Coal barge

“ The water often comes up suddenly, and the coal must be rushed to market while the high water lasts. A single towboat sometimes takes to New Orleans several acres of coal from the great Pittsburg coal seam. This lies flat under the hilltops and is mined from the edges where the rivers have cut down through the coal, far into the beds of rock that lie below.
Fig. 46. Coal Barges, Pittsburg
On the Monongahela the United States owns fifteen dams with locks, and the river is thus “slacked” far up into West Virginia. ”

“ These lamps are the footlights the miners hold up to Old King Coal as they pierce his sides with their electric drills, and wrench open his wounds with their ripping charges of dynamite. They call this shooting the coal, so it is just as well to keep your peculiar fantasies to yourself.
In a coal-mine one loses his sense of direction, for there is no heaven above, no earth beneath—nothing but silence and black impenetrableness. ”

“ No one, having once seen and examined an anthracite coal breaker, could ever mistake one for a building erected for any other purpose. These breakers have a character peculiarly their own. They are the most prominent features in the landscape of every anthracite coal region, where they tower up black, majestic, many-winged, and many-windowed, in the range of almost every outlook.
When the mine car full of coal is hoisted to the head of the breaker it is run by two headmen from the carriage across the scale platform to the dump [185] shute bars on to which it is dumped. ”

“ On the north side only, however, has it been followed under the basalt, and that for but a very slight distance; and in every instance in which this has been attempted the coal has been found to be "blacked" and to be fractured, and frequently to pass into "rock and rig." A coal is said in this district to be "blacked" when, by its near proximity to an igneous rock, it has become so altered as to lose all its brightness, and nearly, if not quite, all its inflammability. ”

“ The breaker is often as much as 150 feet high, and rarely less than 80 feet. The coal, as it is hoisted out of the mine, is carried up to the top of the breaker and discharged into a hopper, whence it passes downward over bars, through screens and crushers, and is finally discharged into bins at the bottom. The admixed slate is separated partly by special screens, and the slaty coal (bone coal) is picked out by boys as it slides down the chutes, in the more modern breakers water-jigs are used very successfully to separate the slate and coal. ”

“ Experience has taught that there are no coal seams below the conglomerate, so that wherever this is found as a surface rock, or wherever it is pierced by the drill, it is usually unnecessary to explore below it. If no coal outcrop is found, the bed of a stream is searched for fragments of the mineral, and, if any are discovered, they are traced to their source. Coal is sometimes exposed where [77] a tree has been uprooted by the wind, and pieces of it have been found in the soil thrown out at a groundhog’s burrow. ”

“ Any experienced miner can tell when the face of the breast is approaching the outcrop; the coal becomes softer, changes in color, breaks into smaller pieces, sometimes water runs down through. It is obviously unsafe to erect buildings on the line of this outcrop, or immediately inside of it, where the roof is thin. There is no assurance that the body of coal left will not slip down the breast; and the pillars of coal near the surface are so soft that any disturbance of this kind may cause them to give way and let down the entire thickness of strata above them. ”

“ Do you think Highlandmen who have lived on the mountains are going to dig coal? Do you imagine that these men, who, until a generation or two ago, never handled anything but a claymore, and who even now scorn to do aught but stalk deer or spear salmon, will take a shovel and a pickaxe and labor as coal-miners? There is not a Crawford among them who would do it. I would despise him if he did."
"There is a glimmer o' good sense in what you say, Colin. I dinna intend any Crawford to work in my coal mine. Little use they would be there. I'll send to Glasgow for some Irish bodies." ”

“ Some of our coal crops out at the surface in places where through the ages wind and weather have worn away the overlying clay, stone, and slate. This can be gathered like wood in the forest without danger. The amount of such coal is commercially unimportant. Some lies only a few feet underground so that it is possible to take it by stripping away the thin overlying material and blast and scoop it out with a steam shovel. There are [Pg 44] some stripping mines in the anthracite field and a considerable number in the alluvial plains of the West. ”

“ To the poor people who live in the vicinity of the breakers these heaps of refuse coal are an unmixed blessing. Pieces of good coal are always being thrown out inadvertently with the waste, and the bony coal that is discarded is not by any means without value as a fuel; indeed it makes a very respectable fire. So, too, one can obtain, with a screen, from the culm heap quite a little percentage of material that will burn. ”

“ Most of the anthracite coal is used in houses, and householders will not buy it unless the pieces are of nearly the same size and free from dirt, coal dust, and slate. The work of preparation is done in odd-shaped buildings called "breakers." One part of a breaker is often a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet in height. The coal is carried to the top of the breaker. ”

“ One shovel full of screenings to four or five of bark will produce a more economical result than the tan bark separate, as the coal gives body to the fire and forms a hot clinker bed upon which the bark may rest without falling through the spaces in the grate bars, and with the coal, more air can be introduced to the furnace. ”

“ But the driving of the stalls themselves is a work involving no little waste of coal and insecurity to the colliers; the mass of coal of eight yards wide having to be undercut, or holed about a couple of yards in, a large amount of coal is cut up into slack by the "pike," or collier's pick, and the men are exposed to continual risk from falls of coal. As the various portions of the seam are successively "cut" at the side of the stall, and brought down, the colliers have to mount on heaps of slack or light wooden stages, and are necessarily exposed to still greater danger. ”

“ It is not thought to be given off in appreciable quantities by the coal at the open faces; but it is formed when the carbonic acid passes through any ignited carbonaceous material, or when steam passes over burning coal. It is therefore produced most frequently by smouldering gob fires, by burning wood in the mines, or by a shaft on fire, and may exist as one of the results of an explosion of fire damp or of blasting powder. It is the most to be dreaded of any of the gases which the miner has to encounter. ”

