I just realised that I have never seen or used it, neither crude oil of course, but there are more variants of it than this natural mineral that powers a lot of the world.
What led to you seeing or touching coal?
OP humblebragging about never making the naughty list.
When I was a kid, for some reason I really wanted coal for Christmas and I was diappointed that only the bad kids got it. My parents decided to mess with me one year by hiding all my actual presents and only putting a piece of coal in my stocking. I was thrilled and thought it was so cool. I have no idea why I thought it was cool, I was a weird kid. My parents gave up on the joke before I even realized that none of the presents under the tree had my name on them. I was entirely happy with the piece of coal.
Ironically, it’s become one of my favorite Christmas memories and it’s one of few presents I still have as an adult.
Whoa, I didn’t expect coal to look so pretty!
There are different types/grades of coal, with anthracite being the hardest and shiniest.
Lignite balls
lmao gottem
Growing up we had a coal fire in the sitting room and a coal range in the kitchen. The range was a wet-back, so it heated water as well. Lovely and cosy in the winter but sweltering in the summer. We had a special coal shed. The coalman would carry big sacks of coal in on his shoulder and empty them into the bin. Coal on one side, firewood and kindling on the other. Mum had the knack of setting the flues just so at night to bank the fire, so that in the morning it just needed a couple of sticks of kindling on the embers to get it going again.
The range was a bastard to cook on. The spot directly over the firebox was hottest. If you needed it even hotter you could lift a cover off - it had a second ring outside that for bigger pans. Moving along from the hot spot towards the chimney were cooler sections. For the lowest heat you moved the pan to the back. There was so much shuffling around! And don’t get me started on the oven. And the constant film of soot, the gusts of ash when you shovelled in coal from the scuttle. Gross. I love my induction hob and electric oven.
We use coal for bbq here
I think you mean charcoal. Coal would probably make your food taste awful.
Yep yep yep thats my bad
In my language I don’t think there’s a distinction between the two, but you can say it’s barbecue coal etc.
There better be. Charcoal is semi-burnt wood. Coal is effectively ‘solid’ oil. Cooking with regular coal would be horrible.
In my language, the word for coal refers to both types, but you can specify “wood coal” or “rock coal” if necessary.
It makes sense. Coal in English is a word that originally meant a burning ember and likely related to charcoal that we then changed to exclusively mean rock coal. Since it didn’t happen until the 1300s and we were producing charcoal long before that.
If anything charcoal is redundant. It’s a word with an origin like “burned burned” (though char comes from change, not burn)
As a child, I used to live alongside a heritage steam railway in the south of England. Much of the engineering/restoration works was accessible, along with huge sections of the way. I’d quite often find lumps of Welsh Steam Coal that had fallen off the engines. It has a very peculiar and distinctive (yet strangely pleasant) smell in its unburnt form.
In the US I have had similar experiences walking along tracks, though the trains were just transporting the coal and they used diesel engines.
Yeah, my house (built in the 1940s) originally had a coal-burning fireplace. Even though it had been renovated (and the fireplace and coal delivery chute removed) before I bought it, there were still a few stray pieces of anthracite in the basement.
I live in the valleys of south Wales. Walk through old coal mining areas and you’ll occasionally find lumps of it on the ground.
Same here. The question should be has anyone not seen coal 😆
Slightly more seriously though, I’ve got a bucket of coal in front of my fire right now.
Having grown up in a house without central heating, coal ovens in the kitchen and the living room were the two points of warmth in the winter. I have learned to light the coal oven before I was old enough to attend school. And whenever coal was delivered, I was tasked to help moving the coal to the coal shack behind the house.
Dirty business, 0/10, can’t recommend.
I don’t know whether it was you, but I have responded to this same question on Lemmy before.
Yes. We had a coal fire when I was growing up - in the 60s and 70s -, so it was an everyday thing during the winters.
I used to raise pigs, and I saw bags of coal at the feed store one of the (many) times I was there. Later, I had a small store in town and, as a Christmas gag, I bought one of those bags of coal and some small fabric bags to sell for $5 a pop.
Later I realized that coal can be pretty toxic and I probably shouldn’t have been putting it in a bag that was gonna be next to candy in some kids’ stocking
We burned coal for heat on the coldest of nights when we lived off grid on a ranch in the mountains of colorado. We only used it if we absolutely had to as its super stinky, dirty and gross. We would get maybe two or three big chunks a year that weighed maybe 1-2 lbs. You can go up into the mountains and see the huge mountains of coal from the mines that have shut down. There are also rows of of coke ovens in monument canyon (used in the 19th century to turn coal into smelting iron)
We bought a house with a small coal supply under the stairs. No idea what to do with it.
I dabble with blacksmithing. I’d take it in a heartbeat
Yes, I’ve seen it in train cars being hauled
Yes, drive through West Virginia and you’ll see seams of coal in the parts of the mountains they cut for highways.
Went to a open cast lignite mining operation once. The scales are quite impressive. Once standing at the bottom of the pit vision of the surrounding landscape just fades and you feel a bit like in a wasteland of sorts.
I assume many people are familiar with hydrocarbon gas for cooking or heating. Coal can also be converted to liquid or gas fuel form chemically but the process is quite complex and usually not economical.
Then there’s crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.
EDIT: the coal typically used for barbecue (charcoal) is made from wood and is different from the stuff mined from the earth. Many people seem to not know this.
