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?
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
Gneiss!
For some reason I expected coal to be round at least in some form
And the texture, like a dry snowball?
It’s like a sooty soapstone.
Not really. It’s like a rock, but you can easily break it up with a hammer.
I just love this story.
Ha! That’s a funny story. Thanks for sharing.
OP humblebragging about never making the naughty list.
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.
Can I ask how old you are and/or where you’re from? I’m 53, lived in Tulsa half my life. I’ve never actually seen coal. This whole thread in kinda freaking me out.
Lol! It was quite a nostalgia trip for me to write about coal, and it never occurred to me that many people of course would never have experienced it. I’m 71 years old and grew up in New Zealand.
Our coal was pretty good quality, it came in large shiny chunks - some of them were too big for the firebox, so you had to break them up with a hammer. There was a lower grade of coal that was cheaper, but it didn’t burn as hot.
Filthy, awful fuel. Looking back I’m amazed we didn’t all get lung cancer or something, the amount of soot we breathed in.
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.
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
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)
We have like barbecue coal or bricettes, and coal ore as far as I know but I am no coal miner.
Either way it’s not like we get them confused because our language is a certain way.
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.
In university, I got a summer job as the single caretaker of a ~200 year-old church. I did everything from plastering the cracks in the walls to mowing the lawn. Anyhow, I also had to clean out the old coal bin. There wasn’t much left, but there was some. I also found newspapers from 1914 lining the bottom. That was pretty cool. There were no services there anymore, (no electricity or running water, either) so I was alone for 8 hours a day. I managed to read War and Peace at work that summer (I picked it because it was notoriously long, and I had so much down time when there wasn’t grass to be cut.) As far as minimum wage jobs go, it was pretty great. It was also a huge turn on for my girlfriend at the time who would visit in the afternoons sometimes. Haha!
I see a lot of “yes” here, so let me chime in with: no, I don’t think I ever have.
This question got me. I’m 53, too young to have seen it used for household heat or the like. Was a major rockhound as a child, knew all about rocks.
I roll my own lump charcoal for black powder. If you handed me a chunk of coal, I’d say, “Yep. That’s coal.”
I’ve… never seen coal.
We heated my childhood home with coal until I moved out as an adult.
Here’s a picture I took of the inside of the coal burning stove when visiting my parents in 2014, I’m not sure why but the heat made it turn purple for some reason 🤷♂️
Hi! It’s because your camera can see infrared, but has to show it to you in colours you can see.
You’re not wrong, but the way you put it makes it sound a little bit too intentional, I think. It’s not like the camera sees infrared light and makes a deliberate choice to display it as purple. The camera sensor has red, green and blue pixels, and it just so happens that these pixels are receptive to a wider range of the light spectrum than the human eye equivalent, including some infrared. Infrared light apparently triggers the pixels in roughly the same way that purple light does, and the sensor can’t distinguish between infrared light and light that actually appears purple to humans, so that’s why it shows up like that. It’s just an accidental byproduct of how camera sensors work, and the budgetary decision to not include an infrared filter in the lens to prevent it from happening.
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Yes, I’ve held coal and touched crude oil.
Coal was common along the railway and I would pick up chunks cause it was interesting.
Crude oil I saw / touched because I would go along with my dad who would measure the tank level for oil on the see-saw style pumps
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.
Yes. I still have a chunk. My brother worked at a mine for a summer. Guess what I got the following Christmas? He thought he was hilarious…
And rightly so!
Me and my sister got coal for christmas one year we were extra annoying. Mother just brought in some from the grill bag, i know she wanted to make a point but my older sister litteraly said oh we can just grill out with this! Made our mom sooo mad. It didnt help we had copious amounts of gifts from our grandparents so it didn’t matter to us. We were mostly good kids, just brats. Besides the time we attacked the mail man, I believe that was the coal year.
Don’t grills use charcoal briquettes rather than actual lumps of coal?
Yeah man maybe, i have no idea. My family used a coal grill and tossed what i think as coal into the bottom and lit it on fire to cook food. This was almost 30 years ago. If that wasnt real coal then 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Yes, that’s not coal.
