|
A buried treasure : History of the coal mining operation . Los viejos tiempos - The old times | History of the locomotive | Español - Un tesoro enterrado : historia de la explotación minera del carbón de piedra .
|
|
| The truely sensational impetus experienced by the industry and the commerce during the Industrial Revolution of XIX century, impetus without precedent in the history of the world until that time , has had its origin in new applications of the driving force, by means of the machinery use. The three main factors in this development that have made history, have been: the improvement of the steel as raw material for the machinery; the operation of the soft coal to provide energy or driving force in the form of heat, and the answer given to the human invention when these new instruments of progress appeared gradually in the game. |
Origin of the steam railroad fuel : photo of a coalmine and its breaker in Pennsylvania towards 1920. |
||
|
Aside from the contribution of the steel, we can demonstrate how the coal, as soon as known about three hundred years ago, was one of the supreme sources of energy and wealth of the world, and it had contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain between 1750 and 1830 , followed by other countries during the 19th century and placed three nations (the United States, the Great Britain and Germany) at the top of the rest of the world, in positions that cause that the conquests by the arms appear local and stingy. Throughout the 20th century , the
use of the stone coal as the main energy source to produce driving
force by means of its transformation in heat was progressively replaced
by the oil. The Earth still has even great deposits of energy that
all their accessible soft coal deposits and the necessities of the
Humanity will stimulate the invention until these deposits are used. But at the moment of the reign of the steam railroad , nevertheless, the stone coal reigned supreme, as it had reigned by nearly three hundred years. It was the one that provided the mainly force to move the universal machinery, as well as the steel provided the material for this machinery . Even though the electricity provided the driving force necessary to carry out the mechanical works the soft coal played its role in the production of this electricity. What is the stone soft coal or mining coal ? The answer is not as simple as to a profane it could seem to be. We know that the soft coal is buried solar radiation, which is the fossil of enormous tree ferns that absorbed this spilled solar radiation on the prehistoric world, and that now gives back this radiation to us in fire form; but this is not enough. Great sums of money have been spent to get to fix in legal terms a precise definition, without having obtained it, because the expression "coal" is applied to a great variety of terrestrial substances that can be used as fuel. The mining coal does not have a fixed chemical composition. It is a rock composed, mainly, of carbon and formed at expenses of vegetal matter, capable to burn itself like fuel, and that when it burnes produces heat and light in different proportions. The varied composition of the coal
depends partially on the material of which it has been formed, that
is to say, of the vegetable class it comes from , and partially
of where and how it has formed, that is, in what conditions of place,
time and pressure it has been formed, as well as of the influences
of the heat and the chemical changes to what it has been exposed.
This great variety in the composition allows that the mining coal
can have an extensive series of applications, being certain coal
qualities best for certain uses and other qualities for others;
from where it results that its excellence in quality is not an absolute
property, but a relative one, according to the particular use to
that it is to be applied. |
|||
| The classifications
in which the different coals are sorted depend mainly on the proportion
of carbon that they , respectively, contain. Thus, the fuels of this
class are placed by their carbon richness in the following ascending
scale: firewood, 50 percents of carbon; peat , 52 to 60 percents;
lignite and brown coal, 55 to 65 percents; dry soft coal, 75 to 80
percents; soft or bituminous coal or soft coal, 65 to 85 percents;
anthracite, 75 to 95 percents. On this last substance is the graphite,
that is almost pure carbon and that is fireproof. These different
coal classes, whose carbon richness varies from 60 to 95 percent,
form a series of imperceptible gradations, by the conditions under
which they have formed, constituting the central group of this series
the bituminous coal also called soft coal, which is represented by
the Pittsburgh coal type in North-America.
