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GreyShuck ,
@GreyShuck@feddit.uk avatar

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.

SnokenKeekaGuard ,

We use coal for bbq here

fine_sandy_bottom ,

I think you mean charcoal. Coal would probably make your food taste awful.

SnokenKeekaGuard ,

Yep yep yep thats my bad

papabobolious ,

In my language I don’t think there’s a distinction between the two, but you can say it’s barbecue coal etc.

TehWorld ,

There better be. Charcoal is semi-burnt wood. Coal is effectively ‘solid’ oil. Cooking with regular coal would be horrible.

wandermind ,

In my language, the word for coal refers to both types, but you can specify “wood coal” or “rock coal” if necessary.

roguetrick ,

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

papabobolious ,

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.

withabeard ,

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.

Tippon ,

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.

UnRelatedBurner , (edited )

This mf never had a grill party.

Nemo ,

Most people where I am use charcoal, not mineral coal.

UnRelatedBurner ,

good point lol. I’m a country away from the bags, so I won’t check.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

This mf has no idea what coal is.

takeheart , (edited )

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.

open cast mine

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.

thirdBreakfast ,

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.

Amorphous ,

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.

RedWeasel ,

In the US I have had similar experiences walking along tracks, though the trains were just transporting the coal and they used diesel engines.

MrsDoyle ,

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.

shalafi ,

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.

MrsDoyle ,

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.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

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.

Nemo ,

It’s a rock, you find it laying on the ground. Especially around railyards and mines.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

Saw a big chunk washed up on a beach.

grue ,

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.

user224 ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Maybe, though I am not sure.

But I did hold a jar of crude oil when I was a kid.

Sylver ,

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

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

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

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