Anthracite iron as an ingredient into a reverberatory furnace (and in later years, a Bessemer converter). Anthracite, also known as stone coal or rock coal, is very difficult to ignite, mine, clean, and break into smaller chunks and requires correct conditions to build heat or hold temperature and sustain burning—which oft depend upon the size and uniformity of the coal particles. Yet American cities were cramped for fuels, woodlands were exhausted near bigger towns and Philadelphia, largest city in America needed fuels for mills and foundries as well to sustain manufacturing. Inventor and industrialist Josiah White (owner of a wire mill, foundry
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