coal, wood, and other crude fuel, and of removing the ash resulting from such fuel, it has been demonstrated in practice by the use of crude oil that the expense connected with the burning of brick can be reduced fully 60 per cent.  This large saving is made by converting crude petroleum into gas and utilizing this fuel, either directly in the arches of the kiln or by converting the crude oil into gas in a gas producer, and drawing this fuel gas from the producer and burning the same as required in kilns of suitable construction.

Crude oil fuel must in the future play an important part in all branches of manufacture requiring high, constant heats, and in which the cost of wood, coal, and other solid fuels, together with the labor cost of handling them, forms a considerable part of the cost of production.  Where coal is required to be hauled in carts from the wharves, or from a line of railway to the brick yard, located a mile, more or less, from the places where the coal is received, the cost of handling, haulage, and waste is an important item.  Added to these costs, the deterioration of soft coal under atmospheric influences and the waste from imperfect combustion and from the particles which fall from the grate bars into the ash pits, all eat a large hole in the brickmakers’ profit.

Mr. D.V.  Purington, of Chicago, Ill., in speaking on this subject, says: 

“I will say that my fuel bill for oil is cheaper than it would cost me for coal.  There is a very wide difference in the cost of unloading, hauling away ashes and cinders, and getting my coal around to the kiln, or boilers, or drier, or wherever I use it, and I get very much better results by being able to put the heat from oil fuel just where I want it.”

In order to secure the best results with any fuel it is not only necessary that a cheap fuel should be used, but that it should be always obtainable, and that all of it should be burned and turned to commercial account in the operations of brick manufacture.

Owing to the losses which we have previously mentioned, and resulting from the use of coal, this fuel is destined to be superseded by some form of fuel which will avoid such losses, and which will dispense with all of the inconveniences now encountered in the handling of coal and of the ashes resulting from combustion.  Wood is rapidly becoming too scarce and high near the great centers of man’s habitation to be regarded in the present discussion.

Fully two hundred million of brick a year are being burned in the city of Chicago with crude oil fuel, and a clamp kiln containing one million brick can be burned with crude oil in Chicago at a labor cost of less than $100, and at a total cost for labor and oil of about 40c. per thousand brick.