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?
Growing up my parents had a Jesus on the cross statue carved out of coal. Does that count?
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.)
Not sure what the English terms are, but we used Steinkohle (stone coal) for barbecue in the 80s and 90s,so I guess yes.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
A gas station in a mining town I visited had little statues carved out of coal.
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.
I have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.
I’ve never shoveled coal.
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
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.
Yes. Hike up a mountain in Kentucky and it just sticks out occasionally.
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
My neighbour used it for heating in winter when I was a kid.
