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?
OP humblebragging about never making the naughty list.
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.
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)
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.
I see a lot of “yes” here, so let me chime in with: no, I don’t think I ever have.
This question got me. I’m 53, too young to have seen it used for household heat or the like. Was a major rockhound as a child, knew all about rocks.
I roll my own lump charcoal for black powder. If you handed me a chunk of coal, I’d say, “Yep. That’s coal.”
I’ve… never seen coal.
Having grown up in a house without central heating, coal ovens in the kitchen and the living room were the two points of warmth in the winter. I have learned to light the coal oven before I was old enough to attend school. And whenever coal was delivered, I was tasked to help moving the coal to the coal shack behind the house.
Dirty business, 0/10, can’t recommend.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Sure! My stepfather was a coal miner and brought home several fossils in coal when I was a kid. Ferns, tree bark, etc. I’ve lost track of them over the years, unfortunately.
I’ve actually been in a coal mine too. In my hometown, they have a decommissioned mine where they give tours.
Yes. I still have a chunk. My brother worked at a mine for a summer. Guess what I got the following Christmas? He thought he was hilarious…
And rightly so!
We burned coal for heat on the coldest of nights when we lived off grid on a ranch in the mountains of colorado. We only used it if we absolutely had to as its super stinky, dirty and gross. We would get maybe two or three big chunks a year that weighed maybe 1-2 lbs. You can go up into the mountains and see the huge mountains of coal from the mines that have shut down. There are also rows of of coke ovens in monument canyon (used in the 19th century to turn coal into smelting iron)
Yes, I’ve seen it in train cars being hauled
Yes, drive through West Virginia and you’ll see seams of coal in the parts of the mountains they cut for highways.
