Joseph Paviglianiti, age 9, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania for his question:

How do they make charcoal?

On warm summer evenings we like to cook dinner outdoors, over a charcoal fire. People have been making charcoal for many hundreds of years, though nowadays they make it a little differently. Ages ago, there was a charcoal maker near every village. He gathered wood and chopped it into sticks and chips. He used this wood to make a fire that burned slowly, very slowly. He covered the burning ashes with earth and built a tent of sticks around it.

This shut out most of the air and the slow slow fire kept burning for a week or more. There were no fast flames and the fumes escaped through a hole at the top of the tent. Instead of burning to dusty ashes, the wood gradually changed to sooty hard chunks of charcoal. Nowadays, they make charcoal from wood, bones and other materials. And the slow burning is done in a big oven that shuts out most of the air.