Mining and extraction technology

See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA

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Albert, Wilhelm August Julius

Beaumont, Huntingdon

Bergius, Friedrich Carl Rudolf

Bickford, William

Biringuccio, Vanoccio Vincenzio Agustino Luca

Bissell, George Henry

Blackett, William Cuthbert

Blenkinsop, John

Born, Ignaz Edler von

Brandt, Alfred

Brunel, Sir Marc Isambard

Buddle, John

Chaudron, Joseph

Coster, John

Crælius, Per Anton

Curr, John

Davy, Sir Humphry

Dörell, Georg Ludwig Wilhelm

Drake, Edwin Laurentine

Ercker, Lazarus

Fauvelle, Pierre-Pascal

Garforth, William Edward

Gilbert, John

Gilbert, Thomas

Glenck, Karl Christian Friedrich

Greathead, James Henry

Gurney, Sir Goldsworthy

Hair, Thomas H.

Hedley, William

Ingersoll, Simon

Jobard, Jean-Baptiste-Ambroise Marcelin

Kegel, Karl

Kind, Karl Gotthelf

Koepe, Friedrich

Leschot, Georges Auguste

Leupold, Jacob

Lucas, Anthony Francis

Menzies, Michael

Merivale, John Herman

Nobel, Immanuel

Oeynhausen, Karl von

Polhem, Christopher

Pötsch, Friedrich Hermann

Raky, Anton

Rammler, Erich

Rateau, Auguste Camille-Edmond

Rittinger, Peter von

Rowland, Thomas Fitch

Sommeiller, Germain

Stanley, Robert Crooks

Thompson, Benjamin

Treadgold, Arthur Newton Christian

Williams, Thomas

Wolf, Carl

SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After leaving Durham college of Physical Science and having been apprenticed in different mines, he received the certificate for colliery managers and subsequently, in 1887, was appointed Manager of all the mines of Charlaw and Sacriston collieries in Durham. He remained in this position for the rest of his working life.

Frequent explosions in mines led him to investigate the causes. He was among the first to recognize the role contributed by coal-dust on mine roads, pioneered the use of inert rock-or stone-dust to render the coal-dust harmless and was the originator of many technical terms on the subject. He contributed many papers on explosion and was appointed a member of many advisory committees on prevention measures. A liquid-air rescue apparatus, designed by him and patented in 1910, was installed in various parts of the country.

Blackett also developed various new devices in mining machinery. He patented a wire-rope socket which made use of a metal wedge; invented a rotary tippler driven by frictional contact instead of gearing and which stopped automatically; and he designed a revolving cylindrical coal-washer, which also gained interest among German mining engineers. His most important invention, the first successful coal-face conveyor, was patented in 1902. It was driven by compressed air and consisted of a trough running along the length of the race through which ran an endless scraper chain. Thus fillers cast the coal into the trough, and the scraper chain drew it to the main gate to be loaded into trams.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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A former Second Lieutenant of the Austrian navy (hence his later nickname "Captain") and graduate of the Polytechnic Institute of Graz, Lucas decided to stay in Michigan when he visited his relatives in 1879. He changed his original name, Lucie, into the form his uncle had adopted and became a naturalized American citizen at the age of 30. He worked in the lumber industry for some years and then became a consulting mechanical and mining engineer in Washington, DC. He began working for a salt-mining company in Louisiana in 1893 and became interested in the geology of the Mexican Gulf region, with a view to prospecting for petroleum. In the course of this work he came to the conclusion that the hills in this elevated area, being geological structures distinct from the surrounding deposits, were natural reservoirs of petroleum. To prove his unusual theory he subsequently chose Spindle Top, near Beaumont, Texas, where in 1899 he began to bore a first oil-well. A second drill-hole, started in October 1900, was put through clay and quicksand. After many difficulties, a layer of rock containing marine shells was reached. When the "gusher" came out on 10 January 1901, it not only opened up a new era in the oil and gas business, but it also led to the future exploration of the terrestrial crust.

Lucas's boring was a breakthrough for the rotary drilling system, which was still in its early days although its principles had been established by the English engineer Robert Beart in his patent of 1884. It proved to have advantages over the pile-driving of pipes. A pipe with a simple cutter at the lower end was driven with a constantly revolving motion, grinding down on the bottom of the well, thus gouging and chipping its way downward. To deal with the quicksand he adopted the use of large and heavy casings successively telescoped one into the other. According to Fauvelle's method, water was forced through the pipe by means of a pump, so the well was kept full of circulating liquid during drilling, flushing up the mud. When the salt-rock was reached, a diamond drill was used to test the depth and the character of the deposit.

When the well blew out and flowed freely he developed a preventer in order to save the oil and, even more importantly at the time, to shut the well and to control the oil flow. This assembly, patented in 1903, consisted of a combined system of pipes, valves and casings diverting the stream into a horizontal direction.

