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?
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.
This mf never had a grill party.
Most people where I am use charcoal, not mineral coal.
good point lol. I’m a country away from the bags, so I won’t check.
This mf has no idea what coal is.
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 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
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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.
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.
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.
My neighbour used it for heating in winter when I was a kid.
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 have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.
I’ve never shoveled coal.
Yep used to do exploration for it as a geologist
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)
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
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
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
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.
