[Stoves] How to make smokeless coal?

Wed May 24 21:41:13 CDT 2017

Dear Neil

The coking of coal was one going for a very long time, certainly 2000 years in some countries. The interesting thing I read recently was that there were a couple of patents issued around 1700 (before and after) relating to the production of a much higher % of the initial mass. I am looking for them.

Question for you: can you ask around some old-timers and find out where the expression "Scotch method" comes from when referring to lighting a fire on top in order to reduce smoke? This name arrived in Southern Africa with people from Europe more than 100 years ago, 120 at least. But where did it originate? 

Thanks
Crispin

On 22 May 2017 at 19:40, Andrew Heggie wrote:

> I do know it was a large scale technology here in UK as it formed part 
> of the industrial process that linked coal mining with town gas with 
> steel making.

The first use of coke in iron making was at Coalbrookdale in what is now the new town of Telford in Shropshire England, formerly the east Shropshire coalfield, and the first successful smelting of iron with coke from coal was by the Quaker Abraham Derby in 1777 I think it was, at least that is the date on his enlarged hearth, now in preservation, and incidentally where they still make the AGA.  It took quite a few experiments before he got the quality of iron he wanted that compared with charcoal smelted iron, and he documented the story himself.

The famous 'Iron Bridge' spanning the River Severn was an early use of coke smelted iron and the point at which iron making really took off, permitting large scale smelting not previously possible from available supplies of wood for charcoal.  The classic 'missionary boiling' pots originated there.

The process was done in open heaps, much as charcoal was made, and here is an excellent colour picture of it from the time, more romantic than detailed, but it does give that idea of open heaps, with flame breaking
through:

http://www.wga.hu/art/l/loutherb/coalbroo.jpg

Industrial atmospheric pollution 18th century style!

But yes, coke was also used in the Bessemer converters converting pig iron into steel, and I can just remember seeing them shooting their bright flares into the night sky in the 1950s as I travelled as a small boy across the centre of 'The Black Country', the industrial West Midlands, built on a coalfield, to visit my grandparents. Both my grandfathers were Birmingham brassfounders.  The smogs were so bad, the front passenger in a car had to shine a torch out of the side window to find the edge of the road and steer the car while the driver hovered over the brake in case brake lights appeared in front. I actually did that once. Navigation was from memory, and sometime other cars followed you into your own driveway and buses got lost!  Real people died real deaths from respiratory difficulties in those smogs.  All for lack of a Crispin! 
Yet there was so much invention there, including stove making!

Another relation was commissioned by Birmingham City Council to make an engraving of the very first ever municipal gasworks at Smethwick.  Coal gas continued into the early 70's, which is when I remember someone coming to change the cooker jets in 1973 or 74 to burn the new North Sea gas the whole country was converting to.  I'm not aware that gas works were necessarily intrinsically polluting, but I may just not have come across references.  The process was contained after all, and tars that were scrubbed from the gas presumably were also utilised as the basis of a whole chemical industry. You can still buy 'coal tar soap', so I guess coal can be clean ;-) Gas coke was still available after the conversion for a while and into the 80s though, (perhaps from steel works by then) because we still burned it at home in the AGA central heating boiler, but some time in that decade it ceased to be available.  In the earlier part of the 20th century you used to be able to go down to the local gasworks with a bucket or two and carry home free coke!  An open coke fire pinned you to the opposite wall of the living room, and burned out the grates rather fast!

Neil Taylor (raised in the Black Country)  'Ta tar a bit'

_______________________________________________
Stoves mailing list

to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org

to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org

for more Biomass Cooking Stoves,  News and Information see our web site:
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/