Coal, and What We Get from It

Raphael Meldola

Coal, and What We Get from It

EAN 8596547331919

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [email protected]

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

COAL; AND WHAT WE GET FROM IT.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

ADDENDUM.

INDEX.

PREFACE.

Table of Contents

This is neither a technical manual, nor a treatise dealing with the history of a particular branch of applied science, but it partakes somewhat of the character of both. It is an attempt—perhaps somewhat bold—to present in a popular form an account of the great industry which has arisen out of the waste from the gas-works. In the strictest sense it is a romance of dirt. To render intelligible the various stages in the evolution of the industry, without assuming any knowledge of chemical science on the part of the general reader, has by no means been an easy task, and I have great misgivings as to the success of my effort. But there is so much misapprehension concerning the history and the mode of production of colouring-matters from coal-tar, that any attempt to strip the industry of its mystery in this, the land of its birth, cannot but find justification. Although the theme is a favourite one with popular lecturers, it is generally treated in a superficial way, leaving the audience only in possession of the bare fact that dyestuffs, &c., have by some means or other been obtained from coal-tar. I have endeavoured to go somewhat beyond this, and to give some notion of the scientific principles underlying the subject. If the reader can follow these pages, in which not a chemical formula appears, with the same interest and with the same desire to know more about the subject that was manifested by the audience at the London Institution, before whom the lecture was delivered, my object will have been accomplished. To the Board of Managers of that Institution my thanks are due for the opportunity which they have afforded me of attempting to extend that popular knowledge of applied science for which there is such a healthy craving in the public mind at the present time.

R. M.

6 Brunswick Square, W.C.

COAL;

AND WHAT WE GET FROM IT.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.

Table of Contents

Hier [1771] fand sich eine zusammenhängende Ofenreihe, wo Steinkohlen abgeschwefelt und zum Gebrauch bei Eisenwerken tauglich gemacht werden sollten; allein zu gleicher Zeit wollte man Oel und Harz auch zu Gute machen, ja sogar den Russ nicht missen, und so unterlag den vielfachen Absichten alles zusammen.—Goethe, Wahrheit und Dichtung, Book X.

To get at the origin of the familiar fuel which blazes in our grates with such lavish waste of heat, and pollutes the atmosphere of our towns with its unconsumed particles, we must in imagination travel backwards through the course of time to a very remote period of the world’s history. Ages before man, or the species of animals and plants which are contemporaneous with him, had appeared upon the globe, there flourished a vegetation not only remarkable for its luxuriance, but also for the circumstance that it consisted to a preponderating extent of non-flowering or cryptogamic plants. In swampy areas, such as the deltas at the mouths of great rivers, or in shallow lagoons bordering a coast margin, the jungles of ferns and tree-ferns, club-mosses and horse-tails, sedges, grasses, &c., grew and died down year by year, forming a consolidated mass of vegetable matter much in the same way that a peat bed or a mangrove swamp is accumulating organic deposits at the present time. In the course of geological change these beds of compressed vegetation became gradually depressed, so that marine or fresh-water sediment was deposited over them, and then once more the vegetation spread and flourished to furnish another accumulation of vegetable matter, which in its turn became submerged and buried under sediment, and so on in successive alternations of organic and sedimentary deposits.

But these conditions of climate, and the distribution of land and water favourable to the accumulation of large deposits of vegetable matter, gradually gave way to a new order of things. The animals and plants adapted to the particular conditions of existence described above gave rise to descendants modified to meet the new conditions of life. Enormous thicknesses of other deposits were laid down over the beds of vegetable remains and their intercalated strata of clay, shale, sandstone, and limestone. The chapter of the earth’s history thus sealed up and stowed away among her geological records relates to a period now known as the Carboniferous, because of the prevalence of seams or beds of coal throughout the formation at certain levels. By the slow process of chemical decomposition without access of air, modified also by the mechanical pressure of superincumbent formations, the vegetable deposits accumulated in the manner described have, in the lapse of ages, become transformed into the substance now familiar to us as coal.

Although coal is thus essentially a product of Carboniferous age, it must not be concluded that this mineral is found in no other geological formation. The conditions favourable for the deposition of beds of vegetable matter have prevailed again and again, at various periods of geological time and on different parts of the earth, although there is at present no distinct evidence that such a luxuriant growth of vegetation, combined with the other necessary conditions, has ever existed at any other period in the history of the globe. Thus in the very oldest rocks of Canada and the northern States of America, in strata which take us back to the dawn of geological history, there is found abundance of the mineral graphite, the substance from which black-lead pencils are made, which is almost pure carbon. Now most geologists admit that graphite represents the carbon which formed part of the woody tissue of plants that lived during those remote times, so that this mineral represents coal in the ultimate stage of carbonization. In some few instances true coal has been found converted into graphite in situ by the intrusion of veins of volcanic rock (basalt), so that the connection between the two minerals is more than a mere matter of surmise.

