UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
N A V I G A T I O N D I G I T A L L I B R A R Y
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 355]

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334

THE UNIVERSITY AND STATE

the service of the engineering profession of the whole world. One notable investigation in fuels, however, has especially improved the use of Illinois coal. The station has shown not only how to get the greatest heat out of the bituminous products of the great fields in the southern part of the State, but has demonstrated that practicable coking processes will make it like anthracite, burning with little or no smoke. The chemical experiments here have been carried farther than anywhere else in the world; and a notable sight at the University is still the furnace into which is dumped the soft black coal out of which Chicago and Pittsburg produce blinding fogs, and which here burns with clear heat. Studies have been made of the effects of weathering, washing, and storage of such coal, and of its utilization in gas-making. The civil engineering department has also made studies of rural roads especially valuable for Illinois.|| But the investigations of materials used in engineering construction, and especially of the strength and properties of reenforced concrete, the study of which was begun when the station was established in 1904, have been available to the industrial world at large, and have been the basis of the subsequent design of concrete Structures by engineers all over Europe and America. The huge materials testing machines of the University, now housed in a large special building, have been constantly engaged for thirteen years in breaking, crushing, or straining pillars of concrete, brick, wood, or steel, in search of important engineering principles. So, too, with the studies in heat transmission, of the strength of welds in steel, and of different materials used in electricfilaments,which have been useful not merely in Illinois, or the United States, but abroad.