Burning freshly cut wood.

In the 1960's, my mother's next-door neighbour had an open fire that burnt coke. Not sure how it kept itself alight, but it got really hot and threw out a lot of heat, and was characterised by small dancing blue flames over the glowing surface from the burning carbon monoxide.

As the other Tim says this was likely Phurnacite, a pillow briquette made of some sort of coke dust and binder.

I visited the coal research establishment near Cheltenham as it was being run down in the late 90s to view a pillow briquette maker in operation, with a view to using it with charcoal dust from something we were developing.

Two geared contra rotating large diameter wheels with half the mould in each periphery. It was a true black art in forming the mixture such that the cohesion after pressing exceeded the adhesion to the wheels and gravity allowed the formed briquette to drop out.

Compressed nominally desulphurised coal. Various sorts available and still available as smokeless fuel. Some sulphur on the outside of this stuff after 40 years in the coal bunker but it's main claim to fame was that it came in relatively big angular chunks just like coal. It's shiny hexagonal extruded cross section was very distinctive.

Pretty close to being anthracite made form coal with the pyrites taken out using the fines and some binder by hydraulic compaction in a mould.

We had a fire like that, once the Clean Air Act banned coal. We lit it using a gas poker, fed by a rubber tube that just pushed onto the gas tap.

IIRC, when North Sea Gas came along, we had to have a bayonet fitting. :-)

Chris

We used to burn coke at home in our Rayburn. The hydrocarbon you gases refer to was useful feedstock - you washed the gases to produce more or less clean gas for household use (what we all used before natural gas) and the tarry stuff removed from the gas went to the chemical industry.

It was in the tarry stuff (IIRC) that Perkin discovered aniline dyes.

We had a Parkray coal fire behind glass, with a backboiler that was lit with one of those gas pokers, but the house was built in 1956 with a bayonet gas fitting next to the fire.

Fuelled with those oblong-shaped coal nuts about 2 inches long by

Not building them anymore and are planning to shut down what brown coal power generation they currently have. It remains to be seen how the planned shut down is carried out tho.