How Did We Find Out About Coal
Ancient swamp forests became coal. This black stone powered the Industrial Revolution's steam engines, creating modernity and dangerous carbon dioxide pollution
The narrative unfolds as a rigorous and logical progression, characteristic of an Asimovian examination of fundamental science applied to human history. It traces the arc of civilization not through kings and conquests, but through humanity's increasing mastery over stored energy, detailing how one discovery inexorably leads to the next technological necessity, culminating in a modern crisis that is both existential and scientifically predictable. The overall structure is less a historical recounting and more a scientific thesis on the power derived from controlling the chemistry of carbon.
The First Mini-Story: Fire
The initial portion of the story establishes the most crucial technological boundary crossing for human development: the controlled combination of carbon and hydrogen atoms with oxygen, known simply as burning. This chemical reaction produces both heat and light. The most basic principle explored is that substances containing large numbers of carbon and hydrogen atoms, such as wood and paper, are inflammable. These substances only combine with oxygen once they are heated to a high temperature, breaking their large molecules into hot gases or vapors that ignite.
The narrative begins long before humanity, explaining that fires naturally occurred when lightning struck dry, woody plant material. Animals, including early hominids, instinctively feared this phenomenon. The turning point for our lineage arrived when primitive human beings, specifically Homo erectus, allowed curiosity to override fear. The great initial achievement was not starting fire, but keeping it small, tame, and contained by limiting the available fuel. This small, controlled flame provided immediate benefits: light, warmth, and protection from dangerous animals. Crucially, the discovery was expanded upon: fire made meat safer and easier to chew, killed germs, and allowed for the creation of durable goods like hard pottery, glass, and eventually, metals from ores. The final mastery of this fundamental energy source was the ability to start a fire without borrowing it from another, through friction or sparks—a milestone achieved perhaps only nine thousand years ago. This initial section sets the stage by defining the chemical basis of energy utilization and establishing humanity’s capacity for technological adaptation.
The Second Mini-Story: Wood
Once the secret of fire was mastered, the issue shifted immediately to maintaining it—the problem of fuel. The most obvious initial solution was wood, which was common, burned easily and steadily, and provided ample light and heat. Furthermore, wood did not compete with humans for food. A critical side-development emerged from wood fires: the discovery of charcoal. When wood burned in a large pile where oxygen could not reach the center, hydrogen combined with oxygen first, leaving behind a blackish material composed mostly of carbon atoms. This charred wood, or charcoal, possessed significant advantages: it burned more slowly and, critically, much hotter than wood, making it indispensable for smelting ores to obtain pure metals, particularly iron.
Wood also fostered the development of portable light sources. Certain wood types produced brighter flames due to resins, leading to the use of torches. Further refinement involved using liquid oils or solid fats and waxes in conjunction with wicks, leading ultimately to the candle. Despite these innovations, wood remained the chief fuel for thousands of years because oils, fats, and waxes were comparatively rare and difficult to collect in large quantities. This segment highlights a period of long-term, relative resource stability, while simultaneously introducing the concentration of energy (charcoal) as a necessary step for metallurgical advancement.
The Third Mini-Story: Coal
The narrative transitions naturally from abundance to scarcity, detailing how long ages of wood use, coupled with rising populations, eventually surpassed the rate at which new forests could grow. Once human usage exceeded new growth, forests began to disappear, driving up the cost and difficulty of obtaining wood. This pressing need created the demand for an alternative fuel. The required replacement was eventually found in a fuel that was, chemically, much like wood, being derived from ancient forests—plants like giant ferns and clubmosses that grew in swampy lands hundreds of millions of years ago. When these plants died in water or mud, they decayed only partially, forming thick layers of black material which gradually compressed into coal.
The discovery was not immediate; coal looked merely like black stone and was ignored for millennia. It presented a major practical challenge: coal, due to its high carbon content and dense, non-porous structure, was much harder to set on fire than porous wood or charcoal. The deliberate use of coal began in China about a thousand years ago, and knowledge of its use was brought to Europe by travelers like Marco Polo. However, it was not until Europeans, particularly in England and the Netherlands, began suffering acute wood shortages that they started looking for the black stones underground. This chapter underscores a fundamental Asimovian lesson: civilization’s advance is often predicated on exhausting one resource and being forced by necessity to seek a more complex, less accessible replacement.
The Fourth Mini-Story: The Industrial Revolution
The development of the Industrial Revolution hinged on the integration of coal into critical national infrastructure. England, facing dwindling wood supplies necessary for building the ships essential for its defense, urgently needed an alternative heat source. While coal served as household fuel, it was initially unusable for smelting iron, which required the intense heat provided only by charcoal. A technological breakthrough came with the discovery that heating bituminous coal in the absence of oxygen drove off tarry material, leaving behind coke—a material chemically similar to charcoal but derived from coal. This allowed iron furnaces to transition away from scarce wood, securing England’s supply.
Concurrently, the process of mining coal and iron ore faced a practical problem: water filling the mines. This necessity spurred the creation of the steam engine, initially developed by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, to pump water out. Scottish engineer James Watt dramatically improved the engine’s efficiency, transforming it into a general-purpose machine that could turn wheels and run machinery. This new power source, fueled by Great Britain’s abundant coal supply, rapidly led to mechanized production, textile factories, and immense national wealth. The application of the steam engine was quickly extended to transportation, leading to successful steamships and, eventually, self-moving wagons called locomotives operating on railroads. The Industrial Revolution, therefore, is portrayed not merely as a period of invention, but as a direct consequence of harnessing concentrated carbon energy (coal) to overcome inherent human limitations in labor and mobility. Coal was the indispensable engine that made the modern mechanized world possible.
The Fifth Mini-Story: The Present and Future of Coal
The final section shifts from historical triumph to the analysis of long-term consequences and future challenges. As industrialization spread globally, particularly to nations with large coal reserves like the United States, Germany, and Russia (the largest modern producer), the consumption of coal skyrocketed. This massive consumption resulted in severe side effects: heavy air pollution (soot and smoke), dangerous mining conditions, and the difficulty of handling the dense fuel. This led, in the late 1800s, to a widespread shift toward petroleum, or oil. Oil provided numerous practical advantages: it was easier to obtain (pumped from the ground), simpler to transport (pipelines), and easier to handle in furnaces, and it powered new forms of transport. Oil eventually surpassed coal as the world's primary fuel after 1950.
However, the narrative identifies a crucial vulnerability: oil supplies are far smaller than coal supplies, and global reliance on oil, particularly from unstable regions like the Middle East, created economic and political risks. The threat of machinery shutting down due to fuel scarcity could risk mass starvation, as modern machinery is necessary for food production. The logical response is a return to abundant coal reserves, which are still vast enough to last the world for centuries.
Yet, even coal presents a final, profound dilemma: environmental damage from mining and, more critically, the invisible danger posed by its chemistry. Burning carbon produces carbon dioxide gas. While this gas is naturally present and necessary for plant life, human industrial activity is now producing it faster than nature can absorb it, causing it to "pile up in the air". This accumulating carbon dioxide traps infrared radiation—heat—that the Earth attempts to radiate back into space. The consequence is a slow but steady rise in the average global temperature, potentially altering the Earth's climate in damaging ways. The story concludes with a challenge for the future, demonstrating that to avoid environmental catastrophe, humanity must undertake yet another great energy shift, moving away from carbon fuels entirely toward hydrogen, nuclear, or solar energy. The final insight is that the massive success afforded by coal has simultaneously created the most intricate and urgent technological challenge humanity has ever faced.
