it is much less extensive. For this manufacture a special fabric is made from pure woollen fibre, on rolls of about 3 ft. width and of considerable length. The tar must be previously dehydrated, and is preferably deprived of its more volatile portions by heating in a still. It is heated in an iron pan to about 90° or 100° C.; the fabric is drawn through it by means of rollers which at the same time squeeze out the excess of tar; on coming out of these, the tarred felt is covered with a layer of sand on both sides by means of a self-acting apparatus; and is ultimately wound round wooden rolls, in which state it is sent out into the trade. This roofing-felt is used as a cheap covering, both by itself and as a grounding for tiles or slates. In the former case it must be kept in repair by repainting with tar from time to time, a top covering of sand or small gravel being put on after every coat of paint.
Coal-tar is also employed for the manufacture of lamp-black. This is done by burning the tar in ovens, connected with brick-chambers in which the large quantity of soot, formed in this process, deposits before the gases escape through the chimney. Numerous patents have been taken out for more efficiently collecting this soot. Most of it is employed without further manipulation for the manufacture of electric carbons, printing inks, shoe-blacking, patent leather and so forth. A finer quality of lamp-black, free from oily and empyreumatic parts, is obtained by calcining the soot in closed iron pots at a red heat.
Distillation of Coal-Tar.—Much more important than all applications of crude coal-tar is the industry of separating its constituents from it in a more or less pure form by fractional distillation, mostly followed by purifying processes. Most naturally this industry took its rise in Great Britain, where coal-gas was invented and made on a large scale before any other nation took it up, and up to this day both the manufacture of coal-gas and the distillation of the tar, obtained as a by-product thereof, are carried out on a much larger scale in that than in any other country. The first attempts in this line were made in 1815 by F. C. Accum, and in 1822 by Dr G. D. Longstaff and Dr Dalston. At first the aim was simply to obtain “naphtha,” used in the manufacture of india-rubber goods, for burning in open lamps and for some descriptions of varnish; the great bulk of the tar remained behind and was used as fuel or burned for the purpose of obtaining lamp-black.
It is not quite certain who first discovered in the coal-naphtha the presence of benzene (q.v.), which had been isolated from oil-gas by M. Faraday as far back as 1825. John Leigh claims to have shown coal-tar benzene and nitro-benzene made from it at the British Association meeting held at Manchester in 1842, but the report of the meeting says nothing about it, and the world in general learned the presence of benzene in coal-tar only from the independent discovery of A. W. Hofmann, published in 1845. And it was most assuredly in Hofmann’s London laboratory that Charles Mansfield worked out that method of fractional distillation of the coal-tar and of isolating the single hydrocarbons which laid the foundation of that industry. His patent, numbered 11,960 and dated November 11th, 1847, is the classical land-mark of it. About the same time, in 1846, Brönner, at Frankfort, brought his “grease-remover” into the trade, which consisted of the most volatile coal-tar oils, of course not separated into the pure hydrocarbons; he also sold water-white “creosote” and heavy tar-oils for pickling railway timbers, and used the remainder of the tar for the manufacture of roofing-felt. The employment of heavy oils for pickling timber had already been patented in 1838 by John Bethell, and from this time onward the distillation of coal-tar seems to have been developed in Great Britain on a larger scale, but the utilization of the light oils in the present manner naturally took place only after Sir W. H. Perkin, in 1856, discovered the first aniline colour which suddenly created a demand for benzene and its homologues. The isolation of carbolic acid from the heavier oils followed soon after; that of naphthalene, which takes place almost automatically, went on simultaneously, although the uses of this hydrocarbon for a long time remained much behind the quantities which are producible from coal-tar, until the manufacture of synthetic indigo opened out a wide field for it. The last of the great discoveries in that line was the preparation of alizarine from anthracene by C. Graebe and C. T. Liebermann, in 1868, soon followed by patents for its practical manufacture by Sir W. H. Perkin in England, and by Graebe, Liebermann and H. Caro in Germany.
The present extension of the industry of coal-tar distilling can be only very roughly estimated from the quantity of coal-tar produced in various countries. Decidedly at the head is Great Britain, where about 700,000 tons are produced per annum, most of which probably finds its way into the tar-distilleries, whilst in Germany and the United States much less gas-tar is produced and a very large proportion of it is used for roofing-felt and other purposes.
We shall now give an outline of the processes used in the distillation of tar.
Dehydration.—The first operation in coal-tar distilling is the removal of the mechanically enclosed water. Some water is chemically combined with the bases, phenols, &c., and this, of course, cannot be removed by mechanical means, but splits off only during the distillation itself, when a certain temperature has been reached. The water mechanically present in the tar is separated by long repose in large reservoirs. Very thick viscous tars are best mixed with thinner tars, and the whole is gently heated by coils of pipes through which the heated water from the oil-condensers is made to flow. Sometimes special “tar-separators” are employed, working on the centrifugal principle. The water rises to the top and is worked up like ordinary gas-liquor. More water is again separated during the heating-up of the tar in the still itself, and can be removed there by a special overflow.
 Fig. 1.—Tar-Still (sectional elevation).[1] |
Tar-Stills.—The tar is now pumped into the tar-still, fig. 1. This is usually, as shown, an upright wrought-iron cylinder, with an arched top, and with a bottom equally vaulted upwards for the purpose of increasing the heating surface and of raising the level of the pitch remaining at the end of the operation above the fire-flues. The fuel is consumed on the fire-grate a, and, after having traversed the holes bb in the annular wall e built below the still, the furnace gases are led around the still by means of the flue d, whence they pass to the chimney. Cast-iron necks are provided in the top for the outlet of the vapours, for a man-hole, supply-pipe, thermometer-pipe, safety valve, and for air and steam-pipes reaching down to the bottom and branching out into a number of distributing
- ↑ The illustrations in this article are from Prof. G. Lunge’s Coal Tar and Ammonia, by permission of Friedrich Vieweg u. Sohn.
