Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 200, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1918 — Dames Once Scorned Coal Fires. [ARTICLE]

Dames Once Scorned Coal Fires.

Coal and its products were not always so popular as they are today, Alexander Findlay, a Welsh chemist, reminds us In his book, “The Treasures of Coal Tar.” “The introduction of coal, especially as a domestic fuel, was for a long time regarded with disfavor,” he writes. “Even in the seventeenth century it met with an active boycott on the part of ‘the nice dames of London.’ who ‘would not come into any house or rooms where sea-coales were burned, nor willingly eat of meat that was either sod or roasted with sea-coal fire’ —doubtless by reason of the pollution of the atmosphere by smoke and of the stench produced by the burning coal.” Coal was more popular in England tn 1859, when mauve dye appeared as one of the coal tar products and became so much, the rage that Punch referred to the fashion epidemic as the Mauve Measles.