Coal Part 1

Coal.

by Raphael Meldola.

PREFACE.

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 a.s.suming 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 Inst.i.tution, before whom the lecture was delivered, my object will have been accomplished. To the Board of Managers of that Inst.i.tution 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._

CHAPTER I.

"Hier [1771] fand sich eine zusammenhangende 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 circ.u.mstance 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, gra.s.ses, &c., grew and died down year by year, forming a consolidated ma.s.s of vegetable matter much in the same way that a peat bed or a mangrove swamp is acc.u.mulating 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 acc.u.mulation 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 acc.u.mulation 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 superinc.u.mbent formations, the vegetable deposits acc.u.mulated 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 Archaean rocks. Coal of post-Carboniferous date is found in beds of Permian age in Bavaria, of Tria.s.sic age in Germany, in the Inferior Oolite of Yorks.h.i.+re belonging to the Jura.s.sic 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).

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 quant.i.ties 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 c.o.ke 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 a.s.sociated together, but it is most likely that this combination of circ.u.mstances, 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, Suss.e.x, and Surrey till late in the last century, the railings round St.

Paul's, London, being made from the last of the Suss.e.x 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 to be a source of energy. It is a familiar doctrine of modern science that energy, like matter, is indestructible. The different forms of energy can be converted into one another, such, for example, as chemical energy into heat or electricity, heat into mechanical work or electricity, electricity into heat, and so forth, but the relations.h.i.+p between these convertible forms is fixed and invariable. From a given quant.i.ty of chemical energy represented, let us say, by a certain weight of coal, we can get a certain fixed amount of heat and no more. We can employ that heat to work a steam-engine, which we can in turn use as a source of electricity by causing it to drive a dynamo-machine. Then this doctrine of science teaches us that our given weight of coal in burning evolves a quant.i.ty of heat which is the equivalent of the chemical energy which it contains, and that this quant.i.ty of heat has also its equivalent in mechanical work or in electricity. This great principle--known as the Conservation of Energy--has been gradually established by the joint labours of many philosophers from the time of Newton downwards, and foremost among these must be ranked the late James Prescott Joule, who was the first to measure accurately the exact amount of work corresponding to a given quant.i.ty of heat.

In measuring heat (as distinguished from temperature) it is customary to take as a unit the quant.i.ty necessary to raise a given weight of water from one specified temperature to another. In measuring work, it is customary to take as a unit the amount necessary to raise a certain weight at a specified place to a certain height against the force of gravity at that place. Joule's unit of heat is the quant.i.ty necessary to raise one pound of water from 60 to 61 F., and his unit of work is the foot-pound, _i.e._ the quant.i.ty necessary to raise a weight of one pound to a height of one foot. Now the quant.i.tative relations.h.i.+p between heat and work measured by Joule is expressed by saying that the mechanical equivalent of heat is about 772 foot-pounds, which means that the quant.i.ty of heat that would raise one pound of water 1 F. would, if converted into work, be capable of raising a one-pound weight to a height of 772 feet, or a weight of 772 lbs. to a height of one foot.

This mechanical equivalent ought to tell us exactly how much power is obtainable from a certain weight of coal if we measure the quant.i.ty of heat given out when it is completely burnt. Thus an average Lancas.h.i.+re coal is said to have a calorific power of 13,890, which means that 1 lb.

of such coal on complete combustion would raise 13,890 lbs. of water through a temperature of 1 F., if we could collect all the heat generated and apply it to this purpose. But if we express this quant.i.ty of heat in its mechanical equivalent, and suppose that we could get the corresponding quant.i.ty of work out of our pound of coal, we should be grievously mistaken. For in the first place, we could not collect all the heat given out, because a great deal is communicated to the products of combustion by which it is absorbed, and locked up in a form that renders it incapable of measurement by our thermometers. In the next place, if we make an allowance for the quant.i.ty of heat which thus disappears, even then the corrected calorific power converted into its mechanical equivalent would not express the quant.i.ty of work practically obtainable from the coal.

In the most perfectly constructed engine the whole amount of heat generated by the combustion of the coal is not available for heating the boiler--a certain quant.i.ty is lost by radiation, by heating the material of the furnace, &c., by being carried away by the products of combustion and in other ways. Moreover, some of the coal escapes combustion by being allowed to go away as smoke, or by remaining as cinders. Then again, in the engine itself a good deal of heat is lost through various channels, and much of the working power is frittered away through friction, which reconverts the mechanical power into its equivalent in heat, only this heat is not available for further work, and is thus lost so far as the efficiency of the engine is concerned. These sources of loss are for the most part unavoidable, and are incidental to the necessary imperfections of our mechanism. But even with the most perfectly conceivable constructed engine it has been proved that we can only expect one-sixth of the total energy of the fuel to appear in the form of work, and in a very good steam-engine of the present time we only realize in the form of useful work about one-tenth of the whole quant.i.ty of energy contained in the coal. Although steam power is one of the most useful agencies that science has placed at the disposal of man, it is not generally recognized by the uninitiated how wasteful we are of Nature's resources. One of the greatest problems of applied science yet to be solved is the conversion of the energy latent in coal or other fuel into a quant.i.ty of useful work approximating to the mechanical equivalent much more closely than has. .h.i.therto been accomplished.

