Given that were appear to be heading into another energy crisis, it seems suitable to look at ways that folks dealt with high-priced or scarce gasoline in the past. This 1922 Stanley Steamer was converted to coal burning by the Mershon Patent Shaking Grate Works, Inc. in 1943, when gasoline was strictly rationed. It also got a mid-20’s Buick coupe body. The owner now just filled the coal bin at the back end of the car from his home coal bunker. According to the owner, the car consumed a bit over a pound of coal per mile, giving it a range of about 175miles on its 200 pound fuel capacity.
As to its emissions, smoke or otherwise, there was of course no mention. Rolling coal, the real stuff.
Lots of experience in making grates, including shaking ones, since 1830.
Here’s a story on it in the December 1943 Popular Mechanics.
More details.
And on the shaking grates.
Looks like this wasn’t the only one.
Coal has an energy density of 24 megajoules per kilo while gasoline has 46, so a pound of coal would be the rough equivalent of half a pound of gasoline. One gallon of gas is the same as 13 pounds of coal.
Coal was ~ $10 per ton in 1943, which would be $164 now. It’s actually $325 per ton today according to Google. That mile per pound of coal in the article? It cost half a cent to travel that mile.
Price of gas in 1943 using an A card? .19 a gallon then or $3.12 today.
One half ton of gasoline is ~ 153 gallons
Emissions aside, this wasn’t bad. I wonder how long it took to raise steam for that 3 ton vehicle! At those prices, I might have let it idle if I were going to be driving again that day.
FWIU that was often the case with a steam car anyway.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a coal burning car. Neat!
Neat idea – and had benefits beyond just cost. Since gas was rationed at the time, people couldn’t drive much… but with an “alternative fuel” vehicle like this, I assume driving could be limitless. Hence the mention in Popular Mechanics about “joy riding past gas-hungry neighbors.”
I guess one downside is that your passenger would have to act as a fireman to shovel coal when needed.
Well, until you needed tires.
Good point.
Tires were exactly the reason why gasoline was rationed, not a lack of oil. Over 90% of the US’s supply of rubber was cut off when the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies and Malaya.
One advertised advantage of a steam car was that just about any flammable liquid could be burned as fuel since it was needed only as a heat source for the steam and didn’t face the technical requirements of going into the heart of an IC engine. Adding a coal-burner outfit just takes that a step further.
OTOH outside the wartime gas-rationing emergency it’s not really feasible for the same reasons almost nobody burns coal in their homes anymore and the power-generating industry has been moving rapidly away from it despite the last presidential administration’s priorites. Solid fuels and their residue are a PITA to deal with logistically even before any environmental consideration enters the picture, and cheapness and availability were the only reasons coal persisted as long as it did anyway.
What about the ashes? Coal ends up with tar and ashes. Where does that go? We regulate all that when it is being burned to create electricity.
During this same time, St. Louis was having black days due to the use of Illinois coal to power and heat the city. It would have been awful if cars like this were being used.
Don’t know much about coal grates, but the shaking aspect is interesting. Having the thing installed such that you could activate the shaker to dump ash ahead of the driving wheels would essentially duplicate what some highway departments were doing during winter driving conditions of the 40s.
I wonder what the risk was of a boiler explosion in a then 20 year old car? Presumably as this car aged, it sat a while, it’s in pretty good shape. But metal fatigue never really stops, and it appears this car lived in the snowbelt. It’s seen twenty years of thermal cycles just from weather, not to mention the extremes of use.
The 1922 Stanley Steamer was converted to coal in 1943. I doubt very much it survived to 1963.
But then steam locomotives typically had much longer lives than that.
More a reference to the Stanley being 20 years old at conversion to coal, and likely still using its 1922 boiler.
A private car that had already outlived most of its contemporaries was not likely to have the kind of maintenance that railroads had, which, of course was still no guarantee….
Read the article: it clearly says that they installed an “advanced type of water-tube boiler”. In any case, Stanley boiler would not have worked with coal; it used gasoline or kerosene. For coal, a different type of boiler would have been called for.
Despite my vague understanding of the purpose of those tubes in a steam engine and how a boiler can blow up, the way it blows them all out like some evil creature inhabited the locomotive frightens and confounds me
Same. Unbelievable picture.
Confirms every nightmare I had as a little kid after my steam-enthusiast dad would have me stand up close to some steam engine. I mean, the super-hot black creature was heaving dragon-roars inside its own belly, and blasting steam sideways, surely as a warning to stay away!
