History
Ancient use of outcropping coal
There is archaeological evidence that coal was burned in funeral pyres during the Bronze Age, 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, in Wales. Aristotle mentions coal (“combustible bodies”) in his Meteorologica, and his pupil Theophrastus also records its use. The Romans in Britain burned coal before 400ce; cinders have been found among the ruins of Roman villas and towns and along the Roman wall, especially in Northumberland, near the outcrop of coal seams. The Hopi Indians of what is now the southwestern United States mined coal by picking and scraping and used it for heating, cooking, and in ceremonial chambers as early as the 12th century ce; in the 14th century they used it industrially in pottery making. Marco Polo reports its use as widespread in 13th-century China. The Domesday Book (1086), which recorded everything of economic value in England, does not mention coal. London’s first coal arrived by sea in 1228, from the areas of Fife and Northumberland, where lumps broken from submarine outcroppings and washed ashore by wave action were gathered by women and children. Thereafter, the name sea coal was applied to all bituminous coal in England. Later in the century, monks began to mine outcroppings in the north of England.
Developments in mine entry
Shafts
Except for the Chinese, who may have mined coal underground, all the early coal seams were worked from the surface, in fully exposed outcroppings. In the later Middle Ages, however, exhaustion of outcrop coal in many places forced a change from surface to underground, or shaft, mining. Early shaft mines were little more than wells widened as much as miners dared in the face of danger of collapse. Shafts were sunk on high ground, with adits—near-horizontal tunnels—for drainage driven into the side of the hill. In England some shallow mine shafts were exhausted as early as the 14th century, making it necessary to go deeper and expand mining at the shaft bottoms. These remained small operations; a record of 1684 shows 70 mines near Bristol, employing 123 workers. Greater depth created many problems. First, water could no longer simply be drained away. Crude methods were devised to lift it to the surface. A bucket-and-chain device was first powered by men and later by horses; a continuous belt of circular plates was drawn up through a pipe. Windmills were used for pumps. But shafts had to be restricted to depths of 90 to 105 metres (300 to 350 feet) and a mining radius of 180 metres. It was not until 1710 that the water problem was eased by Thomas Newcomen’s steam atmospheric engine, which supplied a cheap and reliable power source for a vertical reciprocating lift pump.
Hoisting
Raising the coal itself was another problem. Manpower, operating a windlass, was replaced by horsepower; and, as the shafts went deeper, more horses were added. At Whitehaven in 1801, coal was hoisted 180 metres by four horses at the rate of 42–44 metric tons (46–48 tons) in nine hours. The introduction of the steam engine to hoist coal was a major turning point for the industry. Small steam-powered windlasses were successfully tried out about 1770. About 1840 the first cage was used to hoist the loaded car; and from 1840 onward advances in coal-mining techniques were rapid.
Ventilation
The presence of noxious and flammable gases caused miners to recognize the critical importance of ventilation in coal mines from the earliest days. Natural ventilation was afforded by level drainage tunnels driven from the sloping surface to connect with the shaft. Surface stacks above the shaft increased the efficiency of ventilation; their use continued in small mines until the early 20th century. The most reliable method, before the introduction of fans, was the use of a furnace at the shaft bottom or on the surface. Despite the hazard of fire and explosion, there were still a large number of furnaces operating, at least in nongassy mines, in the early 20th century.
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Open-flame illumination, however, was a much more common cause of explosions until the introduction of the Davy safety lamp (about 1815), in which the flame is enclosed in a double layer of wire gauze that prevents ignition of flammable gases in the air of the mine. Presence of strong air currents, however, made even the Davy lamp unsafe.
Rotary ventilating fans were introduced in mines in the 18th century. Originally of wood and powered by steam, they were improved throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by the introduction of steel blades, electric power, and aerodynamically efficient shapes for the blades.
From manual to mechanized extraction
Conventional mining
Early European miners wedged coal out of the seam or broke it loose with a pick. After explosives were introduced, it was still necessary to undercut the coal seam with hand tools. The advent of steam, compressed air, and electricity brought relief from this hard, dangerous work. In 1868, after almost 100 years of trial and error, a commercially successful revolving-wheel cutter for undercutting the coal seam was introduced in England. This first powered cutting tool was soon improved by introduction of compressed air as a power source in place of steam. Later, electricity was used. The longwall cutter was introduced in 1891. Originally driven by compressed air and later electrified, it could begin at one end of a long face (the vertical, exposed cross section of a seam of coal) and cut continuously to the other.