But although we only get this small fraction of the whole working capability out of coal, the actual amount of energy dormant in this substance cannot but strike us as being prodigious. It has already been said that a pound of coal on complete combustion gives out 13,890 heat units. This quant.i.ty of heat corresponds to over 10,000,000 foot-pounds of work. A horse-power may be considered as corresponding to 550 foot-pounds of work per second, or 1,980,000 foot-pounds per hour. Thus our pound of coal contains a store of energy which, if capable of being completely converted into work without loss, would in one hour do the work of about five and a half horses. The strangest tales of necromancy can hardly be so startling as these sober figures when introduced for the first time to those unaccustomed to consider the stupendous powers of Nature.

If energy is indestructible, we have a right to inquire in the next place from whence the coal has derived this enormous store. A consideration of the origin of coal, and of its chemical composition, will enable this question to be answered. The origin of coal has already been discussed.

Chemically considered, it consists chiefly of carbon together with smaller quant.i.ties of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, and a certain amount of mineral matter which is left as ash when the coal is burnt. The following average a.n.a.lyses of different varieties will give an idea of its chemical composition:--

------------------------------------------------------------------- Variety of Coal. Carbon. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Ash.

-------------------+---------+-----------+---------+-----------+----- S. Staffords.h.i.+re 734 50 117 17 23 Newcastle (Caking) 800 53 107 22 17 Cannel (Wigan) 812 56 79 21 25 Anthracite (Welsh) 901 32 25 08 16 ---------------------------------------------------------------------

There are in addition to these const.i.tuents small quant.i.ties of sulphur and a certain variable amount of water (5 to 10 per cent.) in all coals, but the elements which most concern us are those heading the respective columns.

From the foregoing a.n.a.lyses, which express the percentage composition, it will be seen that carbon is by far the most important const.i.tuent of coal.

Carbon is a chemical element which is found in a crystalline form in nature as the diamond, and which forms a most important const.i.tuent of all living matter, whether animal or vegetable. Woody fibre contains a large quant.i.ty of this element, and the carbon of coal is thus accounted for; it was acc.u.mulated during the growth of the plants of the Carboniferous period.

Now carbon is one of those elementary substances which are said to be _combustible_, which means that if we heat it in atmospheric air it gives out heat and light, and gradually disappears, or, as we say, burns away.

The heat which is given out during combustion represents the chemical energy stored up in the combustible, for combustion is in fact the chemical union of one substance with another with the development of heat and light. When carbon burns in air, therefore, a chemical combination takes place, the air supplying the other substance with which the carbon combines. That other substance is also an element--it is the invisible gas which chemists call oxygen, and which forms one-fifth of the bulk of atmospheric air, the remainder consisting of the gas nitrogen and small quant.i.ties of other gases with which we shall have more to do subsequently. When oxygen and carbon unite under the conditions described, the product is an invisible gas known as carbon dioxide, and it is because this gas is invisible that the carbon seems to disappear altogether on combustion. In reality, however, the carbon is not lost, for matter is as indestructible as energy, but it is converted into the dioxide which escapes as gas under ordinary circ.u.mstances. If, however, we burn a given weight of carbon with free access of air, and collect the product of combustion and weigh it, we shall find that the product weighs more than the carbon, by an amount which represents the weight of oxygen with which the element has combined. By careful experiment it would be found that one part by weight of carbon would give three and two-third parts by weight of carbon dioxide. If, moreover, we could measure the quant.i.ty of heat given out by the complete combustion of one pound of carbon, it would be found that this quant.i.ty would raise 14,544 lbs. of water through 1 F., a quant.i.ty of heat corresponding to over eleven million foot-pounds of work, or about seven and three-quarters horse-power per hour.

Here then is the chief source of the energy of coal--the carbon of the plants which lived on this earth long ages ago has lain buried in the earth, and when we ignite a coal fire this carbon combines with atmospheric oxygen, and restores some of the energy that was stored up at that remote period. But the whole of the energy dormant in coal is not due to the carbon, for this fuel contains another combustible element, hydrogen, which is also a gas when in the free state, and which is one of the const.i.tuents of water, the other const.i.tuent being oxygen. In fact, there is more latent energy in hydrogen, weight for weight, than there is in carbon, for one pound of hydrogen on complete combustion would give enough heat to raise 62,032 lbs. of water through 1 F. Hydrogen in burning combines with oxygen to form water, so that the products of the complete combustion of coal are carbon dioxide and water. The amount of heat contributed by the hydrogen of coal is, however, comparatively insignificant, because there is only a small percentage of this element present, and we thus come to the conclusion that nearly all the work that is done by our steam-engines of the present time is drawn from the latent energy of the carbon of the fossilized vegetation of the Carboniferous period.

