THE HISTORY OF A PIECE OF COAL
WEEK ONE
You might not think you know very much about this subject. You may never even have seen a piece of coal.
Arabella Buckley would have found that amazing, because in the late 1800's, coal was something most children were familiar with. Burning coal created the steam that powered ships, trains, and all kinds of machines. It heated homes, in fireplaces and stoves, and, later, in furnaces. The mining industry provided jobs for people wherever coal could be taken out of the ground.
Here's a quiz to see how many stories you might have read that involve coal. Ready?
- What Biblical prophet had a burning coal touched to his lips?
- Who fell through the window of the library cellar and landed on a coal pile?
- What family was saved by its barking dog when the coal furnace malfunctioned?
- (This is an old book) In which book did a character say he was "mining" coal, when he was actually stealing it from a nearby railway yard?
- Who had two eyes made out of coal?
- Who wrote a picture book called The Lump of Coal?
- Whose boss was too mean to let him put any more coal on the fire?
- Which movie father said some very bad words upon discovering a clinker in his furnace?
- Why do people say that doing something superfluous or useless is like carrying coals to Newcastle?
- Finish the name of this fairy tale: "The Straw, the Coal, and the ?"
(Answers are at the end of everything.)
Now we'll hear from Arabella Buckley.
I have here a piece of coal, which, though it has been cut with some care so as to have a smooth face, is really in no other way different from any ordinary lump which you can pick for yourself out of the coal-scuttle. Our work to-day is to relate the history of this black lump; to learn what it is, what it has been, and what it will be.
Narration: describe a piece of coal. For further examination: look online for a view of coal under a microscope.
So where does coal come from? From underground; from coal mines. At the time this book was written, coal mining was an extremely important business in Great Britain, North America, and other places where coal had been discovered; and it was becoming even more valuable then as coal was being burned to create electrical power. Coal-cutting machines were invented in the 1880s; before that, coal was mined from underground with a pick and shovel. Coal is now mined commercially in over 50 countries, and the top producers are China, the United States, and India. Production has actually increased over the past 25 years; but with new technology, there are far fewer people employed in coal mining. Coal has always been a controversial business, for several reasons: the frequency of accidents, the longterm effects on workers' health, and the impact of burning coal and the mines themselves on the environment.
(Most of Canada's coal mining occurs in the West. British Columbia operates 10 coal mines, Alberta 9, Saskatchewan 3 and New Brunswick one. Nova Scotia operates several small-scale mines, Westray having closed following the 1992 disaster there.)
WEEK TWO: Clues Underground
STIGMARIA
Next look down at your feet and examine the floor. You will not have to search long before you will almost certainly find a piece of stone like that represented, which has also come from Neath Colliery. But this curious pitted stone is a piece of fossil root, or rather underground stem, like that which we found in the primrose, and that the little pits or dents in it are scars where the rootlets once were given off.
Whole masses of these root-stems, with ribbon-like roots lying scattered near them, are found buried in the layer of clay called the underclay which makes the floor of the coal, and they prove to us that this underclay must have been once the ground in which the roots of the coal-plants grew.
(UNDERCLAY: a stratum (layer) of clay lying beneath a coal bed, often containing the roots of coal plants, especially the Stigmaria.)
You will feel still more sure of this when you find that there is not only one straight gallery of coal, but that galleries branch out right and left, and that everywhere you find the coal lying like a sandwich between the floor and the roof, showing that quite a large piece of country must be covered by these remains of plants all rooted in the underclay.
But what of the coal itself? It seems likely, when we find roots below, and leaves and stems above, that the middle is made of plants, but can we prove it? We shall see presently that it has been so crushed and altered by being buried deep in the ground that the traces of leaves have almost been destroyed, though people who are used to examining with the microscope can see the crushed remains of plants in thin slices of coal.
But fortunately for us, perfect pieces of plants have been preserved even in the coal bed itself. Do you remember our learning previously that water with lime in it petrifies things, that is, leaves carbonate of lime (calcium carbonate) to fill up, grain by grain, the fibres of an animal or plant as the living matter decays, and so keeps an exact representation of the object?
Now, it so happens that in a coal-bed at South Ouram, near Halifax (that is, Halifax in England), as well as in some other places, carbonate of lime (lime deposits) trickled in before the plants were turned into coal, and made some round nodules in the plant-bed, which look like cannon-balls.
Afterwards, when all the rest of the bed was turned into coal, these round balls remained crystallized, and by cutting thin transparent slices across the nodule we can distinctly see the leaves and stems and curious little round bodies which make up the coal. Several such sections may be seen at the British Museum, and when we compare these fragments of plants with those which we find above and below the coal-bed, we find that they agree, thus proving that coal is made of plants, and of those plants whose roots grew in the clay floor, while their heads reached up far above where the roof now is.
