Ancient use of coal

There is archaeological evidence that coal was burned in funeral pyres during the Bronze Age, 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, in Wales. Aristotle mentions coal (“combustible bodies”) in his Meteorologica, and his pupil Theophrastus also records its use. The Romans in Britain burned coal before 400CE; cinders have been found among the ruins of Roman villas and towns and along the Roman wall, especially in Northumberland, near the outcrop of coal seams. The Hopi Indians of what is now the southwestern United States mined coal by picking and scraping and used it for heating, cooking, and in ceremonial chambers as early as the 12th century CE; in the 14th century they used it industrially in pottery making. Marco Polo reports its use as widespread in 13th-century China. The Domesday Book (1086), which recorded everything of economic value in England, does not mention coal. London’s first coal arrived by sea in 1228, from the areas of Fife and Northumberland, where lumps broken from submarine outcroppings and washed ashore by wave action were gathered by women and children. Thereafter, the name sea coal was applied to all bituminous coal in England. Later in the century, monks began to mine outcroppings in the north of England.

Except for the Chinese, who may have mined coal underground, all the early coal seams were worked from the surface, in fully exposed outcroppings. In the later Middle Ages, however, exhaustion of outcrop coal in many places forced a change from surface to underground, or shaft, mining. Early shaft mines were little more than wells widened as much as miners dared in the face of danger of collapse. Shafts were sunk on high ground, with adits—near-horizontal tunnels—for drainage driven into the side of the hill. In England some shallow mine shafts were exhausted as early as the 14th century, making it necessary to go deeper and expand mining at the shaft bottoms. These remained small operations; a record of 1684 shows 70 mines near Bristol, employing 123 workers. Greater depth created many problems. First, water could no longer simply be drained away. Crude methods were devised to lift it to the surface. A bucket-and-chain device was first powered by men and later by horses; a continuous belt of circular plates was drawn up through a pipe. Windmills were used for pumps. But shafts had to be restricted to depths of 90 to 105 metres (300 to 350 feet) and a mining radius of 180 metres. It was not until 1710 that the water problem was eased by Thomas Newcomen’s steam atmospheric engine, which supplied a cheap and reliable power source for a vertical reciprocating lift pump.

Britannica