Ignorance, ignorance, burning bright

Editor's Introduction -- In a middle-school textbook published by D.C. Heath and Company, imaginary "science" is combined with guesswork "history" to produce an incandescent demonstration of ignorance and incompetence.

from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1991 Guess Again, Heath William J. Bennetta From page 590 of Physical Science: The Challenge of Discovery, a middle-school textbook published by D.C. Heath and dated in 1991: The first and oldest fuel used by humans was wood. Primitive people burned wood for heat, to cook food, and to frighten off wild animals. The development of a better fuel began with the discovery that charcoal burned better than wood. This form of coal was used for heating in areas where wood became scarce. Charcoal is not a "form of coal." Charcoal is baked wood -- wood that has been carbonized by being heated to 300º C (or more) in the absence (or a near-absence) of air. Obviously, people could not have had much charcoal "in areas where wood became scarce." Local supplies of charcoal could not have exceeded local supplies of wood, and could not even have equaled them: Any charcoal-making technique necessarily involved losses -- so where wood was scarce, charcoal was scarcer. William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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