Coal gas
fuel
Coal gas is a flammable gaseous fuel made from coal and supplied to the user via a piped distribution system originating from a gasworks. It is produced when coal is heated strongly in the absence of air. Town gas is a more general term referring to manufactured gaseous fuels produced for sale to consumers and municipalities.
The original coal gas was produced by the coal gasification reaction, and the burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume. Thus, coal gas is highly toxic. Other compositions contain additional calorific gases such as methane, produced by the Fischer–Tropsch process, and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
Before the development of natural gas supply and transmission—during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and during the late 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom and Australia—almost all gas for fuel and lighting was manufactured from coal. Town gas was supplied to households via municipally owned piped distribution systems. At the time, a frequent method of committing suicide was the inhalation of gas from an unlit oven. With the head and upper body placed inside the appliance, the concentrated carbon monoxide would kill quickly.
“Coal gas” enters the record as fuel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Coal and fuel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q842311. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coal gas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.