The next question is, what kind of plants were these? Have we anything like them living in the world now?
You might perhaps think that it would be impossible to decide this question from mere petrified pieces of plants. But many men have spent their whole lives in deciphering all the fragments that could be found, and though the section may look to you quite incomprehensible, yet a botanist can read it as we read a book.
For example, where stems are cut across, he can learn exactly how they were built up inside, and compare them with the stems of living plants, while the fruits and the little round spores lying near them, tell him their history as well as if he had gathered them from the tree. In this way we have learned to know very fairly what the plants of the coal were like, and you will be surprised when I tell you that the huge trees of the coal-forests, of which we sometimes find trunks in the coal-mines from ten to fifty feet long, are only represented on the earth now by small insignificant plants, scarcely ever more than two feet, and often not many inches high.
In one of these club-mosses called Selaginella, the cases near the bottom of the cone contain large spores, while those near the top contain a powdery dust. These spores are full of resin, and they are collected on the Continent for making artificial lightning in the theatres, because they flare when lighted. (Some people still use "powdered rosin" for special effects.)
WEEK THREE
These trees are called by botanists Lepidodendrons, or scaly trees; there are numbers of them in all coal-mines, and one trunk has been found 49 feet long (the size of 8 tall men). Their branches were divided in a curious forked manner and bore cones at the ends. The spores which fell from these cones are found flattened in the coal, and they may be seen scattered about in the coal-ball.
Another famous tree which grew in the coal-forests was the one whose roots we found in the floor or underclay of the coal. It has been called Sigillaria, because it has marks like seals (sigillum, a seal) all up the trunk, due to the scars left by the leaves when they fell from the tree. You will see the Sigillarias on the left-hand side of the coal-forest picture, having those curious tufts of leaves springing out of them at the top. Their stems make up a great deal of the coal, and the bark of their trunks is often found in the clays above, squeezed flat in lengths of 30, 60, or 70 feet.
These great trees, the Lepidodendrons, the Sigillarias, and the Calamites, together with large tree-ferns and smaller ferns, are the chief plants that we know of in the coal-forests. It seems very strange at first that they should have been so large when their descendants are now so small, but if you look at our chief plants and trees now, you will find that nearly all of them bear flowers, and this is a great advantage to them, because it tempts the insects to bring them the pollen-dust, as we saw in the lessons on the primrose. Now the Lepidodendrons and their companions had no true flowers, but only these seed-cases which we have mentioned; but as there were no flowering plants in their time (no competition), and they had the ground all to themselves, they grew fine and large. By-and-by, however, when the flowering plants came in, these began to crowd out the old giants of the coal-forests, so that they dwindled and dwindled from century to century till their great-great-grandchildren, thousands of generations after, only lift up their tiny heads in marshes and on heaths, and tell us that they were big...once upon a time.
And indeed they must have been magnificent in those olden days, when they grew thick and tall in the lonely marshes where plants and trees were the chief inhabitants. We find no traces in the clay-beds of the coal to lead us to suppose that men lived in those days, nor lions, nor tigers, nor even birds to fly among the trees; but these grand forests were almost silent, except when a huge animal something like a gigantic newt or frog went croaking through the marsh, or a kind of grasshopper chirruped on the land.
But these forms of life were few and far between, compared to the huge trees and tangled masses of ferns and reeds which covered the whole ground, or were reflected in the bosom of the large pools and lakes round about which they grew.
SECRETS OF THE SWAMP
And now, if you have some idea of the plants and trees of the coal, it is time to ask how these plants became buried in the earth and made pure coal, instead of decaying away and leaving behind only a mixture of earth and leaves? When we put plant material in a compost bin, it rots away, doesn't it? Why didn't that happen in this case?
...and that if it were pressed till it was hard and solid it would not be unlike coal.
If, then, we can explain how this peaty bed has been kept pure from earth, we shall be able to understand how a coal-bed may have been formed, even though the plants and trees which grow in this swamp are different from those which grew in the coal-forests.
The explanation is not difficult; streams flow constantly, or rather ooze into the Great Dismal Swamp from the land that lies to the west, but instead of bringing mud in with them as rivers bring to the sea, they bring only clear, pure water, because, as they filter for miles through the dense jungle of reeds, ferns, and shrubs which grow round the marsh, all the earth is sifted out and left behind.
With me so far? The water comes in, but the mud gets filtered out.
