Mr. SCRUGHAM. How is this work conducted? Is it chiefly through Washington employees, or men in the field?

Dr. KIESSLING. It is conducted both ways. In our division we have our staff divided about equally between Washington and the field.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. How many men are employed on this work?

Dr. KIESSLING. In the Washington office there are about 93 people. In the field offices there are about 30, I should judge.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. You stated that they were about equally divided. Dr. KIESSLING. That is, in reference to my division.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Ninety-three and 30 does not represent a very equitable division.

Dr. KIESSLING. It is not with regard to the economics branch, but that is due to the fact that we require a large number of clerical personnel on the safety figures, and those people are located in Washington.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. The object of this question is to ascertain whether or not it would be practicable to place more of your men in the field. There is a tremendous congestion of employees in the city of Washington. It is getting to be a menace to safety in connection with traffic on the streets of Washington, and in other ways, and unless some drastic steps are taken, we are going to have an even more deplorable situation of overcrowding, and this question is largely aimed at seeing whether it would be practicable to disseminate some of your force now employed in Washington throughout the various field stations.

Mr. KIESSLING. Are you asking me whether it is practicable?
Mr. SCRUGHAM. Could you function as well?

Dr. KIESSLING. No doubt it would be of great value if we could have more people located in the field. We not only could collect better figures, but furnish a lot of better services. However, it would be almost fatal to disband the Washington organization and establish it in the field.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Could you move it to College Park, for example? Dr. KIESSLING. When you refer to moving it outside of Washington, I take it that you mean moving it outside of the eastern area. But in collecting figures, we will say, in the State of Colorado, we will find that many of the offices of the major companies are located in New York, and a large portion of those figures have to be collected through eastern contacts, so that the figures that we publish for the State of Colorado are a combination of two efforts, first the result of a major field effort and, second, of a major effort by the administrative officers here, and we need both of them.

One of the principal functions of the field offices is not only to collect figures, but to disseminate service, and in the latter respect these field offices are of more importance than they are as collection agencies.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Have you any statement to make as to what might be done to improve the usefulness of the Minerals Year Book which, as I have stated before, is a most valuable publication to the mineral industry?

Dr. KIESSLING. Well, the Minerals Year Book is, of course, merely a cross-section of our work, and it is a frozen cross-section. It merely gives to the American public once each year what we are giving daily

through our field organization to the practical men interested in operating mines who come to our offices for consultation.

SERVICES RENDERED BY FIELD OFFICERS OF BUREAU

Perhaps I can give you some idea of the amount of service that we render. In other words, while I try to get out a statement once a year which will show to the American public what the problems are in the mining industry, we have to do that job every day, and during the days of the depression an awful lot of people were interested in mining, and while you might say that that rush has fallen off somewhat, we are nevertheless now having a sounder type of inquiry, and I have tabulated here a statement of the services that we render in the way of dispensing figures and information.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Will you condense it as much as possible, and insert that in the record?

Dr. KIESSLING. I will just say that during the past 6 months we rendered over 12,000 such services, more than an average of 60 every working day.

(The table furnished at this point is as follows:)

Services rendered by the field offices of the Mineral Production and Economics Division (Denver, Salt Lake, San Francisco)

Now, the services that we have to offer are used mostly by the people who are close to our offices. In other words, our efficiency in helping the mining industry is directly in ratio to how close we are to them. At the present time, in the western United States, we only have three centers for distributing information, one in Denver, one in Salt Lake, and one in San Francisco, and we have a very small office in Joplin, and a number of people who come to those offices could be included in a radius of a few hundred miles.

Now, the primary need is to have more of those offices. If our function is to help the small fellow, who does not have the information, we would need about six of those offices in the western United States, and each of those offices, if they would be operated as our offices are operated now, would have an engineer-economist in the P-5 grade, an associate engineer-economist in the same grade, a statistical clerk in

CAF-3 grade, and a stenographer in CAF-2 grade. If having the service furnished to the fellow who is on the ground is a good thing, then we need an office in the upper Central States and one in the New England States, as well as one in the southern Apalachian States.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Could you not decentralize your Washington office to some extent by assigning men from your local organization to handle that work at these various field stations, without additional cost to the Government?

Dr. KIESSLING. I think that that is a very good question, but the only point on that is this, that in my own Division, outside of the clerical people working on accident statistics, I only have two men to decentralize besides myself, and I think you will admit that I cannot do much decentralizing with two or three men.

I should also like to have you keep in mind that the personnel in the Washington office of the economics branch is only 93 people, and we try to cover 109 minerals of commercial importance, and at least 80 percent of them are people in the clerical grades which are necessary to carry on the routine inquiries that come to the Federal Government. So you can see that we cannot have more than 15 or 16 men on engineering, and geology, and economics, and if you divide these by the number of minerals that we try to cover, you will see that every man has to cover about four or five minerals, and it would be extremely embarrassing to have the White House call us up and ask what the immediate situation on fluor spar or copper is and not have a man at our elbow who would be able to answer that question.

So we do require a minimum number of experts here in Washington, and we have that number. The serious question is whether we should not supplement it by one or two.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Thank you, Mr. Kiessling.

Mr. RICH. Are those inquiries mostly by correspondence, or by personal interview?

Dr. KIESSLING. It is in that table which I put in the record. It is by telephone calls, personal calls, and correspondence.

NATURE OF WORK AND PURPOSE OF THE PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS

DIVISION

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Next we have Mr. R. A. Cattell, of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Division. Mr. Cattell, very briefly what is the nature of the work conducted by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Division?

