Charcoal

I am continuing to find interesting vignettes in Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. (Here’s a link to my previous post on the book.) Today I was struck by my ignorance of charcoal. For some reason I seem to think that charcoal is primarily dug out of the ground (like coal) and it might then undergo some treatment process before making its ways into bags at the store to be sold to folks who enjoy BBQ. This is despite my having learned many years back that charcoal is produced from burning wood. You’d think this would be reinforced by my playing the boardgame Le Havre on a semi-regular basis. But, just like some of my students, I quickly forget what I learned.

This motivated me to play Le Havre again, but before I started the game I pulled out the appropriate card – the Charcoal Kiln. Sure enough, it turns wood into charcoal. The brown chits are double-sided: wood on one side, coal on the other. In contrast, the coal is a grey chit, and it gets turned into coke via the Cokery. (See picture below.)

Aldersey-Williams personally visits a charcoal burner named Jim Beetle to learn the finer points of the process. The wood must be set up carefully, and the air intake controlled so that the wood burns evenly, with as little smoke and flame as possible. Oxygen intake is restricted – you don’t want everything to turn into gaseous carbon dioxide. If done right, the high quality charcoal produced is almost pure carbon. It also does not contain sulphur and other “impurities” you might find in coal. The author is surprised at how lightweight the charcoal is when he helps to bag it up after the cooling process is complete. My next General Chemistry class is on the mole (as in Avogadro’s Number, not the mammal), and I have samples of different elements I will be handing out, one of which is pure carbon. It sure is lighter than the same amount (in moles) of most metals.

The narrative marvels on the wonders of charcoal as a fuel. It burns without leaving any residue if pure –  the carbon is completely combusted into carbon dioxide. This is in contrast to metals, which gain mass when burned due to formation of a metal oxide. There are of course other problems with releasing so much CO₂, as coal and charcoal are burned in larger quantities to satiate the energy needs of a peculiar species, homo industrialis. (Okay, I just made up a Latin name.)

I also learned a bunch of other interesting trivia. Apparently the name Brazil “refers to burnt timber, the country being named by the Portuguese after brasa, meaning ‘hot coals’ in reference to the red of the brazilwood trees.” The author remarks wryly about the irony – “British barbecue chefs unwittingly play their part in the razing of the Amazon”. Apparently the demand for charcoal has risen with the love of BBQ, with the supply mainly coming from deforestation in the tropics. There’s also a connection between the charcoal burners of today and their counterparts almost a millennia ago involving tales of Robin Hood and Prince/King John. Apparently the Carbonari (named after ‘charcoal burner’ in Italian), formed as a resistance group against Napoleon in Naples, played a role in the ever-changing political scene that led eventually to the unification of Italy.

Hopefully writing about this has strengthened the neural connections in my brain that charcoal indeed comes from burning wood. I suppose playing Le Havre might help too. Here are a couple of pictures from my game mid-progress. (Sorry about picture quality – my hands are not steady, partly why I’m a theorist and not an experimentalist.) The board is busy but the components are aesthetically pleasing! The main boards are in the first picture, and my card tableau is below it. The player on my left built the Charcoal Kiln, so I don’t have it – but I did use it as evidenced by a stack of charcoal tiles at the bottom of the picture. Charcoal! It amply supplied my energy needs in the game. Thankfully, I don’t burn it in real life.