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?
A gas station in a mining town I visited had little statues carved out of coal.
Not sure what the English terms are, but we used Steinkohle (stone coal) for barbecue in the 80s and 90s,so I guess yes.
Yes! I was on vacation in Colorado and one of the residents there used it to warm their cabin in a wood burning stove. It was pretty amazing actually. One small chunk would heat the entire house to a very hot temperature for hours at a time. I can see why it was a popular option back in the day.
We once had a very old house with a cellar that was not used and not built for living there in any way. So you had plain rock walls and it was pretty moist. I do not know why but there was a single basket of coal down there. So I have seen black coal but I have not touched it.
Crude oil I have seen too back in school. My teacher had a sample to be able to show it.
I visited a coal power plant when I was still a student in a university. It’s like stony charcoals.
Yes. Hike up a mountain in Kentucky and it just sticks out occasionally.
Yep. Visited the coal mines in northern PA as a little kid. Going underground was super cool.
Tour Ed Mines represent!
It’s pretty easy to find along the river banks around here. It wouldn’t burn if you tossed it in a fire though, not sure why (maybe it’s waterlogged or something).
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.
For some reason I expected coal to be round at least in some form
And the texture, like a dry snowball?
Lignite balls
lmao gottem
Gneiss!
I just love this story.
I used it at barbeques, other than that no
Is that not charcoal?
Yes it was actually charcoal lol. Both coal and charcoal are translated as cărbune in romanian so until now I thought both of them were the same thing
Yes. We still heated our house with wood and coal in the 90s. I remember a big truck brought coal for us before winter. We even had a dedicated coal room in the cellar.
I’m old enough to remember people actually using it for heating at home!
That’s where I last saw it, my very old neighbor had an equally old farmhouse. The road had natual gas put in decades before but she still had a small pile of the unused coal she used to rely on
rip mary you were the sweetest
I lived in a town built on top of a coal mine. You could just go outside and walk a few feet and find chunks of coal just laying around. I also loved by train tracks for a long time and trains full of coal would go by multiple times a day.
Yeah was an old quarry near my house when I young used to throw rocks and sticks of the huge cliff there, was a decent amount of coal around
Use to have an open coal fire in my childhood home. Made many a coal fire. It’s very sooty on the hands!
It wasn’t charcoal? That sounds wretched. Would it not release toxins into the house?
Don’t think so! Defintely much heavier and more solid than bbq charcoal. I don’t remember it being very smoky, weird less so than wood fires (which have a distinctive and pleasant smell) or peat fires, which were also common in my region but would trigger my asthma. But possibly it was just that I was used to coal? Maybe someone else would have found it gross?
Edit: Doing a bit of research, it seems like historically home fires would use bituminous coal, but by the time I was a child it was anthracite coal that was used. Which only releases 20% of the smoke of bituminous coal. But it’s still a fossil fuel, and not charcoal.