This was my family’s business and car. The coal conversion was mostly a marketing move to sell the grates or furnaces. That being said, I remember riding on the car in parades in the 70’s. After that, we were concerned about the risk of an explosion, so the car was mothballed. I believe it is currently in a museum in the Philadelphia area.
This one had a new water-tube boiler fitted so the boiler was brand new. As for explosions? No steam car boiler has ever exploded, aside from one test boiler at the Stanley factory where they tested it to destruction at something like five times the standard operating pressure. There were several safety systems, including a safety valve that would release steam if the pressure went over the operating pressure, and a fusible plug that would melt if the boiler ran dry, which would then spray high-pressure steam to extinguish the burner. Stanleys usually ran a fire-tube boiler wrapped with three layers of piano wire. The pipe seams would split before the boiler ever exploded.
This is really interesting – I wonder what the modern analog would be (if there is one) for using a cheap and readily available fuel source to make steam to power your car.
A little reading indicates that there are only about 130k homes in the US that still heat with coal, and half of those are in Pennsylvania. In my part of the midwest almost every old house still has the iron door for the coal chute low on the outside wall and some basements still have a coal chute, complete with a sloped concrete floor. I would imagine that coal would be hard to get these days – I doubt that the local fuel company would deliver periodically to your house.
I wonder what the modern analog would be (if there is one) for using a cheap and readily available fuel source to make steam to power your car.
Easy: solar panels to charge an EV.
Or did I misunderstand your question?
I am stunned by the 130K figure, JPC. I truly read it as “130” at first, as that seemed more likely. I do realize it’s a tiny, tiny amount amongst US homes, but it’s still an amazing number on its own.
Mind you, the State I live in generates most of its electrical power from the dirtiest-of-the-lot brown coal, which makes every house still burn coal, in a way.
I guess I’m just amazed the infrastructure within the houses themselves is still serviceable. Though yet again, there’s an elegant little fireplace-firebox in my sister’s ’60’s house: hasn’t burnt briquettes for 40 years, but I guess no reason it couldn’t. (God knows, it put out incredible heat back in the day on that coal!)
Even here in environment-obsessed Europe there are still quite a few homes using a coal oven, you can buy them new and coal is readily available, so I am not surprised by those US figures.
https://www.hornbach.at/shop/Kohleofen-Wamsler-KS-109-6A-Gusseisen-braun-6-kW/7714236/artikel.html
Indeed…my Grandfather lived in NE Pennsylvania, and was a coal miner until he bought a small mom/pop grocery store. He didn’t get out quick enough; a miner from about 1923 till he bought the store in 1940, those 17 years were enough and he died of black lung in 1966. My Grandmother ran the store another 9 years after he died until she retired. They were Slovak immigrants (I’m 1/2 Slovak through my Mother…her first language is Slovak, didn’t learn English until she started grade school. Her family in Europe (still more of them there, only her and her brother and their decendants live here) about 60 km from Ukraine.
Their whole house was coal fired…furnace and stove, there was something inside the stove that served as water heater. Even in summer, the coal stove was used, rendering the kitchen an oven (literally). After my Grandmother closed the store, they converted the furnace to oil, bought a refrigerator (there were several in the store of course, they used a corner of one for their household) and a hotplate and toaster oven. No more shovelling out the coal dust and shovelling in the coal.
I imagine a car running on coal would have to be some kind of steam powered one, and it would take some time to get a bit of time to get going. Plus, you have to fill up with water for steam. Unless you plan the trip, it would be a pain if you needed to go somewhere with no notice, which I guess is what did in other steam cars (that ran on fuels other than coal).
My Grandfather bought one car in his life, a new 1951 Chrysler Windsor with flathead 6 and semi-automatic transmission. I think my Mother helped him learn to drive it, she took driving lessons. He used it to help stock his store (not everything was delivered), which seems odd that he didn’t have a van or vehicle more set up for hauling. There was really no parking at his store, there was a small side street but it was parked up by nearby residents…his store was under where they lived. So deliveries meant a truck parking halfway on the sidewalk and part way into main street till they could unload. Anyhow, the Windsor ran on conventional (gasoline) fuel.
A modern-day equivalent would be running your car on used cooking oil. I was interested to read that England’s King Charles drives an Aston Martin sports car running on used cooking oil so as to be more environmentally friendly. Canola oil is a renewable fuel source.
