Have you ever seen coal in real life?
Have you ever seen coal in real life?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Yeah, was walking over a bridge over some train tracks as a train was going by, had hopper cars full of coal.
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.
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.
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
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've handled many types of coal. Even made my own. The kind you get from the ground I've handled from visiting old western towns where instead of gold, they had coal and silver mines.
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)
For a good bit of my teens, I lived in an active coal mining town. It was everywhere. People loved grabbing some and making "coal gardens", where you leave a few good sized chunks in water and let the minerals accumulate. Can be rather pretty.
Coal can also be used as a craft, not uncommon to find carved coal statues in tourist areas that have a history as a mining town.
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.
Yes, I've seen it in train cars being hauled
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.
I have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.
I've never shoveled coal.
My father runs live steam engines.
Whoa! Deja Vu!
Oh yeah, filled up dump trucks of it. Every year in the fall my grandfather would order a ton (probably more like 10 tons) of coal and it was up to all of us to shovel it out and divide for everyone to use and share
Growing up my parents had a Jesus on the cross statue carved out of coal. Does that count?
Maybe, though I am not sure.
But I did hold a jar of crude oil when I was a kid.
It's a rock, you find it laying on the ground. Especially around railyards and mines.
Saw a big chunk washed up on a beach.
I visited a coal power plant when I was still a student in a university. It's like stony charcoals.
I was a huge fan of steam engines when I was younger, so I used to go to heritage railways a lot as a child. Also when I had an LPG car, the place I used to go for fuel also sold coal
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.
Yeah. I grew up near one of Germany's largest open-pit lignite mines. Had a tour of the mighty Bagger 293 as a kid and was allowed to touch some coal.
There are still folk using coal daily round here. In my family circle, the last house to move away from coal was just last year. UK. We have also burnt peat but I think that's completely banned now. Nope, still available but legislation is in the works.
No crude oil.
Coal, I had my childhood home heated with a coal fire in winter. Crude oil I touched at an art exhibition. I also remember real creosote! Amazing smell.
Yes, in 1989.
East Perth to Midland train yards on the footplate of the Flying Scotsman.
The fireman was shovelling coal into the firebox, and it was one of the most concentrated sources of heat I have seen in my life.
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This is my same answer from a very similar post 2 months ago (c:
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From here
When growing up my Grandparents ordered coal for heating purposes in winter. They had big piles of it when the heating period started. There where huge chunks of maybe 50cm length and 30cm width. I guesstimate the whole pile to be around 10m^3. But keep in mind it’s not the most reliable source since this dates 30+ years back and the dimensions have been seen with a little kids eyes. It may be less.
My house I live in today is 100+ years old. There are still some pieces of coal in my basement.
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.
Coal for heating at my grandma's place yeah. In the southern US, you can also see trains filled with the stuff going west along I-40.
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.
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.
My neighbour used it for heating in winter when I was a kid.
From the former prime minister of Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkyuI3oiGNE
I can't remember a specific time if I've touched coal. I know I've done a geology course at one point, and visited various museums with large rock collections.
I've definitely seen coal in person protruding from the top of passing railcars... here's a picture of one I took in South Surrey earlier this month:
picture of coal train
My dad grew up in England in the 20s and 30s, and they always burned coal in their fireplaces (wood much harder to come by there). He always talked about how long it burned and was kind of nostalgic for it, even though we lived in southern California and he was a contractor, so we always had lots of wood from his jobs. When I was a teenager, he decided to get a big bag of it, and it really did make great fires, but it's messy and smells bad.
We also have a small lump in a little square box with our Christmas stuff that someone got as a novelty gag gift and we never threw it away.
We still use it to heat our tea.
Yeah, used it for heating, just until few years ago when we switched entirely to central heating, mainly because it become illegal to use coal for heating in my area.
Western PA, literally everything is near an abandoned coal mine. The woods near my house growing up had sink holes all over the place and coal just sitting on the sides of the hill where it had been dumped and abandoned.
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
I visited a former coal mine that's now a museum. If you take a tour, you get a small piece of coal to keep at the end.
I see coal everyday. It powers my pen
Yes, in a shallow tourist mine in Australia. Apparently coal starts to flake easily once it's been exposed to air for a bit, so they kept a big chunk in a large jar of water that you could take out and handle. It felt like a light wet rock.
The sample, and the coal at the workface of the mine was stereotypicaly black. We wore hats with lights on, and when we emerged back out to the daylight I had an overwhelming urge to speak in a Monty Python type Yorkshire accent and go home and have my back scrubbed clean of the coal dust by my swarthy tired looking wife while I sat in a tub in front of the fire in the kitchen and our urchins played in the street.
I don't want to give the impression I'm a big fossil fuel tourist, but I've also seen blobs of crude oil on beaches near Mediterranean sea oil terminals.
Sadly, I didn't try to set fire to them on either of these occasions, which I now regret.
Yes. Hike up a mountain in Kentucky and it just sticks out occasionally.
Took a tour of an old/historic cooal mine once. There was still a seam in the wall. And they had some coal and stuff in the gift shop.
You might also see it if you see a blacksmith demonstration. (For example, Historic Fort Snelling, for any one near MSP airport looking for something to do.)
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).
Yep used to do exploration for it as a geologist
As a kid, we used to go along the train tracks and pick up pieces of coal that tumbled out of the cars.
Coal heating was very common especially in the more remote regions of my area, until the late '70s.
Yes, in west Virginia... The shits everywhere.
I use it and see it often for argentinian style barbecues.
