50 Fun Facts About Coal

What kind of rock is coal?

Coal is a sedimentary rock because it builds up in layers from swamp plant debris that waterlogged ground kept from rotting away.

What do decaying plants become first, before heat and pressure turn them into coal?

Peat's acidic, oxygen-poor water stops dead plants rotting, and in 1950 it had kept Tollund Man so lifelike that his finders called the police.

Geologists named the Carboniferous period after the coal-rich rocks of which country?

Britain's coal-rich rocks gave the Carboniferous its name, yet that coal began as tropical swamp forest, because Europe then lay in the humid tropics.

During the great coal-forming age, how did ice sheets near the South Pole help coal swamps spread?

Lowered sea levels did it: the ice sheets locked up so much water that the seas fell, exposing broad shelves and deltas where the coal swamps took root.

Teenage chemist William Perkin stumbled on mauve dye in 1856 while trying to make which drug from coal tar?

Quinine, the malaria drug, was Perkin's target; his accidental mauve launched the synthetic dye industry, and coal-tar dye firms later turned their chemistry to making medicines.

Which 1941 John Ford film about a Welsh mining family beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar?

How Green Was My Valley was shot in California because the war ruled out Wales, so the studio built an 80-acre Welsh mining village near Malibu.

Why did many Eastern US cities around 1900 heat homes with the highest-rank coal?

City homes chose hard coal because it burned with less smoke, so when its miners struck in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to head off a winter coal famine.

Which rank of coal is the most abundant on Earth?

Bituminous coal is often nicknamed 'soft coal', yet the name has little to do with hardness: the rock itself is typically hard.

Every US mine producing the highest-rank coal is in which state?

Pennsylvania's hard coal lay packed into a few hundred square miles of five counties, which let a few mine owners, coal railroads and bankers take control.

Why was the trademarked brand 'Blue Coal' actually blue?

Blue Coal was blue because it was sprayed with dye at the mine, and the brand sponsored radio’s The Shadow for years, including the season Orson Welles voiced the hero.

After the Great Fire of 1666, a tax on coal shipped into London helped pay to rebuild which landmark?

St Paul's Cathedral was largely paid for by coal: London burned so much sea coal shipped from Newcastle that a duty on each load could fund Wren's cathedral and the City churches.

How is coke made from coal?

Heating it without air turns coal into coke, and in 1709 Abraham Darby used coke to smelt iron, letting him build much larger furnaces than charcoal allowed.

Thomas Newcomen's steam engine, first recorded near Dudley Castle in 1712, was mainly used to do what?

Newcomen's engine was built to pump water out of mines, yet he could not patent it: Thomas Savery's broad 1698 patent for a steam pump already covered it.

Which film tells how London activists raised money for a striking Welsh mining village in 1984?

Pride (2014) follows the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and the favour was returned: in June 1985 Welsh miners led London's Lesbian and Gay Pride parade.

Which broom-riding old woman leaves coal for naughty children on the night before Epiphany?

The Befana leaves coal for naughty children, and legend says she still roams because she was too busy with housework to travel with the Three Wise Men.

Which London coal-fired power station appears on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 album Animals?

While Battersea Power Station was photographed for the cover, the band's giant inflatable pig broke free, drifted past planes approaching Heathrow and came down in Kent.

As of 2023, which country mined more than half the world's coal?

China mined more than half the world's coal in 2023, yet it still bought more foreign coal than any other country, nearly twice India's imports.

As of 2023, which two countries exported the most coal?

Indonesia and Australia exported the most coal in 2023, while third-placed Russia turned its sales toward Asia after Western bans and sanctions.

Which Swedish scientist calculated in 1896 how much extra carbon dioxide in the air would warm the Earth?

Svante Arrhenius was really trying to explain the ice ages, and he hoped the warming from burning coal would bring better climates and bigger harvests.

Which 2021 agreement committed countries to 'phasing down' coal?

The Glasgow Climate Pact's drafts said 'phase out' coal until India and China led late opposition, and summit president Alok Sharma said he was deeply sorry.

After Gerald Ford vetoed two earlier bills, which president signed the US law making coal strip mines reclaim mined land?

Jimmy Carter signed the strip-mining law in August 1977, yet at the signing he said he would have preferred a stricter bill.

What is the rock and soil removed to expose a coal seam called?

Overburden has to be cleared before any coal is dug, so surface mining pays only where seams lie near the surface, and deeper coal is mined underground.

Which underground coal-mining method takes out a whole panel of coal, letting the roof collapse behind it?

Longwall mining lets the roof fall once the coal is out, so the ground above can sink and crack, which in 2009 raised fears for Sydney's drinking-water catchment.

Which novelist, the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner, drew on that childhood in Sons and Lovers?

D. H. Lawrence's father was a barely literate miner who had worked from age 10, but his educated mother was determined her children would not do manual labour.

Where does most of the excess rock blasted off in mountaintop removal mining end up?

The excess rock is dumped into nearby valleys as 'valley fills', which have buried more than 1,000 miles of Appalachian streams.

