WESTERN CANADA COAL REVIEW - NOVEMBER 1948

Coal - An Amazing Paradox of Nature
Pick a product - any product - and if it is manufactured in North America bituminous coal has touched it first. Think back to where your product - any product - came from. How were its raw materials drawn from the earth, the sea, the sky. Where did the machinery come from for making it. Were light, power, heat, energy necessary to its manufacture? Did electricity enter in. Steel? Transportation?

At every turn you will find coal, derivatives of coal, or functions made possible by coal. Take yourself, for example. Probably you awaken in the morning wearing coal-dyed pajamas. If it was by an electric alarm clock, its plastic case may have been coal-derived and its energy source, along with your electric light, was a function made possible by coal. Even bedroom slippers often have flexible soles or uppers made of fabricoid deriving from coal, and possibly coloured by pigments out of coal. The chances are that your shaving cream and dentifrice contain coal tar flavors, and the plastic handle of your toothbrush may possibly be one of the plastics based on coal.

Perhaps the after-shave lotion and face powder may be scented, and coloured, by coal tar derivatives.

In your medicine cabinet, the aspirin pills and sodium bicarbonate derive from coal, as do barbiturates, sulfa drugs and many another among the medicinal, pharmaceuticals and such among the 200,000 chemical products which have bituminous coal as their original raw material.

While reading your newspaper reflect that the presses which printed it were probably driven by coal-generated power, and your wife's nylon stockings came originally from coal. And coal's basic role in heating is obvious.

Coal may be called the greatest paradox of nature. The very chemical basis for deadly explosives is changed through chemical magic into drugs which soothe and heal the shocks and wounds caused by those explosives. It contains the basis for poison gases, as well as the chemical products which protect your body from the terrifying effects of those poison gases. Delicate perfumes come out of the same lump of coal which also originates some of the foulest smelling substances.

Coal contains the fast dyes whose colours run the scale of the sun's spectrum, and at the same time the bleaches for removing those dyes. From coal comes saccharin, which is so many times sweeter than ordinary sugar, along with the bitterest of flavors. Coal's by-products include soil fertilizer, plastics, insecticides, fumigants, solvents, wood and food preservatives, and so on.
In fact, it was coal tar chemistry which pioneered the great growth of chemical synthetics on which whole industries are bases today. It is a spectacular phase of coal's versatile, vital role as a basic raw material enabling the progress of civilization.

(Courtesy Bituminous Coal Institute)