Coal meant everything. This is the age of steel. No coal, no steel. You make
steel with coal. And coal also is the primary heating unit for homes and
factories as well. Everyone in the Northeast, Philadelphia and New York
heated their homes with anthracite. Industry was largely powered by bituminous
coal. So coal made everything go.
Bituminous coal mining could use more high powered technology because
bituminous coal sits in the ground. The best way to think of it is like the
icing between the layers of the cake. And the layers of the cake are rock and
soil and the coal sits in there flat. So you can come in with big shovels,
strip mining, and simply pull out large amounts of coal like this. With
anthracite coal, anthracite used to be bituminous, but the Earth squeezed it
down during this Appalachian revolution that took place long ago in geological
time. It squeezed it down and created hard coal, which is anthracite. It's
not called "anthracite coal", it's "anthracite". And that anthracite has very
little carbon content, so it burns clean. The impurities have been squeezed
out of it, so you can use it in your home furnace. And where bituminous is
loose coal, kind of breaks up and you get a lot of soot and smoke.
Philadelphia used anthracite coal. It was a clean city, relatively. Chicago
used bituminous. It was absolutely filthy. Now with anthracite, though, it's
not only squeezed hard, and, by the way, if you squeeze it a little bit harder
it turns to gold -- that's what happened in South Africa -- a little bit less
and it's peat, which happens in Ireland. But it also fissured and because of
this it's really dangerous to go after.
In bituminous and anthracite coal mining, the final stage is the actual blowing
the coal off the face of the mountain, if you will. And you took an auger, a
drill, and you drilled into the side of the face of the coal. And then you
packed that with black powder and you ran a fuse out from the black powder, lit
the fuse and then skeedaddled out of the way. And then the coal and rock was
blown off and you used your pick the separate the coal from the rock. You
loaded the coal then in the mine cars which are carried by mules and
transported outside the mine.
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