A Brief History of Coal Use Coal is the most plentiful fuel in
the fossil family and it has the longest and, perhaps, the most
varied history. Coal has been used for heating since the cave
man. Archeologists have also found evidence that the Romans in
England used it in the second and third centuries (100-200 AD).
In the 1800s, one of the primary uses of coal was to fuel steam
engines used to power locomotives. In the 1700s, the English
found that coal could produce a fuel that burned cleaner and
hotter than wood charcoal. However, it was the overwhelming need
for energy to run the new technologies invented during the
Industrial Revolution that provided the real opportunity for
coal to fill Its first role as a dominant worldwide supplier of
energy. In North American, the Hopi Indians during the 1300s in
what is now the U.S. Southwest used coal for cooking, heating
and to bake the pottery they made from clay. Coal was later
rediscovered in the United States by explorers in 1673. However,
commercial coal mines