Volume Twelve - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - further aspects - Trials of Welsh and Mixed Coals . . .

The Cardiff Times [019] [361] of 2nd July 1870 had the following comprehensive account of the rise of the Welsh Steam Coals : -

WELSH V. NORTH COUNTRY COAL - Thirty years ago the coal fields of Northumberland held every market where English coal was in demand for steam consumption. Its qualities were understood, stokers were inured to its requirements, and both dealers and consumers favoured it as a coal which was known, and the only one known, to be on the whole best adapted for steam purposes. It was at the time when steam was beginning to mark an era in civilization by its gigantic development, that a coal was discovered which possessed properties in combination, which existed in like degree in no other coal, then or since found in any part of the world.

These properties were all in favour of its employment in the steam furnace. The use of this coal increased considerably the practical power of the engine, allowed the fires to be kept up for days instead of hours without fouling the tubes of the boiler, released the stoker from more than half his accustomed attention, and acquitted him of the most arduous part of his labour, left a minimum of ash and clinker, and emitted from the flue instead of volumes of black smoke a scarcely perceptible light vapour, subsiding when the fires were well lighted to an invisible haze, which simply gave a tremor to the rigging or exaggerated the twinkling of the stars that were seen behind it.

Such was the coal of which 30 years ago the entire production amounted to no more than 150 tons per day, which was known only to a few river steamers on the Thames and to the proprietors of a few stationary engines — which had to make its name and way wherever Newcastle coal was then in use — which had all the world before it where to choose a market. Such is the coal which last year was wrought for sale in five parishes of the South Wales mineral basin to the extent of 3,416,835 tons, for which to Cardiff alone there came 4,363 vessels, comprising the flags of 20 foreign powers, and which is now to be found throughout the world from Capetown to Yokohama, and from Valparaiso to Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

It has made the girdle of the earth, and its last conquest in the very midst of the northern colliery masters, whose coal it had been everywhere displacing for steam consumption, and who if themselves engaged in the construction of steam engines under contract, frequently find it necessary, in order to secure the best results, to pass by their own best Hartley and send to Cardiff for coals for Newcastle.