Next day we went to Kiviõli - Kivi means rock and õli oil and together they spell Estonia’s great natural resource, oil shale, second in importance only to her forests. There are four plants for distilling the oil and benzine from this rock - one belonging to the government, and the other three leased as concessions to German, English, and Swedish private corporations. We visited the German one, because Mrs. Neuman, the Estonian lady lawyer who was conducting me, knew some people there and had made arrangements for our reception. She told me the oil shale had been discovered in a strange way: Some persons, early in the twentieth century, built a stove of mixed limestone rock, and a yellow rock that seemed to be just as good. But when they lit a fire in the stove, lo and behold, the whole stove burned up! Then they experimented with the yellow rock, and found it would burn like coal. Before the World War some Russian engineers in Leningrad experimented further with this rock - which they found to be oil shale - with the idea of extracting from it the inflammable oil; but the war put an end to their investigations. After Estonia won her freedom, her leaders remembered this investigation, and since she desperately needed natural resources the young government, poor as it was, lent financial assistance to the early experimentors; and the result was the first government oil plant, followed by the three concessions. We found at Kiviõli a tremendous establishment covering many acres and looking like a combination of a coal mine and a bit of South Chicago. The day was rainy, and everything was dark-grey, black, and wet, with deep puddles all over the yards. The manager received us in an economically bare little office evidently devoted to the unlovely gods of business, and answered my many questions. He said the known deposit of oil shale had been estimated at more than three bilion tons; the total deposit in the whole country as five and a half billion tons. It is unusually rich in oil, yielding from 18 to 20 per cent of crude oil, which can be refined into benzine, suitable for aviation and motoring, gasoline, lubricating oils, pitch, and asphalt. These products are mostly sold at home, but they are exporting increasing quantities to Germany, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania and Norway. In the works themselves we saw the shale loaded on a long line of trucks, ready to be fed into the furnaces. It looks like lumps of softish yellow stone about as large as a walnut, and is burned in three enormous ovens, each one as long as a city block, at a temperature of 1000o C. The gas thus released is collected in towers, and distilled. I never look at many men working together to a common end, without feeling the creative power in the multitude. As I now watched the truck-loads of shale coming in from the mines outside, to be dumped into the flaming furnaces, the men who regulate the speed of their passage through the fire with great levers, the graders, the finishers, the women patiently cleaning the floors - all the manifold, coordinated activities converging to the accomplishment of a single purpose - I reflected how mistaken Hitler was in saying that every achievement is the work of the creative power and capacity of one individual, for whom, and for the State, the multitude exists. On the contrary, here is a group of individuals acting together with a power and intelligence beyond that of any one man, however mighty, beyond the power of any one of themselves, or of any of their headmen. Any worker can die and the work will go on. Anyone in charge can die - engineer, foreman, manager, president - and the work will go on. No matter how important he may be, another will be found to take his place. Not for his sake, nor yet for the company’s sake, does the worker labor, but he and the company both labor to meet the needs of evolving humanity. (To be continued)
A Search For a Happy Country (25)
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