The Workings of Power

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 10, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 35.

The Workings of Power

HIS eternal power.” Let us think about this power for a moment. Very few have any sort of conception of the mighty energies at work in our world.

Consider the air we breathe. We are not conscious of power wrapped up in this subtle, invisible air. Yet it is held closely hugging the earth by the downward pull of gravity with a pressure that is enormous. It is about fifteen pounds to every square inch of the earth’s surface. We do not feel the pressure, for it is through us as well as about us; we are immersed in it. The whole pressure of the air on the surface of the earth, expressed in tons, requires sixteen digits, being close to 5,517,823,961,480,000 tons. In round numbers we may say it is five thousand millions of millions of tons.

But this is only one letter in the mighty alphabet of God’s power in the world.

Listen to the rain. The patter of those drops means an annual fall of millions of tons of water. The average quantity of aqueous vapor, or water held suspended in the air, at any given time, is estimated to be more than 50,000,000,000,000 tons. The annual

amount of rainfall has been estimated to be about 200,000 solid cubic miles. If spread out equally at one time over the land portion of the globe, it would cover all the continents — Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America — with water three feet deep.

All this enormous weight of water is lifted without sound or agitation or seeming effort. What gigantic energy is this that lifts tons as easily as we lift feathers! To such a power, removing mountains is mere child's play.

And yet this is but another letter in the ponderous alphabet of power.

Now the pressure of the air upon the earth, and the pressure of the water that falls as rain, is as nothing to the pressure of the water at the bottom of the ocean. At a depth of 2,500 fathoms, the pressure has been estimated to be two and a half tons to the square inch. Our most ponderous engines do not have to sustain such tremendous pressure. In fact, the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is sufficient to run twenty-five ordinary railway trains for each one of those inches.

Wood sunk in the ocean several thousand feet and immediately raised will be found to be completely water-soaked, the great pressure having driven the water into every pore of the wood. We are told upon good authority of a whaling boat that was dragged several thousand feet into the depths of the sea and up to the surface again by a harpooned whale. The sunken boat was hauled up only with great labor, for so heavy was it that, altho before the accident it would have been buoyant when full of water, it now required a boat at each end to keep it from sinking. "When it was hoisted into the ship, the paint came off in large sheets, and the planks, which were of wainscot, were as completely soaked in every pore as if they had lain at the bottom of the sea since the Flood. A wooden apparatus that accompanied the boat in its progress through the deep, consisting chiefly of a piece of thick deal about fifteen feet square, happened to fall overboard, and tho it originally consisted of the lightest fir, sank in the water like a stone. The boat was rendered useless. Even the wood of which it was built, on being offered to the cook for fuel, was tried, and rejected as incombustible."

This being the mighty pressure at the bottom of the sea, who will undertake to compute the enormous weight of all the waters of the earth? And what shall be said of Him who measures them as easily as you would measure a few drops in the palm of your hand? Isa. 40:12.

But all this is only one more letter in the mysterious alphabet of His power.

Again, think of the marvelous energies at work in all sorts of vegetable life on the globe. Professor Clark, of Amherst, Massachusetts, found that a soft, pulpy squash could lift a ton and a half, and hold it day and night for months. If one squash could do this, what power must there be exerted by all the trees, shrubs, and herbs, that grow on all the earth!

All over the globe this power and activity of vegetable life is constantly and untiringly exerted. The little daisy that blossoms in the meadows, and the vast acres of wheat that wave to every passing wind; each bunch of grass in the pastures, and every corn-stalk that rustles on the prairies; the shrub that ornaments the landscape, and every mighty tree that wrestles with the tempests of a hundred years, — all these add their part to the enormous tides of power that feed the vegetable world.

But all this is merely a fourth letter in the vast alphabet of God's power.

Consider the giant energies stored in our extensive coal-beds. It has been proved that on an average, four ounces of coal is sufficient to draw, on a railway, one ton a mile. The available energy of a pound of coal, properly applied, would lift a weight of one hundred pounds to the height of twenty miles. Or conversely, one hundred pounds falling from a height of twenty miles, and striking against the earth, would generate an amount of heat equal to that developed by the combustion of a pound of coal. A good Cornish engine, by the expenditure of the power of a pound and a half of coal, will perform as much work as a man can do working on a treadmill continuously for eight solid hours. From this it follows that about five tons of coal would evolve as much power during its combustion as would be equal to the continued labor of an able-bodied man for twenty years, working eight hours a day.

What an incalculable amount of mechanical power lies stored away in our immense coal-beds! "Beneath the soil of our own great coal-basins there reposes power equivalent to the united force of myriads of giants, ready, like Aladdin's genius, to be called into activity by the lamp of science, and as its obedient slave to build cities, to transport palaces, or to remove mountains."

But even so it is simply a fifth letter in the mighty alphabet of God's inexhaustible power.

Think of the tides of power pouring down upon the earth in the genial rays of the summer's sun. According to recent measurements, it appears that from every square yard of the earth exposed perpendicularly to the sun's rays, in the absence of an absorbing atmosphere, there could be derived more than one horse-power, if the heat were all converted into this use. At the equator a steamer could be driven at a fair rate of speed by utilizing only the sunshine that heats down upon her deck. And on so small an area as the island of Manhattan, or that occupied by the city of London, the noon-tide heat is enough, could it all be used, to drive all the steam-engines in the world.

Thus we see that untold millions of horse-power are rained down upon us daily in the form of sunlight. If we were able in some way to gather up this energy and store it for use, daylight itself would provide an inexhaustible source of power from which we could draw for untold ages to come.

The sun, besides sustaining us by its power of light and heat, keeps the earth always near it by the mighty force of gravitation. Seldom do we think of the gigantic pull that it is forever exerting upon our globe. And it not only sways this world of ours, but orbs much vaster and that travel in far wider orbits. If we were to substitute wires between the earth and the sun for this attraction of gravitation, it would be necessary to use wires that would sustain a weight of fifteen hundred pounds each, and they would have to be placed so close together that a mouse could not run between them.

Still this is but a fraction of the power that works in that shining orb we call the sun. And the sun is only a captain in the mighty armies of the heavens. Besides him there are suns upon suns, many of them fairer, brighter, and more mighty than he.

And through the wide oceans of space, suns and worlds are made to spin on their axes as we spin our tops, and are hurled in orbits with a speed seventy times as fast as a rifle-ball, never the least portion of an inch out of place, never the fraction of a second out of time.

"All power is given unto Me," says Christ, "in heaven and in earth." "All power"—who shall measure it? We have called over a few letters in this huge alphabet of energy. But the greater part of that alphabet is still unknown to man.

In the field of God's activities we have not yet learned even our A B C's. And it is impossible for us as yet to spell out the first easy word in the infinite literature of "His eternal power."