Quotes About Coal

Shipments of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, an expanding coal port on the Tyne River in the northeast of England, increased accordingly from about thirty-five thousand tons in the midsixteenth century to about four hundred thousand tons by 1625. In two generations, the historian J. U. Nef concludes, "the coal trade from the Tyne had multiplied twelvefold."22

The Scots had deforested their lands a century before the English. They were used to burning coal, and luckily for them, hard Scottish coal burned cleaner and brighter than soft Newcastle bituminous.

Unfortunately, Scottish anthracite burned faster as well, which made it more expensive. Expense was no problem for the king; he had good Scottish coal shipped to Westminster to warm his palaces. Emulating the king, wealthy Londoners took up the custom. The middle classes began burning coal as well. Coal allowed Londoners to keep warm and feed themselves as the city's population increased rapidly, from roughly 200,000 in 1600 to 350,000 by 1650.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

Evelyn did more than complain. He also looked for ways to clear the air. He accepted appointment as one of London's commissioners of sewers. And since he was interested in gardening and in trees, his inventive mind turned to moving industry out of London and perfuming the city's precincts with flowering plants—reversing, as it were, at least locally, the transition from wood to coal. King Charles II had been restored to the throne on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660

10 Coal, with its ubiquitous content of uranium and thorium, releases more radioactivity into the environment when it is burned than any other fuel.

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.

Coal had served blacksmiths for hundreds of years. Soap boilers used it; so did lime burners, who roasted limestone in kilns to make quicklime for plaster; so did salt boilers, who boiled down seawater in open iron pans, a tedious process prodigal of fuel, to make salt for food preservation in the centuries before refrigeration.

Despite their drawbacks, Newcomens revitalized the mining industry in north-central England.26 Between 1710 and 1733, when the patent expired, no fewer than 104 Newcomen engines were built in Britain and abroad.27 Many more would follow—550 or more by 1800—but coal's industrial uses were still limited.28 No one had yet devised a process for smelting good iron with coal; its primary market was still for home heating. As that market glutted, coal prices plummeted.

The British population that used coal for heating and cooking was increasing, from 5.2 million in 1700 to 7.8 million in 1800, and on up to 12 million by 1831. Industry used coal for Newcomen engines pumping out coal mines and pumping water, although much of that coal was essentially mine waste. But iron smelting with coked coal began a major expansion after 1750, radiating outward from the Darby enterprise at Coalbrookdale and rapidly replacing smelting with charcoal made from wood.

The gases in a coal mine could kill. Miners called them damps, from Middle Low German dampf, vapors.

The hardest challenge of early coal mining was drainage. Rainwater flows through rills and streams into brooks and brooks into rivers, drawn always downward by gravity to the sea. About a third of any rainfall soaks into the soil and percolates downward into the earth. Eventually it encounters impermeable layers of rock. There it spreads out and flows along the rock layer until it finds cracks or permeable rock, when it continues percolating down to the next impermeable layer.

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the grandparents grieve because the garden represents something more than a resource to be divided. It is a symbol of community and beauty.

the air was thick with coal dust. Was it possible that men breathed this all day? That must be why miners coughed and spat constantly.

Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.

The president's come out with rules that say 'no new coal-fired power plants.'

When I go up there, I see coal lobbyists, oil lobbyists, natural gas lobbyists, nuclear power lobbyists, somehow they think that's where the action is in Congress.

Affection is a coal that must be cooled; Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work.

No one does a better, cleaner, or environmental friendlier, than the United States, when it comes to drilling for oil, gas, coal, oil refineries and fish friendly hydroelectric.

Bletchley said, sweating freshly in the heat of the bus. 'Some of the species adapt, others don't. In effect, when coal is acquired by wholly mechanical means or perhaps isn't even needed at all, people like Batty and his brothers, and Stringer, won't have a function. And when the function ceases so does the species, or those parts of it that can't recognize or create a further function.

Writing is like a lump of coal. Put it under enough pressure and polish it enough and you might just end up with a diamond. Otherwise, you can burn it to keep warm.