In this way the spongy mass of dead plants remains free from earthy grains, while the water and the shade of the thick forest of trees prevent the leaves, stems, etc., from being decomposed by the air and sun. And so year after year as the plants die they leave their remains for other plants to take root in, and the peaty mass grows thicker and thicker, while tall cedar trees and evergreens live and die in these vast, swampy forests, and being in loose ground are easily blown down by the wind, and leave their trunks to be covered up by the growing moss and weeds.
Now we know that there were plenty of ferns and of large Calamites growing thickly together in the coal-forests, for we find their remains everywhere in the clay, so we can easily picture to ourselves how the dense jungle formed by these plants would fringe the coal-swamp, as the present plants do the Great Dismal Swamp, and would keep out all earthy matter, so that year after year the plants would die and form a thick bed of peat, afterwards to become coal.
The next thing we have to account for is the bed of shale or hardened clay covering over the coal.
Now we know that from time to time land has gone slowly up and down on our globe so as in some places to carry the dry ground under the sea, and in others to raise the sea-bed above the water. Let us suppose, then, that the great Dismal Swamp was gradually to sink down so that the sea washed over it and killed the reeds and shrubs. Then the streams from the west would not be sifted any longer but would bring down mud, and leave it, as in the delta of the Nile or Mississippi, to make a layer over the dead plants. You will easily understand that this mud would have many pieces of dead trees and plants in it, which were stifled and died as it covered them over; and thus the remains would be preserved like those which we find now in the roof of the coal-galleries.
WEEK FOUR
But still there are the thick sandstones in the coal-mine to be explained. (See the "sandstone roof" in this Kentucky coal mine?)
At last, after long ages, when the thick mass of sandstones above the bed had been laid down, the sinking must have stopped and the land have risen a little, so that the sea was driven back; and then the rivers would bring down earth again and make another clay-bed. Then a new forest would spring up, the ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendrons, and Sigillarias would gradually form another jungle, and many hundreds of feet above the buried coal-bed, a second bed of peat and vegetable matter would begin to accumulate to form the coal-bed.
Such is the history of how the coal which we now dig out of the depths of the earth once grew as beautiful plants on the surface.
Try and picture to yourselves a coal-mining area, where all is now black with coal-dust, and grimy with the smoke of furnaces; and where the noise of hammers and steam-engines, and of carts and trucks hurrying to and fro, makes the country re-echo with the sound of labor; there ages ago in the silent swamp shaded with monster trees, one thin layer of plants after another was formed, year after year, to become the coal we now value so much.
But what is it that has changed these beds of dead plants into hard, stony coal? In the first place you must remember they have been pressed down under an enormous weight of rocks above them. We can learn something about this even from our common lead pencils. At one time the graphite or pure carbon, of which the lead (as we wrongly call it) of our pencils is made, was dug solid out of the earth. But so much has now been used that they are obliged to collect the graphite dust, and press it under a heavy weight (or mix it with other ingredients), and this makes such solid pieces that they can cut them into leads for ordinary pencils.
Now the pressure which we can exert by machinery is absolutely nothing compared to the weight of all those hundreds of feet of solid rock which lie over the coal-beds, and which has pressed them down for thousands and perhaps millions of years; and besides this, we know that parts of the inside of the earth are very hot, and many of the rocks in which coal is found are altered by heat.
WEEK FIVE
OIL, GAS, and TAR
So we can picture to ourselves that the coal was not only squeezed into a solid mass, but often much of the oil and gas which were in the leaves of the plants was driven out by heat, and the whole baked, as it were, into one substance. The difference between coal which flames and coal which burns only with a red heat, is chiefly that one has been baked and crushed more than the other. Coal which flames has still got in it the tar and the gas and the oils which the plant stored up in its leaves, and these when they escape again give back the sunbeams in a bright flame. The hard stone coal, on the contrary, has lost a great part of these oils, and only carbon remains, which seizes hold of the oxygen of the air and burns without flame.
Interlude: On Curiosity and Finding Things Out
Uncle Henry...said, peaceably: "Well, Mother, you never saw anybody laying asphalt pavement, I'll warrant you! And I suppose Betsy knows all about that."
Elizabeth Ann's spirits rose. She felt very superior indeed. "Oh, yes," she assured them, "I know all about that! Didn't you ever see anybody doing that? Why, I've seen them hundreds of times! Every day as we went to school they were doing over the whole pavement for blocks along there."
Aunt Abigail and Uncle Henry looked at her with interest, and Aunt Abigail said: "Well, now, think of that! Tell us all about it!"
"Why, there's a big black sort of wagon," began Elizabeth Ann, "and they run it up and down and pour out the black stuff on the road. And that's all there is to it." She stopped, rather abruptly, looking uneasy. Uncle Henry inquired: "Now, there's one thing I've always wanted to know. How do they keep that stuff from hardening on them? How do they keep it hot?"
