As anyone who drives a train on one of the UK's heritage railways will tell you, briquettes and other hybrid fuels using other combustible elements just don't work satisfactorily in operating conditions compared to coal. They don't remove the impurities, just dilute them, and burning the binders creates more problems. Soot, smuts, not enough concentrated heat leading to ash problems, etc etc.
Yes, I think that’s right on them always being a dead end. Interestingly, artificial fuels do seem to have become popular among steam engine users in the US and Europe in the late 19thC, but never in the UK - the ash was too much of a problem. It’s really the failure for domestic uses that were I think most puzzling to contemporaries.
I'm not knowledgeable about the use of artificial fuels in the USA / Europe, but assume their composition was different. CV of the coal element? More coal and less binder? Different kinds of binder?
Basic physics and chemistry tells me the percentages of carbon and inert materials (both intrinsic to the coal and from added matter), the dispersion characteristics of the inert materials on combustion (% up the chimney and remaining in the grate), and the % sulphur content overall, will dictate the attractiveness of any patent fuel / briquette / coal ball.
Yes, they certainly reduced the percentage of inert materials - like that starch production residue I mentioned being celebrated in 1867 being significant for reducing it to just 1%. From a report on the state of the art in 1886 it sounds like they were still using starch mucilage, or some kind of tar - presumably because it was so sticky that they only needed a tiny amount. The only comment on usage is that "On the Continent and in America this fuel appears to have found greater favour among engineers than it has in England, large quantities being consumed annually, especially on the railways". But I suspect it really all comes down to relative prices - with ordinary coal so abundant in Britain compared to everywhere else, and already so much better, only outside of Britain might it make economic sense to use a slightly inferior fuel for such purposes just because it saved on coal and was about a third or so cheaper.
Given all that the only way briquettes would have been widely adopted for domestic use in London was if lower efficiency coal was subjected to a tax raising its price. Such a tax would have been quite regressive.
Russian masonry stoves are much more effective at burning wood than old-style cast iron stoves and they burn wood more completely resulting in less smoke, ash and creosote. Maybe similar coal-fired masonry stoves could have helped with a more complete burn of coal replicating the effect of the binder in the briquettes without the labor costs. Those masonry stoves probably would be more expensive to build and maintain than a simple coal fireplace.
Neither briquettes nor more efficient stoves deal with the sulfur problem though.
Interestingly, England after 1599 did impose a tax on Newcastle coals transported to London. But the severity of it would also have been relevant.
The question of stoves is a very interesting one too, however. As I noted in a previous post, a stove-like solution was used from the 1570s so that brewers could switch to burning coal, and I recently stumbled across some evidence that saltpetre-makers did similarly (something for another post). But stoves never took off in English domestic hearths, even tough in many regards - especially for burning Welsh anthracite, for example - they'd have been the superior method. I have seen a couple of mentions of them being considered unhealthy, but then again you see the same for the use of coal at all, and such concerns were almost always overridden by economics. A mystery for another time, perhaps!
A general observation relevant to modern discussions in resource-rich countries like Australia about capturing more of the value chain: transport costs determine (almost) everything. We export grain, but not bread and chilled/frozen meant rather than live cattle. The exception that proves (where "proves" means "tests") is that we sell live cattle to Muslim countries where buyers insist on freshly killed halal meat. Also, if you haven't seen it there's a classic article "Shipping the good apples out" by Alchian and Allen making your central point about anthracite.
PS: Your commenting facility continually demands profile updates, then rejects them for using an existing handle. Please fix this
Utterly amazing! Romero should stand beside Leonardo as The Renaissance Man.
Hi Anton,
As anyone who drives a train on one of the UK's heritage railways will tell you, briquettes and other hybrid fuels using other combustible elements just don't work satisfactorily in operating conditions compared to coal. They don't remove the impurities, just dilute them, and burning the binders creates more problems. Soot, smuts, not enough concentrated heat leading to ash problems, etc etc.
Coal Balls were always a dead end.
John K
Yes, I think that’s right on them always being a dead end. Interestingly, artificial fuels do seem to have become popular among steam engine users in the US and Europe in the late 19thC, but never in the UK - the ash was too much of a problem. It’s really the failure for domestic uses that were I think most puzzling to contemporaries.
I'm not knowledgeable about the use of artificial fuels in the USA / Europe, but assume their composition was different. CV of the coal element? More coal and less binder? Different kinds of binder?
Basic physics and chemistry tells me the percentages of carbon and inert materials (both intrinsic to the coal and from added matter), the dispersion characteristics of the inert materials on combustion (% up the chimney and remaining in the grate), and the % sulphur content overall, will dictate the attractiveness of any patent fuel / briquette / coal ball.
Yes, they certainly reduced the percentage of inert materials - like that starch production residue I mentioned being celebrated in 1867 being significant for reducing it to just 1%. From a report on the state of the art in 1886 it sounds like they were still using starch mucilage, or some kind of tar - presumably because it was so sticky that they only needed a tiny amount. The only comment on usage is that "On the Continent and in America this fuel appears to have found greater favour among engineers than it has in England, large quantities being consumed annually, especially on the railways". But I suspect it really all comes down to relative prices - with ordinary coal so abundant in Britain compared to everywhere else, and already so much better, only outside of Britain might it make economic sense to use a slightly inferior fuel for such purposes just because it saved on coal and was about a third or so cheaper.
Given all that the only way briquettes would have been widely adopted for domestic use in London was if lower efficiency coal was subjected to a tax raising its price. Such a tax would have been quite regressive.
Russian masonry stoves are much more effective at burning wood than old-style cast iron stoves and they burn wood more completely resulting in less smoke, ash and creosote. Maybe similar coal-fired masonry stoves could have helped with a more complete burn of coal replicating the effect of the binder in the briquettes without the labor costs. Those masonry stoves probably would be more expensive to build and maintain than a simple coal fireplace.
Neither briquettes nor more efficient stoves deal with the sulfur problem though.
Interestingly, England after 1599 did impose a tax on Newcastle coals transported to London. But the severity of it would also have been relevant.
The question of stoves is a very interesting one too, however. As I noted in a previous post, a stove-like solution was used from the 1570s so that brewers could switch to burning coal, and I recently stumbled across some evidence that saltpetre-makers did similarly (something for another post). But stoves never took off in English domestic hearths, even tough in many regards - especially for burning Welsh anthracite, for example - they'd have been the superior method. I have seen a couple of mentions of them being considered unhealthy, but then again you see the same for the use of coal at all, and such concerns were almost always overridden by economics. A mystery for another time, perhaps!
A general observation relevant to modern discussions in resource-rich countries like Australia about capturing more of the value chain: transport costs determine (almost) everything. We export grain, but not bread and chilled/frozen meant rather than live cattle. The exception that proves (where "proves" means "tests") is that we sell live cattle to Muslim countries where buyers insist on freshly killed halal meat. Also, if you haven't seen it there's a classic article "Shipping the good apples out" by Alchian and Allen making your central point about anthracite.
PS: Your commenting facility continually demands profile updates, then rejects them for using an existing handle. Please fix this