The Boy With the U.S. Miners

by Francis Rolt-Wheeler

In the gloomy world of below ground, where the dusty wall of sooty black is the only landscape to be seen, one day is very much like another. Reaching his room, Clem stood his tools in order along the rib, hung his safety lamp on a nail which he drove into a prop supporting the roof, and, reaching up so as to put one hand on the roof, tapped it with the flat side of his pick to make sure that there was no loose slate overhead. He then examined the coal face, as it had been left by the hewer who had been working on the night shift, to make sure that it had been properly spragged or timbered.

This done, Clem stripped naked to the waist, for it was hot in that hole far below ground. Then, lying down flat on his side, his bare shoulder resting on the gritty ground, he started to pick away the coal at the level of the floor and just above it, making a wedge-shaped hole extending under the seam for a distance in of three feet.

Many mines, especially in America, use mechanical coal-cutters for this back-breaking labor. These machines are especially useful in mines where the coal-seams are less than 3-1/2 feet thick, and they are well adapted to "long-wall" workings where the whole face of the coal is removed in a single operation. Some are mounted with a toothed bar which moves in and out, chipping the coal; other types are like circular saws; several forms have the same action as a miner's pick, the percussions being at the speed of two hundred strokes a minute, the motive-power being compressed air.

In pillar-and-room workings, such as this Ohio mine, chain heading machines were used. This American invention consists of a bed-plate which rests on the floor and is secured in position by screw-jacks braced against the roof and against the rib. On this bed-plate rests a sliding frame which carries a revolving chain on which cutting tools are fixed. The machine carries its own motor, which not only drives the chain, but also slides forward the frame into the cut. When the cut is made to the full depth of the machine, it is withdrawn, and the machine moved over its own width and another cut commenced. Several of these machines were at work in the mine, but chiefly in that part of it where the pillars were being cut away, and where speed in removing the coal was a prime necessity. In the more distant rooms, hand labor was used.

All these machines work on exactly the same principle as that of the miner, lying on his back or on his side, and digging at the coal with his pick. The coal must be undercut as far in as a pick or a mechanical coal-cutter will reach, for the entire width of the face. Every few feet, short props or sprags are put in from the edge of the undermined portion to the floor, to prevent a premature fall, which might bury the miner.

When the whole face is undercut and spragged, the shot-firer is summoned. One or more holes, three feet deep, are bored in the coal, close to the roof, these holes are filled with explosive and tamped shut with moist clay, and the charges are fired. This blasting brings down the coal off the face, clear from the rock roof to the undermined portion, for such a distance as it has been undercut.

The miner then shovels away the coal far enough to allow him to lie down again and continue his terribly laborious task, while the loader comes and shovels the blasted coal into cars or into endless-chain conveyors, according to the arrangement of the mine.

Day in, day out, this hewing continues. While the miner is at work, he is always in a cramped position, his body twisted, his muscles at a strain, performing his toilsome labor in the half-dark, in the heat, in poor air, choked with coal-dust constantly and menaced by death every moment. He is well paid, but most fully does he earn every cent he gets.

The morning had almost passed, and Anton was near the entry, where he heard, in the distance, a dull rumble like thunder, followed by a queer cracking sound which seemed to travel along the rock overhead.

The boy halted involuntarily in his task of pushing an empty car back to a room for loading. Little as he knew of the noises below ground, he sensed something strange. The deep silence of a coal mine is generally broken only by the sharp report of a blast or the rattle of cars, and this rumble did not resemble either sound.