Development of continuous mining
The conventional mining techniques described above, made up of the cyclic operations of cutting, drilling, blasting, and loading, developed in association with room-and-pillar mining. The oldest of the basic underground methods, room-and-pillar mining grew naturally out of the need to recover more coal as mining operations became deeper and more expensive. During the late 1940s, conventional techniques began to be replaced by single machines, known as continuous miners, that broke off the coal from the seam and transferred it back to the haulage system. The Joy Ripper (1948) was the first continuous miner applicable to the room-and-pillar method.
Origins of longwall mining
The other principal method of modern mining, longwall mining, had been introduced as early as the 17th century and had found general use by the 19th century, but it had long been less productive than room-and-pillar mining. This began to change in the 1940s, when a continuous system involving the “plow” was developed by Wilhelm Loebbe of Germany. Pulled across the face of the coal and guided by a pipe on the face side of a segmented conveyor, the plow carved a gash off the bottom of the seam. The conveyor snaked against the face behind the advancing plow to catch the coal that chipped off from above the gash. Substantially reducing the labour required at the coal face (except that needed to install roof support), the Loebbe system quickly became popular in Germany, France, and the Low Countries.
The plow itself had limited application in British mines, but the power-advanced segmented conveyor became a fundamental part of equipment there, and in 1952 a simple continuous machine called the shearer was introduced. Pulled along the face astride the conveyor, the shearer bore a series of disks fitted with picks on their perimeters and mounted on a shaft perpendicular to the face. The revolving disks cut a slice from the coal face as the machine was pulled along, and a plow behind the machine cleaned up any coal that dropped between the face and the conveyor.
Roof support
The technique of supporting the roof by rock bolting became common in the late 1940s and did much to provide an unobstructed working area for room-and-pillar mining, but it was a laborious and slow operation that prevented longwall mining from realizing its potential. In the late 1950s, however, powered, self-advancing roof supports were introduced by the British. Individually or in groups, these supports, attached to the conveyor, could be hydraulically lowered, advanced, and reset against the roof, thus providing a prop-free area for equipment (between the coal face and the first row of jacks) and a canopied pathway for miners (between the first and second rows of jacks).
Haulage
Manual labour to electric power
In the first shaft mines, coal was loaded into baskets that were carried on the backs of men or women or loaded on wooden sledges or trams that were then pushed or hauled through the main haulage roadway to the shaft bottom to be hung on hoisting ropes or chains. In drift and slope mines, the coal was brought directly to the surface by these and similar methods. Sledges were pulled first by men and later by animals, including mules, horses, oxen, and even dogs and goats.
Steam locomotives designed by Richard Trevithick were used in the fields of South Wales and Tyne and later in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but they created too much smoke. Compressed-air locomotives, which appeared in the 1880s, proved expensive to operate. Electric locomotives, introduced in 1887, rapidly became popular, but mules and horses were still working in some mines as late as the 1940s.
Mechanized loading
The loading by hand of broken coal into railcars was made obsolete early in the 20th century by mobile loaders. The Stanley Header, the first coal-loading machine used in the United States, was developed in England and tested in Colorado in 1888. Others were developed, but few progressed beyond the prototype stage until the Joy machine was introduced in 1914. Employing the gathering-arm principle, the Joy machine provided the pattern for future successful mobile loaders. After the introduction in 1938 of electric-powered, rubber-tired shuttle cars designed to carry coal from the loading machine to the elevator, mobile loading and haulage rapidly supplanted track haulage at the face of room-and-pillar mines.
Conveyors
In 1924 a conveyor belt was successfully used in an anthracite mine in central Pennsylvania to carry coal from a group of room conveyors to a string of cars at the mine entry. By the 1960s belts had almost completely replaced railcars for intermediate haulage.
Preparation
The history of coal preparation begins in the 19th century, with the adaptation of mineral-processing methods used for enriching metallic ores from their associated impurities. In the early years, larger pieces of coal were simply handpicked from pieces composed predominantly of mineral matter. Washing with mechanical devices to separate the coal from associated rocks on the basis of their density differences began during the 1840s.
At first, coal preparation was necessitated by the demand for higher heating values; another demand was for such special purposes as metallurgical co*ke for steelmaking. In recent years, as concern has grown over the emission of sulfur dioxide in the flue gases of power plants, coal preparation has taken on greater importance as a measure to remove atmospheric pollutants.
M. Albert Evans Raja Venkat Ramani