"On the End of Free Oxygen"

Reports of Lord Kelvin's dire prediction.


From The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, by Silvanus Phillips Thompson:

Toronto was the meeting place of the British Association in 1897. Lord and Lady Kelvin sailed on August 7th on the Campania for New York, reaching Toronto on the 17th. At this meeting he read one paper, on the Fuel and Air Supply of the Earth. This discourse has never been printed in full. Its main theme was an estimate of the total probable amount of fuel on this planet.

Taking as a standard fuel one requiring three times its weight of oxygen to consume it, Lord Kelvin arrived at the conclusion that the total weight of fuel in the earth is not more than 340 millions of millions of tons; the uncombined oxygen over the globe being 1020 millions of millions of tons. The coal-supply of Great Britain was about one two-thousandth part of the total fuel supply of the world. Great Britain's coal was more than could possibly be burned by all the oxygen in the air immediately over the British Isles. In regard to the effect of sunlight in storing energy and fuel, the present rate of sunshine was equivalent to the production of two tons of vegetation per square metre, per thousand years; an estimate agreeing very closely with the growth of German forests and of English hay-fields. We might, as coal fields become exhausted, have to think of growing hay for fuel, as more economical than raising coal. But if we burn up our fuel supplies so fast the oxygen of the air may become exhausted, and that exhaustion might come about in four or five centuries.

There is a copy of "On the Fuel-Supply and the Air-Supply of the Earth" reprinted in Kelvin's Mathematical and Physical Papers, vol. V, but it is only two paragraphs and does not include the conclusions that were quoted in the press (this version from New Castle News, Oct. 9, 1901, p. 3 [1] ):

The extravagant waste of oxygen by modern manufacturing processes may leave the inhabitants of the earth without air for breathing, and that within a short and calculable time. At the present rate of progress five centuries will exhaust the full supply of the world. This means the exhaustion of oxygen.

The sum total of oxygen at our disposal is 1,020 millions of tons. Every ton of fuel used three tons of oxygen in combustion. Consequently the burning of 340,000,000 of tons of combustibles will destroy the world's air for breathing. The population of the earth is 1,500,000,000 persons. Each has to his credit 200,000 tons of combustibles. Burn this and we die, not from lack of fuel for keeping warm, but from lack of oxygen for breath. Considering the rate at which manufacturing and commerce are depleting the coal supply, less than 500 years may see the end of the human race.

These conclusions resulted in dire news stories about the coming end of free oxygen, some examples of which are below...

The Nebraska State Journal, Jun. 15, 1898, p. 4 [2]:

Only 400 Years.

Lord Kelvin, the eminent scientist, has not added to the mirthfulness of the nations by announcing that in four hundred years the oxygen now virtually free in our atmosphere will be used up, and the inhabitants of the earth will die of suffocation from carbonic acid gas.

According to the Scotchman's mathematics, we are now, by cutting down forests for fuel and otherwise destroying vegetation which absorbs the gas and throws out pure oxygen, and by our fierce fires for motor purposes, withdrawing the breath of life very rapidly and unless we mend our ways and stop interfering with the healthful processes of nature, we shall soon be grasping for breath, and the human race with all the animals of this period, will disappear from the earth to be succeeded after a few million years of rest by a better assortment of creatures who will have more sense than to go about deliberately to incur asphyxiation.

Now the present generation is as safe from a catastrophe in four hundred years as they are from one advertised to come off in four million years, yet it makes us shudder more to think of it.

We resemble somewhat the old lady being rowed ashore from a ship by a sailor man. She suddenly asked him how deep the water was. "A hundred fathom, madam." She turned deathly pale and besought him to get her away from so dangerous place immediately. After a while she repeated the question. "Only twenty fathom, madam." Then she thanked him effusively for bringing her into safe waters.

The Washington Post, Apr. 23, 1899, p. 19 (title & blurb only):

OXYGEN IS GIVING OUT;

Time Coming When We Must Breathe Artificial Air.
LORD KELVIN'S COLD PREDICTION

Eminent Scientists Declare that We Are Burning Up the Available Supply of Oxygen So Fast that It Will Be All Gone Long Before Our Coal Supply Gives Out—Then the Air We Breathe Will Have to Be Manufactured. Prof. Rees' Statement. Coal and Oxygen Supply. Other Sources of Power. Growing Grain for Oxygen.

The time is coming when we must live without air; or, rather, that being a physical impossibility, we must learn to manufacture the air necessary to support life, just as we make bread. "Free as the air we breathe" will some day become an out-of-date expression, for air will then be no longer free, but must be bought or toiled for, just as flour is.

