Others stumbled on to the secrets of burning anthracite through luck rather than skill. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard established two iron factories along the Schuylkill River a few miles north of Philadelphia in 1810. White and Hazard possessed advanced technical skills, including knowledge of the latest techniques in Britain and France. They pioneered many innovations include building the nation’s first wire suspension bridge and an iron canal boat. Yet anthracite confounded even their considerable ability. After acquiring a batch of stone coal, they and their workers spent the morning unsuccessfully attempting to light the fire. Frustrated and ready to give up, the men shut the furnace door and left for lunch. When one workman returned thirty minutes later, he was shocked to discover the furnace door glowing with heat. Though they did not know it, closing the door had directed the air to flow through the coal rather than over it, providing the proper conditions for ignition. White later calculated that the higher heat of anthracite allowed the men to roll iron with far less labor and fuel than with imported bituminous coal. He and Hazard became so impressed with anthracite’s potential that they became active promoters themselves in 1817, initiating a series of enterprises that became the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.

When we think about coal today, we often think of large industrial consumers. Yet in the early nineteenth century, anthracite boosters did not see factories as the most promising customer base for their product. A market with much greater potential loomed larger in their imaginations: homes.

Every resident of the northeast corridor in the early nineteenth century required a source of heat in their homes to cook their food, and more importantly, to keep their domiciles warm in winter. To meet these basic needs, families relied on the prolific bounty of America’s forests. An average family of six Philadelphians at the time annually burned at least eight cords of wood—a stack four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long. Wealthy families often used three times as much. Philadelphia’s more than 60,000 residents in 1820, therefore, likely consumed close to 100,000 cords of wood annually. As a ton of coal could offset about a cord and a half of wood, anthracite promoters knew they could achieve sales of tens of thousands of tons of coal, not simply a wagon load here or there.

Turning dreams into reality, of course, meant engaging in the difficult task of educating residential consumers. Robert Roberts’ 1827 guide for servants captures the complexity of burning anthracite. The author dedicated fifteen pages to the techniques necessary for starting and maintaining an anthracite fire, prefacing his remarks with the observation that “Very few servants at first understand the method of kindling and continuing a fire of Lehigh coal, many will never learn, and many more . . . make but a bungling piece of work of it.” As Roberts explained, consumers needed to break coal into similar sized pieces (“about as large as your fist, if your hand is rather a small one”), choose the right type of kindling (“charcoal, unless dry hickory be preferred”), and avoid the cardinal sin of over-poking the fire (“judicious use of the poker is essential to the well-being of an anthracite fire”). To encourage homeowners to adopt anthracite, promoters distributed such guidelines, performed scientific analyses demonstrating the superior heating qualities of anthracite compared with firewood, and even engaged in direct demonstrations. Once Josiah White entered the coal trade, he instructed his wife to keep an anthracite fire burning in their home at all times so that prospective buyers could see how it worked. Unfortunately, the historical record does not provide evidence describing how Mrs. White felt about being told to allow visitors into their home at any time.