"You look astonished!" exclaimed the optimist, "but listen to me. You have not thought of this thing as I have. If you should strike fire your fortune would be made. By a system of reflectors you could light up the whole country. By means of tiles and pipes this region could be made tropical. You could warm all the houses in the neighborhood with hot air. And then the power you could generate--just think of it! Heat is power;the cost of power is the fuel. You could furnish power to all who wanted it. You could fill this region with industries. My dear sir, you must excuse my agitation, but if you should strike fire there is no limit to the possibilities of achievement.""But I want water," said I. "Fire would not take the place of that.""Oh, water is a trifle," said he. "You could have pipes laid from town; it is only about two miles. But fire! Nobody has yet gone down deep enough for that. You have your future in your hands."As I did not care to connect my future with fire, this idea did not strike me very forcibly, but it struck Phineas Colwell.
He did not say anything to me, but after I had gone he went to the well-drivers.
"If you feel them pipes getting hot," he said to them, "Iwarn you to stop. I have been in countries where there are volcanoes, and I know what they are. There's enough of them in this world, and there's no need of making new ones."In the afternoon a wagoner, who happened to be passing, brought me a note from Mrs. Perch, very badly spelled, asking if I would let one of my men bring her a pail of water, for she could not think of coming herself or letting any of the children come near my place if spouting fires were expected.
The well-driving had gone on and on, with intermissions on account of sickness in the families of the various workmen, until it had reached the limit which I had fixed, and we had not found water in sufficient quantity, hot or cold, nor had we struck fire, or anything else worth having.
The well-drivers and some specialists were of the opinion that if I were to go ten, twenty, or perhaps a hundred feet deeper, I would be very likely to get all the water I wanted.
But, of course, they could not tell how deep they must go, for some wells were over a thousand feet deep. I shook my head at this. There seemed to be only one thing certain about this drilling business, and that was the expense. I declined to go any deeper.
"I think," a facetious neighbor said to me, "it would be cheaper for you to buy a lot of Apollinaris water,--at wholesale rates, of course,--and let your men open so many bottles a day and empty them into your tank. You would find that would pay better in the long run."Phineas Colwell told me that when he had informed Mrs. Perch that I was going to stop operations, she was in a dreadful state of mind. After all she had undergone, she said, it was simply cruel to think of my stopping before I got water, and that after having dried up her spring!
This is what Phineas said she said, but when next I met her she told me that he had declared that if I had put the well where he thought it ought to be, I should have been having all the water I wanted before now.
My optimist was dreadfully cast down when he heard that Iwould drive no deeper.
"I have been afraid of this," he said. "I have, been afraid of it. And if circumstances had so arranged themselves that Ishould have command of money, I should have been glad to assume the expense of deeper explorations. I have been thinking a great deal about the matter, and I feel quite sure that even if you did not get water or anything else that might prove of value to you, it would be a great advantage to have a pipe sunk into the earth to the depth of, say, one thousand feet.""What possible advantage could that be?" I asked.
"I will tell you," he said. "You would then have one of the grandest opportunities ever offered to man of constructing a gravity-engine. This would be an engine which would be of no expense at all to run. It would need no fuel. Gravity would be the power. It would work a pump splendidly. You could start it when you liked and stop it when you liked.""Pump!" said I. "What is the good of a pump without water?""Oh, of course you would have to have water," he answered.
"But, no matter how you get it, you will have to pump it up to your tank so as to make it circulate over your house. Now, my gravity-pump would do this beautifully. You see, the pump would be arranged with cog-wheels and all that sort of thing, and the power would be supplied by a weight, which would be a cylinder of lead or iron, fastened to a rope and run down inside your pipe.
Just think of it! It would run down a thousand feet, and where is there anything worked by weight that has such a fall as that?"I laughed. "That is all very well," said I. "But how about the power required to wind that weight up again when it got to the bottom? I should have to have an engine to do that.""Oh, no," said he. "I have planned the thing better than that. You see, the greater the weight the greater the power and the velocity. Now, if you take a solid cylinder of lead about four inches in diameter, so that it would slip easily down your pipe,--you might grease it, for that matter,--and twenty feet in length, it would be an enormous weight, and in slowly descending for about an hour a day--for that would be long enough for your pumping--and going down a thousand feet, it would run your engine for a year. Now, then, at the end of the year you could not expect to haul that weight up again. You would have a trigger arrangement which would detach it from the rope when it got to the bottom. Then you would wind up your rope,--a man could do that in a short time,--and you would attach another cylinder of lead, and that would run your engine for another year, minus a few days, because it would only go down nine hundred and eighty feet. The next year you would put on another cylinder, and so on. I have not worked out the figures exactly, but I think that in this way your engine would run for thirty years before the pipe became entirely filled with cylinders.