The little girl looked blank. "Why, a fire, I suppose," she faltered, searching her memory desperately and finding there only a dim recollection of a red glow somewhere connected with the familiar scene at which she had so often looked with unseeing eyes.
"Of course a fire," agreed Uncle Henry. "But what do they burn in it , coke or coal or wood or charcoal? And how do they get any draft to keep it going?"
Elizabeth Ann shook her head. "I never noticed," she said.
Aunt Abigail asked her now, "What do they do to the road before they pour it on?"
"Do?" said Elizabeth Ann. "I didn't know they did anything."
"Well, they can't pour it right on a dirt road, can they?" asked Aunt Abigail. "Don't they put down cracked stone or something?"
Elizabeth Ann looked down at her toes. "I never noticed," she said.
"I wonder how long it takes for it to harden?" said Uncle Henry.Coke is pure carbon, which we make artificially by driving out the oils and gases from coal, and the gas we burn is part of what is driven out.
"I never noticed," said Elizabeth Ann, in a small voice.
Uncle Henry said, "Oh!" and stopped asking questions. (Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.)
You will find it difficult at first to understand how coal can be so full of oil and tar and gases, until you have tried to think over how much of all these there is in plants, and especially in seeds—think of the oils of almonds, of lavender, of cloves, and of caraways; and the oils of turpentine which we get from the pines, and out of which tar is made. When you remember these and many more, and also how the seeds of the club-moss now are largely charged with oil, you will easily imagine that the large masses of coal-plants which have been pressed together and broken and crushed, would give out a great deal of oil which, when made very hot, rises up as gas. You may often yourself see tar oozing out of the lumps of coal in a fire, and making little black bubbles which burst and burn. It is from this tar that James Young first made the paraffin oil we burn in our lamps, and the spirit benzoline comes from the same source.
From benzoline, again, we get a liquid called aniline, from which are made so many of our beautiful dyes—mauve, magenta, and violet; and coal-tar has been used for food colourings and flavourings.
At this point, Arabella Buckley gets a bit poetic about the uses and benefits of coal. As we have said before, many now would argue with this praise of the coal industry. Yes, coal mining provided employment; coal-produced steam powered factories, trains, and ships; coal heated homes; coal oil provided light. At the same time we need to consider what coal mining and coal burning has done to the environment; and what the cost has been to human workers (including children) who were often injured or became sick because of their work. Is there still a need for coal in today's world? There are many good questions to ask about the energy we consume and the places we get it. However, the point of this chapter has been more about where coal came from in the first place, so let's focus on that as we wind up.
Think, then, how much we owe to these plants which lived and died so long ago! If they had been able to reason, perhaps they might have said that they did not seem of much use in the world... they lived and died all on one spot, generation after generation, without seeming to do much good to anything or anybody. Then they were covered up and put out of sight, and down in the dark earth they were pressed all out of shape and lost their beauty and became only black, hard coal. There they lay for centuries and centuries, and thousands and thousands of years, and still no one seemed to want them.
At last, one day, long, long after man had been living on the earth, and had been burning wood for fires, and so gradually using up the trees in the forests, it was discovered that this black stone would burn, and from that time coal has been becoming every day more and more useful. ... In fact, almost everything we use could only have been made with difficulty and in small quantities; and even if we could have made them it would have been impossible to have sent them so quickly all over the world without coal, for we could have had no railways or steamships, but must have carried all goods along canals, and by slow sailing vessels.
All this then, those plants and trees of the far-off ages, which seemed to lead such useless lives, have done and are doing for us. Tennyson wrote:
"That nothing walks with aimless feet
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete."
(In Memoriam)
Quiz Answers
- What Biblical prophet had a burning coal touched to his lips? Isaiah
- Who fell through the window of the library cellar and landed on a coal pile? Rufus Moffat, in Rufus M. by Eleanor Estes
- What family was saved by its barking dog when the coal furnace malfunctioned? The Melendy family, in The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright
- In which book did a character say he was "mining" coal, when he was actually stealing it from a nearby railway yard? The Railway Children, by Edith Nesbit
- Who had two eyes made out of coal? Frosty the Snowman
- Who wrote a picture book called The Lump of Coal? Lemony Snicket
- Whose boss was too mean to let him put any more coal on the fire? Bob Cratchit, in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Which movie father said some very bad words upon discovering a clinker in his furnace? The Old Man (Ralphie's father) in A Christmas Story
- Why do people say that doing something superfluous or useless is like carrying coals to Newcastle? Because Newcastle upon Tyne was the center of the coal industry in Great Britain.
- Finish the name of this fairy tale: "The Straw, the Coal, and the ?" "Bean."
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