Which region is the largest coal-producing area in the United States?

The Powder River Basin holds some of the world's largest low-sulfur coal deposits, which power plants prized once they had to cut sulfur dioxide pollution.

What is the explosive mine gas known as firedamp?

Methane blasts can ignite coal dust, so US rules require rock dust spread in all underground areas of coal mines to stop a coal-dust explosion from spreading.

Who invented the gauze-screened miners' safety lamp in 1815?

Humphry Davy's gauze soaked up the flame's heat, so air and gas could pass through to the flame but the flame could not escape to ignite the gas outside.

Which future railway pioneer built a competing safety lamp in 1815?

George Stephenson was accused of stealing the idea, but a local committee cleared him with a £1,000 award, and in 1833 a Commons committee gave him equal claim.

Which group did Britain's 1842 Mines Act ban from working underground in coal mines?

The 1842 Mines Act banned women and girls, and boys under 10, from working underground after a Royal Commission report on children in mines shocked the public.

Which gas were canaries carried into mines to detect?

Carbon monoxide has no colour or smell, so British pits still kept canaries as gas alarms in 1986, when plans were announced to replace them with electronic detectors.

Who first proposed using a warm-blooded animal to detect gas in mines, in 1895?

Canaries were in use by 1896 in Britain, the US and Canada.

What is the common name for coal workers' pneumoconiosis?

Black lung's severe form was nearly eradicated in the US by the mid-1990s, yet in 2018 researchers confirmed its largest cluster ever, blamed on silica dust from mining thinner seams.

A 1966 colliery spoil-tip collapse killed 116 children in which Welsh village?

When the Coal Board refused to pay to remove Aberfan's remaining tips, £150,000 was taken from the disaster fund that the public had donated to the village.

Which 1907 explosion, killing 362 miners, is called the worst mining disaster in US history?

The blast at Monongah, West Virginia, pushed Congress to create the US Bureau of Mines in 1910, yet strict safety standards were not enforced until the mid-20th century.

In which country was Europe's worst mining accident, which killed 1,099 miners in 1906?

In France, 13 Courrières miners were found alive 20 days after the blast, and when one more emerged after 25 days, crowds turned on the engineers running the rescue.

A mine fire has burned beneath which American borough since 1962?

After a 12-year-old boy fell into a steaming sinkhole in 1981, Congress approved $42 million to move Centralia's residents away from the fire.

What weather system trapped London's coal smoke to create the Great Smog of December 1952?

An anticyclone held the smoke over London, and official estimates of about 4,000 deaths at the time were later raised to as many as 12,000.

Which UK law, passed in response to the Great Smog, pushed households toward smokeless fuels?

Burning coal at home had been seen as an inviolable freedom, but the Clean Air Act 1956 let councils create smoke control areas where only smokeless fuels could be burned.

Which Welsh city's Coal Exchange once set the price of the world's coal?

Cardiff's Coal Exchange is said to have seen the world's first £1 million deal in the early 1900s, yet it closed in 1958 as the coal trade declined.

Who led the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984–85 British strike?

Arthur Scargill never held a national strike ballot, so in September 1984 a High Court judge ruled the strike unlawful, and Scargill dismissed him as an unelected judge.

Which Merle Travis coal-mining song became a million-selling hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955?

Sixteen Tons was only the B-side, but radio stations flipped the single, and it sold over a million copies in 24 days.

Who built the first steam locomotive to haul a load over a distance, at Pen-y-darren in 1804?

Richard Trevithick's engine hauled 10 tons of iron and 70 men for an ironmasters' 500-guinea bet, yet it proved too heavy and broke the tramway's cast-iron rails.

Whitby jet, the black Victorian mourning gem, is a form of what?

Lignite in the form of Whitby jet boomed after Queen Victoria's long mourning for Albert, and demand ran so high that black glass was sold as 'French jet'.

Who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter?

Sissy Spacek did her own singing as Loretta Lynn, performing Lynn's hit songs in the film herself rather than miming to the originals.

Which French foreign minister proposed in May 1950 that France and West Germany pool their coal and steel?

Robert Schuman argued that pooling coal and steel would make war between France and Germany not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

How does the highest-rank coal tend to break, like thick glass?

Hard coal breaks with a conchoidal fracture, named from the Greek for mussel shell: the same curved break that gave flint and obsidian the sharp edges early people used as tools.

Longyearbyen, the Arctic coal town named after an American mine owner, is the main settlement of which archipelago?

Svalbard's main town honours John Munro Longyear of Michigan, who first saw the islands as a tourist in 1901 and came back to found the Arctic Coal Company.

About 10,000 armed coal miners fought a sheriff's army in West Virginia's Logan County in which 1921 clash?

The Battle of Blair Mountain, fought over the right to unionize, grew so fierce that the sheriff's side hired planes to drop homemade bombs on the miners before federal troops ended it.

Which Irish-born organizer of coal miners was labelled 'the most dangerous woman in America'?

Mother Jones lost her husband and four children to yellow fever and her shop to the Great Chicago Fire, then spent decades organizing coal miners.