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If you are after
the greatest yield of tar products, you impoverish the gas by taking out
the benzene and get a blue instead of a bright yellow flame. If all you
are after is cheap coke, you do not bother about the by-products, but
let them escape and burn as they please. The tourist passing across the
coal region at night could see through his car window the flames of
hundreds of old-fashioned bee-hive coke-ovens and if he were of
economical mind he might reflect that this display of fireworks was
costing the country $75,000,000 a year besides consuming the
irreplaceable fuel supply of the future. But since the gas was not
needed outside of the cities and since the coal tar, if it could be sold
at all, brought only a cent or two a gallon, how could the coke-makers
be expected to throw out their old bee-hive ovens and put in the
expensive retorts and towers necessary to the recovery of the
by-products? But within the last ten years the by-product ovens have
come into use and now nearly half our coke is made in them.


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