 In this video, we're exploring the origins of everyone's favorite Christmas present, coal. We're digging into its history and significance while attempting to mine my own for the ultimate stocking sufferer, the fuel of the Industrial Revolution. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today? That's the question we're exploring. Each week I try to take the next step forward in human history. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. Coal is produced by the conversion of a plant matter of dense forests that used to populate the earth. Coal has been formed from most geological periods, but 90% of it came from two periods 360 to 250 million years ago. Mostly composed of carbon, it is formed from plant matter that decays into peat and then is converted into coal by heat and pressure by being buried. The earliest records of its use by humans dates to 3500 BCE in China and was widely used by many civilizations wherever it was available. Most early use was just easily accessible surface deposits. Coal and coal share many properties, but coal has a few advantages. The first was it was ready made. Coal requires vast forests to source for wood and then a laborious burning process. Coal could be dug straight up from the earth and then burned. So it was used only when mining was cheaper than charcoal production. But it is also more energy dense, producing a hotter fire more consistently. The real value of coal really peaked during the industrial revolution, while many forces combined together to allow the invention and proliferation of the coal powered steam engine. While today quickly shrinking in relevance, coal still produces 27% of the world's power. With the steam engine as my primary goal of the reset series, coal is most definitely crucial. Eventually it may power my steam engine, but now first in the early iron age it also has uses as a more effective fuel for smelting and gorging iron. So I want some of that. A constant goal for this series since the beginning has been to explore the origin and sources for the ingredients we use every day. But when it comes to metals and other minerals, that's always been proven to be a challenge as rarely can many of them be found just on the surface of the earth. Needing to go deeper underground into mines then becomes necessary but also proves difficult for a variety of reasons. At this point I've made it to around 7 mines. Some are mines that have been closed down and now offered tours, most often not allowing you to actually mine them anymore, however there was one exception with AdventureMind where they let us mine our own native copper and even operate some of their mining equipment. I've also made it into one active mine, the Redmond Real Salt mines in Utah where I got a tour and was allowed to harvest a small sample. Beyond that the best bet has been abandoned mines which require a fair amount of risk and off-roading, as well as some questionable legalities. And when even that fails I can sometimes scrounge some of the sources from their discarded tailings outside the mine. In the end getting access to a large supply of minerals has always been next to impossible. That's why I made it a caveat since the beginning of the reset that I only needed to source an initial sample of the mineral before unlocking a larger store-bought supply, as anything more is basically impossible in the current modern world. And even with that coal has remained a challenge and our requests to several mines and sites have gone pretty much unanswered. So when we heard about an abandoned coal mine right next to San Francisco I wanted to check it out and see if we could collect even a small amount. So after a very fruitful trip around California a few years ago, where we got to collect a large variety of minerals and plants, collaborate with several YouTubers, and check out a few variety of power sources for upcoming inspiration, on our very last stop of the trip I wanted to get some coal. Discovered in 1891 off the bluffs right next to San Francisco this mine was tunneled around 200 feet but then never really developed into a full mining venture. Since then most of the tunnel has collapsed and the entrance is pretty difficult to access now. To make things even more difficult the access is only reachable during low tide. We'll linger too long and you might find yourself swimming back to shore. We talked to one adventurer who had recently explored it for suggestions of how to get into it. They recommended only attempting if you have experience climbing knowledge, which I don't have, or to get a ladder. So equipped with the biggest ladder I could rent, I tried to make it in during the one window we had while there was low tide. All right so I'm here at an abandoned coal mine. We have a beautiful view of the Golden Gate bridge right over there and this was supposedly prospected back during the gold rush early days of San Francisco and has been abandoned since and it's only accessible from up there. Inside there's a rope you can climb your way up. The rope climb was never my strongest here in school so I brought a ladder so I hope I can get up there and get some coal. See if I can knock some loose, take it home with me. I hope it's big enough. Seriously. All right well that's too short. It was a 10 foot climb it's about an 18 foot ladder it's more like 20 feet more than that even 25. I don't know if I can reach it. To try to get to the actual cave was a complete logistical failure. I should have brought a ladder or at least someone who's a professional climber probably could easily made it up there. I am not. Also doesn't help that I cut up my hand getting bamboo the other day. Sorry I can't even grip that well. I might have been able to make it into some of them but I'm not confident enough to risk my life. Over I found a cave nearby here and it's got what it looks like might be a few pieces of the coal they've been sticking through and it might be able to harvest at least a few pieces of coal. Never actually seen it before so I'm gonna guess this is probably coal. Take it home see if it actually does anything. It smells like coal. It's a little bit here. Let's take a little bit. Kind of like charcoal which I think is a good sign. It comes out nicely. That has to be cool. Is this the clean stuff? Early bites. All right so I didn't make it up to the mine but I did manage to get a small quantity of coal. All right got my crystal shopping done for this year. I just walked straight into the water. While I was able to collect a small sample of coal from the cliff surface in San Francisco, a larger supply of more pure coal would be ideal. I was fortunate though to have a friend who was able to gain some limited access to the Falkirk open pit mine in North Dakota and graciously collected a bucket of coal for me straight from the mine. Hopefully I'll be able to make a trip out there myself soon in less turbulent times. For a quick comparison we burned some of the charcoal and then some of the coal to compare the different burning intensities and see if we can measure some of the temperature differences. Charcoal max is out at around 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit where coal is able to reach temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. All right so here we have the coal and next to it for comparison we have charcoal and visually they're almost impossible to tell the difference. The most noticeable difference is that this stuff is heavier almost like a rock which it is a rock. It's a lot more compacted just by millions of years of pressure that turned into coal. So with this we should be able to get an even hotter fire that would be very useful for forging, smelting and eventually a steam engine. Ultimately they're both pretty much the same largely carbon but there is a lot of just trace elements in coal that could eventually be used for things like some of the first forms of plastic. So this is some of the uh higher grade stuff Martin got for me in North Dakota. This is the stuff I got in San Francisco just on the surface there um probably not the highest grade but that's what happens when you're just on the surface. Just by doing a little flame test I can tell some of it is not actually coal but uh but some of it definitely is although obviously not the best grade of coal. So this may have become known as the uh the gift for the naughty children but as a gift to humanity itself it was a crucial building block for the eventual industrial revolution and the steam engine. Now having this crucial fuel the next steps will be building a brick forge to use the actual coal in as well as needing to build the more efficient bellows to provide enough oxygen. Merry Christmas. Merry Zegmuk. Thanks for watching. Zegmuk. If you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.