Then again we have coal of pre-Carboniferous age in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, this being of course younger in point of time than the graphite of the Archæan rocks. Coal of post-Carboniferous date is found in beds of Permian age in Bavaria, of Triassic age in Germany, in the Inferior Oolite of Yorkshire belonging to the Jurassic period, and in the Lower Cretaceous deposits of north-western Germany. Coming down to more recent geological periods, we have a coal seam of over thirty feet in thickness in the northern Tyrol of Eocene age; we have brown coal deposits of Oligocene age in Belgium and Austria, and, most remarkable of all, coal has been found of Miocene, that is, mid-Tertiary age, in the Arctic regions of Greenland within a few degrees of the North Pole. Thus the formation of coal appears to have been going on in one area or another ever since vegetable life appeared on the globe, and in the peat bogs, delta jungles, and mangrove swamps of the present time we may be said to have the deposition of potential coal deposits for future ages now going on.

Although in some parts of the world coal seams of pre-Carboniferous age often reach the dignity of workable thickness, the coal worked in this country is entirely of Carboniferous date. After the explanation of the mode of formation of coal which has been given, the phenomena presented by a section through any of our coal measures will be readily intelligible (see Fig. 1). We find seams of coal separated by beds of sandstone, limestone, or shale representing the encroachment of the sea and the deposition of marine or estuarine sediment over the beds of vegetable remains. The seams of coal, varying in thickness from a few inches to three or four feet, always rest on a bed of clay, known technically as the underclay, which represents the soil on which the plants originally grew. In some instances the seams of coal with their thin partings of clay reach an aggregate thickness of twenty to thirty feet. In many cases the very roots of the trees are found upright in a fossilized condition in the underclay, and can be traced upwards into the overlying coal beds; or the completely carbonized trunk is found erect in the position in which the tree lived and died (see Fig. 2).

Larger Image

Fig

. 1.—Section through Carboniferous strata showing seams of coal. Dislocations, or faults, so common in the Coal Measures, are shown at H, T, and F. Intrusions of igneous rock are shown at D. At B is shown the coalescence of two seams, and at N the local thinning of the seam. The vertical lines indicate the shafts of coal mines.

Fig

. 2.—Section showing coal seams and upright trunks attached to roots in situ. A′, A″, A′″, beds of shale. B, coal seams. C, underclay. D, sandstone.

Owing to the chemical and mechanical forces to which the original vegetable deposit has been subjected, the organic structure of coal has for the most part been lost. Occasionally, however, portions of leaves, stems, and the structure of woody fibre can be detected, and thin sections often show the presence of spore-cases of club-mosses in such numbers that certain kinds of coal appear to be entirely composed of such remains. But although coal itself now furnishes but little direct evidence of its vegetable origin, the interstratified clays, shales, and other deposits often abound with fossilized plant remains in every state of preservation, from the most delicate fern frond to the prostrate tree trunk many yards in length. It is from such evidence that our knowledge of the Carboniferous flora has been chiefly derived.

Now this carbonized vegetation of a past age, the history of which has been briefly sketched in the foregoing pages, is one of the chief sources of our industrial supremacy as a nation. We use it as fuel for generating the steam which drives our engines, or for the production of heat wherever heat is wanted. In metallurgical operations we consume enormous quantities of coal for extracting metals from their ores, this consumption being especially great in the case of iron smelting. For this last operation some kinds of raw coal are unsuitable, and such coal is converted into coke before being used in the blast furnace. The fact that the iron ore and the coal occur in the same district is another cause of our high rank as a manufacturing nation.

It has often been a matter of wonder that iron ore and the material essential for extracting the metal from it should be found associated together, but it is most likely that this combination of circumstances, which has been so fortunate for our industrial prosperity, is not a mere matter of accident, but the result of cause and effect. It is, in fact, probable that the iron ore owes its origin to the reduction and precipitation of iron compounds by the decomposing vegetation of the Carboniferous period, and this would account for the occurrence of the bands of ironstone in the same deposits with the coal. In former times, when the area in the south-east of England known as the Weald was thickly wooded, the towns and villages of this district were the chief centres of the iron manufacture. The ore, which was of a different kind to that found in the coal-fields, was smelted by means of the charcoal obtained from the wood of the Wealden forests, and the manufacture lingered on in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey till late in the last century, the railings round St. Paul’s, London, being made from the last of the Sussex iron. When the northern coal-fields came to be extensively worked, and ironstone was found so conveniently at hand, the Wealden iron manufacture declined, and in many places in the district we now find disused furnaces and heaps of buried slag as the last witnesses of an extinct industry.

From coal we not only get mechanical work when we burn it to generate heat under a steam boiler, but we also get chemical work out of it when we employ it to reduce a metallic ore, or when we make use of it as a source of carbon in the manufacture of certain chemical products, such as the alkalies. We have therefore in coal a substance which supplies us with the power of doing work, either mechanical, chemical, or some other form, and anything which does this is said