The conclusion to which we have now been led leaves us with the question as to the _origin_ of the energy of coal still unanswered. We shall have to go a step further before this part of our story is complete, and we must form some kind of idea of the way in which a plant grows. Carbon being the chief source of energy in coal, we may for the present confine ourselves to this element, of which woody fibre contains about 50 per cent. Consider the enormous gain in weight during the growth of a plant; compare the acorn, weighing a few grains, with the oak, weighing many tons, which arises from it after centuries of growth. If matter is indestructible, and never comes into existence spontaneously, where does all this carbon come from? It is a matter of common knowledge that the carbon of plants is supplied by the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide--the gas which has already been referred to as resulting from the combustion of carbon. This gas exists in the atmosphere in small quant.i.ty--about four volumes in 10,000 volumes of air; but insignificant as this may appear, it is all important for the life of plants, since it is from this source that they derive their carbon. The origin of the carbon dioxide, which is present as a normal const.i.tuent of the atmosphere, does not directly concern us at present, but it is important to bear in mind that this gas is one of the products of the respiration of animals, so that the animal kingdom is one of the sources of plant carbon.

The transition from carbon dioxide to woody fibre is brought about in the plant by a series of chemical processes, and through the formation of a number of intermediate products in a manner which is not yet thoroughly understood; but since carbon dioxide consists of carbon and oxygen, and since plants feed upon carbon dioxide, appropriating the carbon and giving off the oxygen as a waste product, it is certain that work of some kind must be performed. This is evident, because it has been explained that when carbon combines with oxygen a great deal of heat is given out, and as this heat is the equivalent of the energy stored in the carbon, it follows from the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, that in order to separate the carbon from the oxygen again, just the same amount of energy must be supplied as is evolved during the combustion of the carbon. If a pound of carbon in burning to carbon dioxide gives out heat equivalent to eleven million foot-pounds of work, we must apply the same amount of work to the carbon dioxide produced to separate it into its const.i.tuents. Neither a plant nor any living thing can create energy any more than it can create matter, and just as the matter composing a living organism is a.s.similated from external sources, so must we look to an external source for the energy which enables the plant to do this large amount of chemical work.

The separation of carbon from oxygen in the plant is effected by means of energy supplied by the sun. The great white hot globe which is the centre of our system, and round which this earth and the planets are moving, is a reservoir from which there is constantly pouring forth into s.p.a.ce a prodigious quant.i.ty of energy. It must be remembered that the sun is more than a million times greater in bulk than our earth. It has been calculated by Sir William Thomson that every square foot of the sun's surface is radiating energy equivalent to 7000 horse-power in work. On a clear summer day the earth receives from the sun in our lat.i.tude energy equal to about 1450 horse-power per acre. To keep up this supply by the combustion of coal, we should have to burn for every square foot of the sun's surface between three and four pounds per second. A small fraction of this solar energy reaches our earth in the form of radiant heat and light, and it is the latter which enables the plant to perform the work of separating the carbon from the oxygen with which it is chemically combined. It is, in fact, well known that the growth of plants--that is, the a.s.similation of carbon and the liberation of oxygen--only takes place under the influence of light. This function is performed by the leaves which contain the green colouring-matter known as chlorophyll, the presence of which is essential to the course of the chemical changes.

If we now sum up the results to which we have been led, it will be seen--

(1) That the chief source of the energy contained in coal is the carbon.

(2) That this carbon formed part of the plants which grew during the Carboniferous period.

(3) That the carbon thus acc.u.mulated was supplied to the plants by the carbon dioxide existing in the atmosphere at that time.

(4) That the separation of the carbon from the oxygen was effected in the presence of chlorophyll, by means of the solar energy transmitted to the earth during the Carboniferous period.

We thus arrive at the interesting conclusion, that the heat which we get from coal is sunlight in another form. For every pound of coal that we now burn, and for every unit of heat or work that we get from it, an equivalent quant.i.ty of sunlight was converted into the latent energy of chemical separation during the time that the coal plant grew. This energy has remained stored up in the earth ever since, and reappears in the form of heat when we cause the coal to undergo combustion. It is related that George Stephenson when asked what force drove his locomotive, replied that it was "bottled-up suns.h.i.+ne," and we now see that he was much nearer the truth in making this answer than he could have been aware of at the time.

Before pa.s.sing on to the consideration of the different products which we get from coal, it will be desirable to discuss a little more fully the nature of the change which occurs during the transformation of wood into coal. Pure woody fibre consists of a substance known to chemists as cellulose, which contains fifty per cent. of carbon, the remainder of the compound being made up of hydrogen and oxygen. It is thus obvious that during the fossilization of the wood some of the other const.i.tuents are lost, and the percentage of carbon by this means raised. We can trace this change from wood, through peat, lignite, and the different varieties of coal up to graphite, which is nearly pure carbon. It is in fact possible to construct a series showing the conversion of wood into coal, this series comprising the varieties given in the table on p. 23, as well as younger and older vegetable deposits. The series will be--

I. Woody fibre (cellulose).

II. Peat from Dartmoor.

III. Lignite, or brown coal, an imperfectly carbonized vegetable deposit of more recent geological age than true coal.

IV. Average bituminous coal.

V. Cannel coal from Wigan.

VI. Anthracite from Wales.

VII. Graphite, the oldest carbonaceous mineral.