[.....]

Pearson's Magazine, July 1900 (unrelated parts omitted here, see complete original):

How Will The World End?

by Herbert C. Fyfe

[.....]

Lord Kelvin startled us not long ago by affirming that there was only oxygen in the atmosphere sufficient to last mankind for some 300 years, and that the world was doomed to die of suffocation. Everyone knows that in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen no animal being can live for long. Put a mouse under an air-tight glass containing some burning substance that exhausts the oxygen, and it will be speedily suffocated. Thus will it be (so says Lord Kelvin) with man, who is himself lighting the fires for the suffocation of his progeny.

On an average it requires three tons of oxygen to consume one ton of fuel, and the oxygen that exists in our atmosphere is practically all the supply available for the purpose. As shown by the barometer the average weight of the air is 14.9 pounds to the square inch, which gives a total weight for the earth of 1,020,000,000,000 tons of oxygen. At the rate of three tons of oxygen to one ton of fuel, the weight of fuel which can be consumed by this oxygen is 340,000,000,000 tons.

Now to see how the oxygen can keep pace with the fuel. The whole world consumes about 600,000,000 tons of coal a year, and to this must be added the consumption of oxygen by wood and other vegetable substances which raises the equivalent coal consumption of the world to not less than 1,000,000,000 tons a year.

Thus, even at the present rate of fuel consumption there is only oxygen to last 340 years, and long before this time the atmosphere would have become so vitiated with carbonic acid gas, and so weakened in oxygen, that either we should have to emigrate to some other sphere, or else give up the habit of breathing altogether.

Following in Lord Kelvin's footsteps, Professor Rees, a prominent American scientist, has been going further into the question of the exhaustion of the air supply of the world. He gives definite warning of the coming "failure" of the air.

"'Free as the air we breathe,'" he writes, will, in the distant future, become an out-of-date, misleading expression. Air will no longer be free, for it will be manufactured and sold like any other necessary. Those who will not work for their daily air supply, and who cannot afford to buy it, will perish, for Nature will have exhausted her supply. The artificial air will be stored up in enormous reservoirs, and to these receptacles applicants will come for their daily supply of oxygen. This will then be carried home and doled out to the family as part of the day's means to support life. The manufactured oxygen will be breathed in as a diver inhales the air supplied him when he sinks beneath the waves.

"'Died from air starvation' will be a common verdict in the coroners' courts of the future, for 'no money, no air,' will be the rule of life. The wealthy will gain a reputation for charity by free gifts of air to the aged poor at Christmas time. Men and women will no longer be able to look at each other with eyes of love, for everyone will be clothed in a great air helmet, like a diver of to-day."

There is, however, a silver lining of hope fringing these gloomy clouds of speculation. Lord Kelvin himself is not wholly a prophet of evil, neither are his views of an entirely pessimistic nature. He looks to the agriculturist to improve his methods, so that the plant life on the globe may be able to absorb the surplus carbonic acid gas and to release sufficient new oxygen to cope with the growing consumption of fuel.

Those sources of Nature at present allowed (except in a few instances) to run to waste—the tides, the ceaseless movement of the waves, waterfalls, solar energy, the wind, the ether, atmospheric electricity—all these in times to come will be made to supply the energy that we require for daily needs. If this be the case, we shall not die of suffocation after all.

[.....]

New Castle News, Oct. 9, 1901, p. 3 (with minor typo edits):

DESTROYING OXYGEN.

Says a London Letter:

Will the human race and all animal life soon be left without air for breathing? will the world come to an end in the general asphyxiation of every living thing?

Lord Kelvin, the greatest authority today in mathematical physics, asserts that the oxygen supply of the world will be exhausted within the next five centuries.

Oxygen is the real force of the atmosphere so far as man and nearly all air-breathing animals are concerned.

Lord Kelvin has sounded an alarm which has created more discussion in scientific circles than any other pronouncement since Darwin put forth his 'Origin of Species.' No satisfactory reply has so far been offered. It is admitted that, theoretically, the oxygen in the atmosphere is diminishing. Every bucketful of coal in a furnace and every stick of wood in a cook stove burns up a portion of the world's supply of breathing air. How long will the oxygen hold out?

Is there any way in which the extravagant waste of the world's atmosphere can be checked?

Lord Kelvin's conclusions were stated in a lecture recently delivered before the British association for the promotion of science. He has made a study of the subject for many years. He is now past middle age, and ranks as the foremost living physicist.

