet,” Mr. Cooper put in.

Again the president nodded.

Jimmy continued. “Then we blast a connection between the bottoms of the two shafts through the coal.”

This the president discussed at some length. “Why not put the shafts closer together?” he finally asked.

“No reason that we can see,” said Jimmy. “If they were closer it would make the connection down below easier. This second shaft is the one that brings up the gaseous products of combustion.

“We’re going to use your regular regenerative furnace, or one something like it. We can get you producer gas that is just as good as any you’re getting—from the coal we burn in the ground, if we control the air and steam right.”

Although this was clear to Mr. Wentworth, it may perhaps need explanation here. In modern furnaces, for the fusion of glass or other operations where great heat is necessary, the process of combustion of the fuel is carried on, not in one operation, as it is in the simple furnaces with which every one is familiar, but in two distinct, separate, progressive stages.

The first stage takes place in a subsidiary furnace known as a “gas producer.” Here part of the heat which the fuel is capable of generating is utilized for the production of a combustible gas. In other words the fuel is changed into gaseous form, but only partly burned.

A familiar example of this operation is seen in any ordinary fireplace when the fire is first lighted. There is at first an inadequate “draft.” This supplies the fire with an insufficient amount of oxygen, and although the fuel—paper, for instance—is entirely volatilized it is not entirely burned; there is smoke, which, if it could be mixed with more air, and at a sufficiently high temperature, would burst into flame.

This was the process Jimmy proposed to carry on in the ground; that is, only partly to consume the coal by supplying it with an insufficient amount of oxygen. And it was the unburned coal-gases—the combustible smoke, in other words—that he proposed to pipe up to the furnace at the surface—not the actual heat. The burning mine, hundreds of feet down in the ground, was in effect to be his subsidiary furnace—his gas-producer.

These unburned gases, from the producer, pass, hot, into the furnace proper; either directly or sometimes after being conveyed a considerable distance—as they would have to be according to Jimmy’s plan. In this latter event they cool off, but are heated up again by the waste heat of the furnace.

These hot gases, entering the main furnace, meet a current of hot air, also heated by the waste heat of the furnace. The combination of h6t gas and hot air burns rapidly and completely, and yields very high temperatures if properly proportioned.

To the layman it may seem surprising that when part of the combustion of the fuel takes place entirely away from the furnace—the heat of this combustion being completely wasted—that a far greater heat can subsequently be obtained. But it is a fact nevertheless.

“How would you start the fire in the ground?” suggested Mr. Wentworth.

“By dropping down incandescent coal,” Jimmy returned promptly. “And then blowing air to it. You see—”

The president raised his hand. “That’s only a detail. Then you really think you could approximate a gas-producer with this burning mine of yours?”

“Yes, By forcing down the proper proportions of air and steam. You see, the hole in the burning coal-bed would gradually spread out. But that wouldn’t make any difference, because it would only have two outlets to the surface air, and both of them under control.”

“The lower ends of your casing would melt,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“What of it, chief?” Mr. Cooper interposed. “That wouldn’t hurt anything,”

The president considered. “No, I don’t suppose it would,” he admitted. “It’s an interesting idea, especially if it would work. Have you talked with any of our technical men? How about Merkle, seen him?”

“He has been—” Jimmy hesitated; then meeting Mr. Cooper’s warning glance, went on:

“Yes, sir; he’s been studying it. He says it can be done; he knows just how to do it.”

“Oh, he does?”

“Yes, sir. He’s outside now; we thought you might like to talk to him about it.”

“We’ll have him in at once.” The president reached for the button on his desk, but Jimmy stopped him.

“Just a minute, Mr. Wentworth—before you get Merkle. There’s another point I wanted to make.” Jimmy still had his trump card, and he thought this a good time to play it.

“We understand around the office that this new factory you’re planning is for the making of optical glass?”

The president inclined his head.

“And for optical glass you need a very good grade of sand; if it has less than one-twentieth of one per cent of iron, and not more than that of other impurities, it is unsatisfactory?” Jimmy was quoting almost verbatim what he had carefully learned.

Mr. Wentworth nodded again; his growing surprise and admiration for Jimmy were evident from his expression.

“Well, sir, when I found that out, I thought of a sand-bank that’s on mother’s farm. It’s all sandy; that’s why it’s no good for a farm.” Jimmy took a little bottle from Ms pocket and laid it on the desk before the president.

“There’s some of the sand, Mr. Wentworth, I had it analyzed.” He produced a folded sheet of paper. “Here’s the analysis—over ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent pure silica.” He handed the paper to Mr. Wentworth.

“That’s mighty important, chief, as you know,” said Mr. Cooper earnestly. “If you’ve got the fuel and the sand, that’s pretty near everything, isn’t it?”

The president glanced at the paper and the little bottle of sand lying on his desk; then he sat up briskly.

“We’ll have Merkle in here at once; see what be says. You’re certainly interesting—mighty interesting. If it works—if it works—”

“It ’ll work, chief,” said Mr. Cooper confidently, as president rang his buzzer to summon Isaac Merkle,

The conference with Mr. Merkle lasted over an hour. The little chemist, forgetting the unsavory circumstances under which he had been induced to begin work on Jimmy’s plan, plunged into a discussion of it with enthusiasm. His ideas, as he outlined them now to Mr. Wentworth, did not differ in any large essential from the way in which Jimmy had explained how it should be done.

Mr. Merkle was sure that coal burning under control in the ground could be made to yield gas of a very satisfactory quality. In his opinion the main furnaces that had already been decided upon for the new optical glass factory could be used, unchanged.

The president raised the question of the saving of the cost of coal; whereupon Mr. Merkle surprised Jimmy and George Cooper greatly by producing a sheet of paper with it all figured out.

“Of course y’ understand, Mr. Wentworth, I couldn’t know what this coal property is going to cost you. But when you own it—here is the saving according to the estimate we made of the fuel consumption of this new factory. But, Mr. Wentworth, coal’s going higher next year; it would be more than this.”

Mr. Wentworth looked over the figures attentively. Then he showed the chemist the little bottle of sand on his desk, explaining briefly what Jimmy had told him about it. Mr. Merkle’s eyes nearly popped from his head. Here was something he and Hope had never thought of. He waved his hands before him expressively.

“With that and producer gas next to nothing you got a cinch, Mr. Wentworth,” he stated emphatically.

The interview ended with the president thoroughly convinced as far as he had gone. He declared himself intensely interested, and stated definitely that if the thing continued to work out theoretically as it seemed now it would—and as he himself admitted he thoroughly believed it would—he certainly would-see that the company gave it a fair trial.

“Too good to pass up; we’d be the first in the field to use it, too.” He chuckled to himself. “They’d never catch up with us.”

The president then said he would go into the matter thoroughly with several of his technical men and the other officers of the company, after which the directors would pass upon it—only a technicality, for he’d “shove it through, whether they liked it or not,” if he thought it feasible himself.

Then he shook hands with Jimmy, patted him on the back, and told him he was a “good boy.” Jimmy had never been so happy before in his life. A great lump came up into his throat; he wanted to tell Mr. Wentworth how he appreciated the way he had been treated, but the words wouldn’t come. He stood staring at the president dumbly, and was able finally only to mumble: “Thank you very much.”

After which Cooper clapped him on the back and pulled him through the door into the outer office.