Submitted 1 month ago by delitomatoes@lemm.ee to [deleted]
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.
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.
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.
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 unused coal she used to use
rip mary you were the sweetest
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.
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
We heated my childhood home with coal until I moved out as an adult.
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.
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!
You’ve never used charcoal for a grill?
Charcoal isn’t the same thing as regular coal
Charcoal isn’t much like what most people think of as coal - the hard, slightly to somewhat shiny mineral like anthracite. Having grown up near rail lines that transported coal, it was pretty common to find near the tracks.
Charcoal is more like a compressed powder, similar to pencil lead, not hard like a rock and shiny.
Charcoal is very light, Anthracite has some heft, and it’s greasy to the touch.
Closest I’ve ever seen outside of pictures of coal or digital representations of it would be charcoal, for grilling. Otherwise, I’ve never seen it, unless I saw it once in a geology class I did in the fall and don’t remember it.
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 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
It’s a dark rock…for reasons I have lumps of coal embedded in the concrete of the basement
I have no idea how they got there. Probably the coal used when they wete pouring the concrete left there. Again, no idea
Sure! My stepfather was a coal miner and brought home several fossils in coal when I was a kid. Ferns, tree bark, etc. I’ve lost track of them over the years, unfortunately.
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.
Then there’s crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.
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.
We used it to heat our house growing up. But only on the very coldest nights, normally we’d use wood since the coal would actually put out too much heat. This was the 80s through early 90s in New York state, us.
I used it at barbeques, other than that no
Yeah, was walking over a bridge over some train tracks as a train was going by, had hopper cars full of coal.
Yes. There isn’t much coal where I’m at but I’ve stumbled over it a few times while mucking around in the woods, streams, or whatever. I’ve even seen anthracite on the beach that either came from nearby or fell off a ship.
Touch, not sure. See, certainly. I have seen steam locomotives operate many times in my life because I live in a country where those are still in use as tourist attractions.
My wife’s family are in mining. I’ve seen coal, coal mines, mine tailings, coke ovens, coke, coal trucks and coal trains, and I’ve driven mining roads on a family vacation. I have a little vial of Cominco coal as a souvenir.
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
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)
Yes, my grill uses it.
atmur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
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cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world 1 month ago
Whoa, I didn’t expect coal to look so pretty!
grue@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There are different types/grades of coal, with anthracite being the hardest and shiniest.
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Zeritu@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I just love this story.
Anticorp@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Ha! That’s a funny story. Thanks for sharing.