Mr. CATTELL. It is to carry on technical studies that supply oil and gas operators, National and State Governments, and the public with information that leads to more efficient use of the Nation's petroleum resources and reduction of waste in their development and operation.

These studies may be divided into three broad groups: First, production of oil and gas, including related problems of pipe-line transportation; second, petroleum chemistry and refining; and, third, special engineering problems.

In the work under all these headings, the Bureau concentrates its efforts on studies of a fundamental nature that apply throughout the industry and cannot reasonably be made by individual companies or others. Because of its broad point of view, the character of its staff, which is composed of specialists in the various fields of study, and

its access to data that are not generally available to individual competing units within the industry, the Bureau can solve technical problems which the individual units, and particularly the smaller ones, cannot solve for themselves. When a problem is solved, or data developed, by the Bureau, the information is made equally available to all.

The Petroleum and Natural Gas Division also operates the Government's helium properties near Amarillo, Tex., which supply the helium used by the Army and Navy, but that work is not financed from the oil and gas investigations appropriations.

Our field centers, from which work is conducted in every important oil- and gas-producing State, are the petroleum experiment station, Bartlesville, Okla., where a new $250,000 laboratory and office building recently was added to buildings erected in 1918; the petroleum experiment station, Laramie, Wyo., which occupies a building provided by the University of Wyomong; the helium plant operated by the Division at Amarillo, Tex., where oil and gas research as well as helium production are carried on; and field offices at Dallas, Tex., and San Francisco, Calif.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. The principal point that I want to develop today is, Why is there need for oil and gas research of the character that your division performs?

Mr. CATTELL. The petroleum industry is becoming more complicated all the time. The shallower, more easily developed resources, are pretty well developed. Wells are being drilled to depths of two miles. Oil is being produced from structures where the pressure is 4,000 pounds per square inch or more.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Let me express it a little differently. What is the underlying purpose of your studies in petroleum chemistry and refining?

Mr. CATTELL. The underlying purpose of our studies in petroleum. chemistry and refining is to give the refiners better information about the characteristics of the petroleum with which they are dealing, and fundamental data necessary to efficient refining. The petroleum refiner probably is dealing with the most complicated substance that is involved in any industrial process.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Do you make any studies of the hydrogenation of oils and the development of the cracking process, and so on? Is that a function of your Department?

Mr. CATTELL. We are now conducting studies of cracking in connection with our work at Laramie, Wyo., on the black oils of the Rocky Mountain district. The Rocky Mountain district has large resources of these black oils, which have a high sulphur content. The potential production is large, but the actual production is small because of the difficulties in refining such oils into marketable products. Mr. SCRUGHAM. Is that high is asphalt?

Mr. CATTELL. The black oils are high in asphalt, and we are carrying on those studies in two principal directions. One is on the thermo-decomposition, or cracking, of those oils, and the other is on their asphalt characteristics. We believe that those oils can be used for asphaltic materials, for road-building materials, in place of some of the high asphalt content oil that is being imported from foreign countries.

Mr. O'NEAL. Are you doing anything with the low-temperature oils?

Mr. CATTELL. No, that would not come under my division.
Mr. SCRUGHAM. Is that under Dr. Fieldner's division?
Dr. FIELDNER. Yes.

Mr. CATTELL. As to hydrogenation, we have done nothing except some studies of the hydrogenation of tars that we made a few years ago. Hydrogenation of petroleum oil might very logically come under our division, but there have been other problems that seemed to be more important, and with our limited funds we have been unable to do many of the things that we might do for the benefit of the industry and the public.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Are you doing any work looking toward the end of making more safe these engine propellants?

Mr. CATTELL. No, we are not. Our division deals with the production of crude oil, and with its chemistry and refining. We do work relating to the products of the refining process, but at present the major part of our work relates to conservation and efficiency in production. The Pittsburgh station, under Dr. Fieldner, has done work on the explosive limits of various vapors mixed with air.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. Dr. Fieldner, to follow the subject further for a moment, have you made any discoveries or recommendations looking to the safer operation of gasoline-propelled vehicles, either motor boats or automobiles, or, for that matter, airplanes?

Dr. FIELDNER. We have done some work on the development of an apparatus for detecting and giving warning of the presence of inflammable vapors in enclosed places, and some of that work has been published, and, as a matter of fact, there are several companies that are now selling an apparatus that automatically records the percentage of inflammable gas or vapor in the air, and that will give a warning, ring a bell, or flash on a light.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. But you have made substantially no developments in the production of a fuel that will not be explosive, that will not be dangerous for ordinary use?

Dr. FIELDNER. We have a research chemist and an assistant at the Pittsburgh station who are studying the mechanism of the propagation of flames. It is a thoroughly scientific study. We hope to know more about how such flames ingite, about the chemistry of it, so that there might be developed inhibiting agents that could be added to the liquid itself.

Mr. SCRUGHAM. That is exactly the question that I had in mind. Dr. FIELDNER. That is the hope. We have not succeeded yet. Mr. SCRUGHAM. Are there any systematic studies being conducted along that line under your direction?

Dr. FIELDNER. We are systematically studying the mechanism of the propagation of flames, and we have added some agents to them, as a trial, to see whether they would slow up the propagation. We found some things that affected it, but nothing that is practical yet. Mr. O'NEAL. May I ask the doctor one question with reference to these low-temperature oils? Are not most of them imported now, that are used for creosoting purposes and work of that kind?

Dr. FIELDNER. Most of our creosoting oils are the product of hightemperature coke ovens, such as are used for making metallurgical cokes, and normally we make most of them, but recently we have been