Anthracite schools, were heated with anthracite-burning furnaces through the 1980s. During the American Civil War, Confederate blockade runners used anthracite as a smokeless fuel for their boilers to avoid giving away their position to the blockaders. The invention of the Wootten firebox enabled locomotives to directly burn anthracite efficiently, particularly waste culm. In the early 20th century US, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad started using only the more expensive anthracite coal in its passenger locomotives, dubbed themselves "The Road of Anthracite," and advertised widely that travelers on their line could make railway journeys without getting their clothing stained with soot.
Anthracite power-generation. The rarer higher grades of anthracite are purer – i.e., they have a higher carbon content – and are used in steel-making and other segments of the metallurgical industries. Technical characteristics of the various grades of anthracite are as follows: Anthracite is divided by size mainly into applications that need lumps (typically larger than 10 mm) – various industrial processes where it replaces metallurgical coke, and domestic fuel – and those that need fines (less than 10 mm), such as sintering and pelletising. The common American classification by size is as follows: Lump, steamboat, egg and stove coals, the