The idea of bringing 200 pounds of coal up from your house’s coal bin is unattractive to say the least. Dig into the pile, balance the coal on the shovel, walk up the stairs and out the grade entry and into the garage, then flip it into the car’s bin, all without losing any lumps. Walk back down the stairs. Repeat 20 times. Now you can drive to work after changing clothes and taking a bath and eating an extra meal to make up for the energy you used.
You’d shovel it into a hod to transport it.
I’m one of those rare houses that still heats with coal. I can’t imagine it working that well in a car because in addition to the dampers to regulate the fire, the ash is also used. In the dead of winter in Maine, when I want all of the heat I can get, I shake all of the ashes out. This gives me a temp of about 700 degrees F on the stove top. Right now with an outside temp of about 40 degrees, I leave a bed of ash under the fire to block airflow. This gives me a stovetop temp of about 350 degrees. If we get a warm day, I can let the ash pile up so that the fire is just barely going. It’s a totally different animal than wood. In an automotive application, bouncing over the frost heaves that we have now, I would think that the fire would be getting shaken down with every bump. The fire in my stove today was lit back in October.
And right here at CC, here’s one! (see comment above).
Do you mind my asking why you use coal? Genuine curiosity, btw, not some political bait.
For context, I live in the gentle climes of southern coastal Australia, as do 80% of Aussies: midwinter days of 50 is about it. Maine is a gorgeous place, but if had to do your sort of winter, from my background, I’d be burning the ground itself to get warm!
No coal user here but was very glad I have a wood stove in my flat two weeks ago when my gas oven gave up the ghost and – should this become an issue – I have enough wood outside my door (I live at near a forest) to heat up for next winter… I visited Oz back in 86-87 and even in Melbourne aircon was in my view more important than “our” type of heating so I hear you, in your case I suppose you need to start buying Chinese fans:)
I work long hours. Coal will easily burn for 12 to 14 hours that I’m gone. Wood wouldn’t. It’s cheap to buy too. I’m getting up in years though and I’m feeling my limitations. I’m toying with the idea of a heat pump as many folks around here have converted to. I love the heat that coal gives as it is constant heat but it is labor intensive. Wood heat is very popular around here but I find that it is much more labor intensive than coal. Old habits die hard but I think that change may be on the horizon. The coal stove will remain though. A backup source of heat is a necessity in extreme climates.
ICE cars were converted to wood gas at the same time in much of Europe. Needs must:
lowtechmagazine.com/2010/01/wood-gas-cars.html
Cadillac toyed with this idea again in the early ’80s, cobbling together a 1978 Eldorado that ran on coal. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/automobiles/04COAL.html
Particularly during WW2, in which Australia and the British Empire was antinazi 30 months longer than the U.S.A., petrol rationing and shortage were overcome by many operators of internal combustion engined cars, buses, trucks, tractors and taxis by the appending of a CHARCOAL BURNER, more accurately described as a Gas Producer. PRODUCER GAS was a combustible mixture of N2 – Nitrogen, CO – Carbon Monoxide, and H2 – Hydrogen. The relevant reagents were air, steam and burning coke or coal. I’ll leave it to you to find the relevant chemical equations. The gas was directed to inlet manifolds. After we won the war, petrol rationing continued a while. By 1950, charcoal units removed from back bumpers could be seen rusting among horse-drawn ploughs and littering roadsides. At the first big postwar motor race, on the still iconic Motorheads’ Mountain at Bathurst, one competitor who ran the distance in a respectable time drove a Bentley Drophead. A 4&1/2 Blower blitzer? I’ve forgotten the model. The car won immortality, as did her dauntless driver, lord & master, sharing the well-deserved agnomen CHARCOAL CHARLIE. His legal names? Look for them! Agnomena eclipse heroes’ pre-triumph titles. Who cares about Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Major OR Minor. All hail, Scipio AFRICANUS!
More recently, GM teased a coal dust-powered Delta 88.
A Coaldsmobile‽ Who knew‽
Chrysler and Ford, that’s who knew, but they dropped their development competitors when they realized it would just lead to a coaled war.
There’s a bitumen joke in here somewhere, but I’m not sure it’s family-friendly.
I think it would have been easier to set up a gas generator rig on regular car or light truck like the wood gas units used in Europe during WWII. Then again the Mershon Patent Shaking Grate Works may have been more interested in demonstrating its product in an easily portable boiler.