The following is a summary of the important points of Kelvin's theory:

'The extravagant waste of oxygen by modern manufacturing processes may leave the inhabitants of the earth without air for breathing, and that within a short and calculable time. At the present rate of progress five centuries will exhaust the full supply of the world. This means the exhaustion of oxygen.

'The sum total of oxygen at our disposal is 1,020 millions of tons. Every ton of fuel used three tons of oxygen in combustion. Consequently the burning of 340,000,000 of tons of combustibles will destroy the world's air for breathing. The population of the earth is 1,500,000,000 persons. Each has to his credit 200,000 tons of combustibles. Burn this and we die, not from lack of fuel for keeping warm, but from lack of oxygen for breath. Considering the rate at which manufacturing and commerce are depleting the coal supply, less than 500 years may see the end of the human race.'

Science has rarely offered so strange and so terrible a picture of the end of the world as Lord Kelvin's theory suggests. From various scientific authorities in New York (Hallock, Woodward, Hovey, Van Ingen, Burgess and others) interesting speculation as to the gradual approach of the final catastrophe has been gathered.

With the decrease of oxygen in the air the heat of summer would become intense. This would not be the pitiless, parching heat of the desert. Moisture would hang heavy in the air. Steam would rise from the ground and the sun would be veiled in clouds of vapor.

Plants would spring up and flower in a day and trees grow almost in a night. With time for adjustment, the very luxuriance of vegetation would clear the air again and furnish breath to famished life.

But with the swift rush of Kelvin's calculations the mischief will have been accomplished in three centuries. Alarm will spread too late. As oxygen becomes precious the entire human race will strive madly for some means of increasing it. Every man will conserve his strength, because muscular effort requires the expenditures of much oxygen. Factories will not smoke any longer.

Huge electric plants will distill the seas into air. The banks of the ocean will be crowded with the humanity that comes to it to turn it by alchemy from water to breath. Every year the waters will recede under the drain of electrolyting process.

Man will become more puny with each generation. Death will confront the race and pride of power and trade and achievements in art and learning will give way to a desperate struggle for life.

Certain animals, on the other hand, will thrive apace. Huge and brilliant fishes will swim the sluggish streams. Serpents will grow to monstrous sizes and great frogs will croak in the swamps. All the lower nature may reach its flower again before the death of man, as it did before his birth.

The sturdiest of the human species will survive longest. Scarcely on the last day will the last men be able to distinguish the faces of each other in the thick vapor. They will move about in the dense atmosphere with slower and slower steps. A torpor will creep over them and they will die.

Professor William Hallock, department of physics and secretary of the faculty, Columbia university, asked about Lord Kelvin's theory, said:

'Lord Kelvin's contention rests upon a sound basis. It is true that modern manufactories are consuming fuel in larger amounts than the processes of nature now produce it.

'This combustion locks up practically that portion of the world's oxygen which was freed originally in the slow formation of this fuel through unknown ages.

'If we continue to use up our known supply of oxygen at the present rate, without in some way getting the stock reinforced, then our descendants must die of asphyxiation. But nature may in some hidden way discover a means of increasing the supply of oxygen. There may be sources of supply yet unknown to us. Man may invent an artificial process of freeing oxygen from its combinations. Or, lastly, man may become a cold-blooded animal and capable of existing upon an infinitesimal supply of oxygen.

'Vegetation upon the earth would probably have to be swept away before our supply of breathing air gives out. In that case it is a problem whether man would not starve to death before asphyxiation came upon him. Personally I do not anticipate any such catastrophe. It is one of those things interesting to speculate upon, because it is remote enough not to alarm us a great deal.

'One can always hope that something will happen before worst comes to worst.

'As animal life is now constituted it cannot live without oxygen. Vegetation, on the other hand, lives upon carbonic acid gas, which is useless to animals. This forms the main distinction between animal and vegetable life. Each supports a laboratory which works for the subsistence of the other.

'Fish and other cold-blooded animals live on an infinitesimal amount of oxygen. They use it only in muscular effort. Their body heat is the same as that of the element in which they live. Man, on the other hand, is not content with enough oxygen for this. He lives in a mean animal temperature of 98 degrees. he uses up a wasteful amount of oxygen in keeping his body temperature at 98 degrees. It is quite within the range of possibility that evolution may change this.'


Notes

  • [1] [2007-06-15] I have replaced the quote that I originally had here from the Davenport Daily Republican, Sept. 8, 1901, p. 10, with the longer one from New Castle News. There are slight differences between the two.

  • [2] Also reprinted in The Washington Post, Jun. 21, 1898, p. 6.