Imagine, you are living in London in the 1850s. It is winter and the streets are cold and wet. You are lucky, as you have enough money for coal to burn, and can stay warm, but there are so many people out in the streets in the cold. All they have to comfort them is the smoke from the coal fires. Sometimes the smog around London is so thick it is hard to see or breathe, and you know the fires are part of the problem, spilling smoke into the air, but you wouldn’t be without one!
When I took this lump of coal to show the children, they were quite intrigued. I had collected the coal and taken it to show them to help answer some of their questions. The news has been full of information about the Carbon Tax, and how fossil fuels are part of the problem, and the idea of fossil fuels was confusing to them. They knew coal was one of the fossil fuels they heard so much about, but they didn’t understand why it was called a fossil fuel. They were intrigued to discover that it is made up of the fossilised remains of ancient plants, but perplexed that they couldn’t see the fossils. When I’ve shown them fossils in the past they have found it easy to see what the fossil was made of, and it actually took some effort to explain to them how coal could be a ‘fossil’ itself!
Although most of the children know about coal used to create electricity and power factories, coal has been used by humans for far longer than electricity has 'existed'. In ancient China over 3000 years ago coal was being used to fire copper smelters which produced the copper they used in their coins. Greeks also probably used coal and remains of coal in Roman buildings suggests it was used by Romans before 400AD. In the 18th and 19th century coal was the fuel behind the Industrial Revolutions both in England and in America. It was even one of the main contributors to London's famous smog, with the smoke from the various coal fires combining with fog (hence it was called smog).
Clearly, coal has played an important role in human history throughout the ages but what is coal? Coal, along with oil and natural gas, is a fossil fuel made up of prehistoric organisms. When it is burned it produces heat (which is why coal was used in home fires for so long), and can be used to create electricity. It is even used in certain industries to create specific materials. How was coal created though? Unlike other fossil fuels like oil and gas which are the fossilized remains of sea organisms, coal formed from the remains of trees, plants and organisms which grew on land. In fact, sometimes coal is called 'buried sunshine' as the plants took their energy from the sun and now we take energy from the coal. As the plants died and decayed they created a substance called peat which was then buried under the earth and compressed. This hardened it into what we see today. Occasionally, we can see the remains of the plants in the coal itself, with fossilised plants like ferns being seen along some of the coal seams.