The substances of the terrestrial crust that enter in the formation of the mining coal: in addition to carbon, the mineral coal contains hydrogen, oxygen , nitrogen, sulfur and other components in small proportions. The hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen decrease as it increases the proportion of carbon. The other ingredients form the ashes that the coal leaves after burning itself. When these last elements, called fixed elements , form a mixture of easily fusible materials, they form dreg when burning the coal. Of course, a deposit or carboniferous bed does not show all these different fuel classes immediately, such as the pit , the lignite, the soft coal, the anthracite; but the gradation can be noticed considering extensive regions. In Montana ( United States ), for example, the coal of the eastern part of that State, where the rocks are flat, belongs to the lignite group ; but in the western portion, where the rocks form rugged layers that constitute the Rocky Mountains, the mineral fuel is of bituminous nature, that is to say, it forms greasy soft coals. In the western part of Pennsylvania, the mineral coals been have not been exposed to a sufficient degree of heat and the pressure that is developed when the terrestrial crust is wrinkled to form coals of greater degree than the bituminous ones. But, in the northeast of Pennsylvania , the rocks have been folded of a very marked way, and the resulting heat and the pressure have eliminated part of the gases that enter in the composition of these greasy soft coals, and the result has been that the same rocks that contain greasy soft coal in the west of Pennsylvania , to the northwest of the same State, these ones contain anthracite. It is necessary to make a geologic investigation of the existing carboniferous deposits in the world, and to consider the several types of vegetation that have produced them and that were buried under different conditions, subject to greater or smaller pressures and to chemical and local reactions rather incidental than of general character, if we intend to properly classify the several coal types . |
|
| The
qualities of the several coal types that are found in the world :
the lignites are found in considerable amount in the western and southern
regions of the United States, specially in the regions of the Gulf,
North and the South Dakota , in Montana and Washington. The dry soft
coal produces flame, burning like a flame lamp, is shining and smooth,
some times it brakes , produces paraffin and is excellent for obtaining
of the gas that was used in the past for the lighting system. It often
appears in conjunction with the greasy soft coal. This last one varies
much in its composition, presenting numerous gradations, from the
brown mineral coal, in one side, to the anthracite or hard coal, on
the other side. It is, nevertheless, the most used carbon type to
reduce water to steam and to obtain gas and coke. The name bituminous
that is applied to this coal was given because some times it softens
and has indeed bitumen appearance, although does not contain anything
of this matter. It burns easily, whereas the anthracite is very difficult
to ignite, although it gives great amount of heat when it is burned.
The anthracite contains so little amount of volatile matters, that
it almost does not produce smoke. It is the hardest of all these fuels,
and, in many cases, the most shining. It brakes, resulting fractures
whose surface resembles to the interior of the mollusk shells .
The mineral coal deposits, that appear in horizontal layers of a wonderful regularity, not very often mixed with accidental inclusions of another matter, vary much in thickness, from two centimeters or less to 20 meters or more, and they often are cut by faults where they are broken and partially sunk. They are surrounded or associated by beds of sandstone, limestone or slate; but, anyway, where they appear, they are the dominant rocks. The Carboniferous Period , which corresponds to one of the geologic periods in which the Earth history is divided, formed an immense band in the terrestrial crust, splashed here and there with comparativily reduced coal beds. For example, the richest carboniferous layers in Great Britain, that is, those of South Wales , have 2,400 meters of thickness, but the set of the coal veins that run through these deposits has only 60 meters of thickness, what means a fortieth of the total. This is one of the cases of the richer deposits; but the coal in several of its forms is, according to indications, in lands where it is forming at the present times in lakes, estuaries, marshes and peat bogs, and in all geologic land types, passing through diverse ages from the Silurian period, that marks in the distances of the past the limit of its recognizable existence. The mineral coal is distributed throughout all continents, but with irregularity. Coal mining, though a booming business, has been known to cause health problems like mesothelioma. Mining has also contributed to water contamination in some areas. Those that have been effected by mining-related injuries should contact mesothelioma attorneys who may be able to help you pay for your medical expenses.
Los viejos tiempos - The old times | History of the locomotive .
|