“ The soft coals, on the contrary, being porous as well as soft, allow the gases to escape from them much more readily, and so increase the danger at the working faces of the mines. The gas given out most abundantly by the coal is light carbureted hydrogen, known as marsh gas, from the fact that being a product of vegetable decomposition under water, bubbles of it rise to the surface on stirring the waters of a marsh. This is the gas that is known to miners as fire damp. ”

“ At the beginning of the present century the anthracite or stone coal was in general use, in all the districts where it was found, as a fuel for the blacksmith’s fire and the iron worker’s forge. This, however, was the limit of its utility. It was thought to be necessary to force a strong artificial air current up through it to make it burn, and since this could not well be done in grates, stoves, or furnaces, there was no demand for coal for domestic use, or for the great manufacturing industries. ”

“ In the great coal-field of South Wales, to which we must look for our main supply of anthracite, we are able to trace the action of heat in producing a whole series of different classes of coal in a single seam, which at one part is highly bituminous—soft, flaming coal, like the Wallsend, then it becomes harder and less bituminous, then semi-bituminous “steam coal,” then less and less flaming, until at last we have the hard, shiny form of purely carbonaceous coal, that may be handled without soiling the fingers, and which burns without flame, like coke or charcoal. ”

“ The process of mining coal is a combination of boring and digging. Shafts are sunk, levels are driven, and drains are carried off, by the help of picks or pickaxes, wedges and hammers, the rocks being also sometimes loosened by blasting with gunpowder. In searching for coal, a shaft is sunk through the uppermost soft stratum, and the rock is then bored, by striking it continually with an iron borer terminating in an edge of steel, which is in the mean time turned partly round; and, at proper intervals, a scoop is let down to draw up the loose fragments. ”

“ There is indeed reason to believe that the strata of coal in the hills cause the fire and appearances which they exhibit of being burned. Whenever these marks present themselves in the bluffs on the river, the coal is seldom seen, and when found in the neighborhood of the strata of burnt earth, the coal with the sand and sulphurous matter usually accompanying it, is precisely at the same height and nearly of the same thickness with those strata. ”

“ It is estimated that sixteen per cent. of the material which goes into the breaker to be prepared comes out as waste, and is sent to the refuse dump. It can readily be supposed, therefore, that in the course of a few years these waste heaps will grow to an enormous size; and as a matter of fact they do. The dirt or culm, which includes all material [190] finer than buckwheat coal, is usually dumped on a separate pile from the rock, slate, and bony coal, since it is not wholly without at least prospective value. ”

“ There will be cracks in the roof, small pieces of slate will drop to the floor, the distance between floor and roof will grow perceptibly less, pillars will bulge in the middle and little fragments of coal not larger than peas will break from them with a crackling sound and fall to the floor, until a deposit of fine coal is thus formed at the base of each pillar in the infected district. ”

“ These "coal-pipes" are much dreaded by our miners, for almost every year in the Bristol, Newcastle, and other coal-fields, they are the cause of fatal accidents. Each cylindrical cast of a tree, formed of solid sandstone, and increasing gradually in size towards the base, and being without branches, has its whole weight thrown downwards, and receives no support from the coating of friable coal which has replaced the bark. ”

“ It is their duty to pick out the pieces of slate, stone, or bone, from the stream of coal which passes under them, and throw this refuse into a trough at the side of the shute, from which point it slides rapidly away. The coal as it comes from the mine is full of waste material, so that the boy who sits first or highest on the shute has no trouble in finding plenty to do, and, work as hard as he may, much of the unfit material must still escape him. ”

“ On our knees we pushed the buggy into the room, took up the hammer, broke up the coal into lumps we could handle, filled up the small box, dragged it out into the entry and emptied it into a heap. This is called "buggying" coal. It is the most laborious part of mining. Whenever a new man would be placed with the convicts for instructions in mining he would have to buggy coal just as long as it was possible to get him to do so. ”

“ Now, when pure air comes down a coal shaft, a lot of changes happen to it. Some of the oxygen is consumed by the breathing of the men and animals in the mine—if there are any donkeys or such—some is taken up by the burning of lamps, some more by the explosion of blasting powder, a little is lost by the rusting of iron pyrites—which is found in many coal mines—and a lot of it is taken up by the coal, just how, we don't quite know. ”

“ The boy who sits below him on the shute is able to give the passing stream a closer inspection and more careful treatment, and, should there be one still below, he must have sharp eyes and skillful fingers to detect worthless pieces that have been left by his comrades. The boys often put their feet in the shute and dam the coal back for a [187] moment to give them time to throw out the abundance of slate that they may see, but no matter how careful they are, nor how many hands the coal may pass through in the picking process, a certain percentage of slate and bone is sure to remain. ”

“ As far as the gas-making properties of the first three are concerned, the relative proportions of carbon and volatile products are much the same. Everybody knows a piece of cannel coal when it is seen, how it appears almost to have been once in a molten condition, and how it breaks with a conchoidal fracture, as opposed to the cleavage of bituminous coal into thin layers; and, most apparent and most noticeable of all, how it does not soil the hands after the manner of ordinary coal. ”

“ Coal, in Southington, Connecticut. Beds of slate are found more or less bituminous; and, at the bottom of some of the wells, the slate begins to exhibit thin veins of coal, distributed in great numbers through the substance of the slate, which is the shale of the miners. The coal is from the thickness of a knife-blade to that of a finger; it is highly bituminous, and burns with great freedom. Even the entire masses of the stone burn brilliantly, when ignited on a common fire; and, after exhaustion of the coally matter, leave the slate of a grayish colour. ”