After all the gas comes off you will find in
the bottom of the test tube a chunk of dry, porous coke. These, then,
are the two main products of the destructive distillation of coal. But
if you are an unusually observant person, that is, if you are a born
chemist with an eye to by-products, you will notice along in the middle
of the tube where it is neither too hot nor too cold some dirty drops of
water and some black sticky stuff. If you are just an ordinary person,
you won't pay any attention to this because there is only a little of it
and because what you are after is the coke and gas. You regard the
nasty, smelly mess that comes in between as merely a nuisance because it
clogs up and spoils your nice, clean tube.
Now that is the way the gas-makers and coke-makers--being for the most
part ordinary persons and not born chemists--used to regard the water
and tar that got into their pipes. They washed it out so as to have the
gas clean and then ran it into the creek. But the neighbors--especially
those who fished in the stream below the gas-works--made a fuss about
spoiling the water, so the gas-men gave away the tar to the boys for use
in celebrating the Fourth of July and election night or sold it for
roofing.
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