Lucas's fame spread around the world, but as he had to relinquish the larger part of his interest to the oil company supporting the exploration, his financial reward was poor. One year after his success at Spindle Top he started oil exploration in Mexico, where he stayed until 1905, when he resumed his consulting practice in Washington, DC.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After Menzies conceived his idea of breaking off coal with machines in 1761, many inventors subsequently followed his proposals through into the practice of underground working. More than one century later, Garforth became one of the principal pioneers of machine-holing combined with the longwall method of working in order to reduce production costs and increase the yield of coal. Having been appointed agent to Pope \& Pearson's Collieries, West Yorkshire, in 1879, of which company he later became Managing Director and Chairman, he gathered a great deal of experience with different methods of cutting coal. The first disc machine was exhibited in London as early as 1851, and ten years later a pick machine was invented. In 1893 he introduced an improved type of deep undercutting machine, his "diamond" disc coal-cutter, driven by compressed air, which also became popular on the European continent.

Besides the considerable economic advantages it created, the use of machinery for mining coal increased the safety of working in hard and thin seams. The improvement of safety in mining technology was always his primary concern, and as a result of his inventions and his many publications he became the leading figure in the British coal mining industry at the beginning of the twentieth century; safety lamps still carry his name. In 1885 he invented a firedamp detector, and following a severe explosion in 1886 he concentrated on coal-dust experiments. From the information he obtained of the effect of stone-dust on a coal-dust explosion he proposed the stone-dust remedy to prevent explosions of coal-dust. As a result of discussions which lasted for decades and after he had been entrusted with the job of conducting the British coal-dust experiments, in 1921 an Act made it compulsory in all mines which were not naturally wet throughout to treat all roads with incombustible dust so as to ensure that the dust always consisted of a mixture containing not more than 50 per cent combustible matter. In 1901 Garforth erected a surface gallery which represented the damaged roadways of a mine and could be filled with noxious fumes to test self-contained breathing apparata. This gallery formed the model from which all the rescue-stations existing nowadays have been developed.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After studying law, philosophy and politics at the University of Olmutz (now Olomouc), in 1835 Rittinger became a fellow of the Mining Academy in Schemnitz (now Banská Štiavnica), Slovakia. In 1839, the year he finished at the academy, he published a book on perspective drawing. The following year, he became Inspector of Mills at the ore mines in Schemnitz, and in 1845 he was engaged in coal mining in Bohemia and Moravia. In 1849 he joined the mining administration at Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov), Bohemia. In these early years he contributed his first important innovations for the mining industry and thus fostered his career in the government's service. In 1850 he was called to Vienna to become a high-ranked officer in various ministries. He was responsible for the construction of buildings, pumping installations and all sorts of machinery in the mining industry; he reorganized the curricula of the mining schools, was responsible for the mint and became head of the department of mines, forests and salt-works in the Austrian empire.

During all his years of public service, Rittinger continued his concern with technological innovations. He improved the processing of ores by introducing in 1844 the rotary washer and the box classifier, and later his continuously shaking concussion table which, having been exhibited at the Vienna World Fair of 1873, was soon adopted in other countries. He constructed water-column pumps, invented a differential shaft pump with hydraulic linkage to replace the heavy iron rods and worked on centrifugal pumps. He was one of the first to be concerned with the transfer of heat, and he developed a system of using exhaust steam for heating in salt-works. He kept his eye on current developments abroad, using his function as official Austrian commissioner to the world exhibitions, on which he published frequently as well as on other matters related to technology. With his systematic handbook on mineral processing, first published in 1867, he emphasized his international reputation in this specialized field of mining.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After studying law at the University of Göttingen, Albert turned to the mining industry and in 1806 started his career in mining administration in the Harz district, where he became Chief Inspector of mines thirty years later. His influence on the organization of the mining industry was considerable and he contributed valuable ideas for the development of mining technology. For example, he initiated experiments with Reichenbach's water-column pump in Harz when it had been working successfully in the transportation of brine in Bavaria, and he encouraged Dörell to work on his miner's elevator.

The increasing depths of shafts in the Harz district brought problems with hoisting as the ropes became too heavy and tended to break. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, iron link chains replaced the hempen ropes which were expensive and wore out too quickly, especially in the wet conditions in the shafts. After he had experimented for six years using counterbalancing iron link chains, which broke too easily, in 1834 he conceived the idea of producing stranded cables from iron wires. Their breaking strength and flexibility depended greatly on the softness of the iron and the way of laying the strands. Albert produced the cable by attaching the wires to strings which he turned evenly; this method became known as "Albert lay". He was not the first to conceive the idea of metal cables: there exists evidence for such cables as far back as Pompeii; Leonardo da Vinci made sketches of cables made from brass wires; and in 1780 the French engineer Reignier applied iron cables for lightning conductors. The idea also developed in various other mining areas, but Albert cables were the first to gain rapidly direct common usage worldwide.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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He was the eldest son of Wolf Christopher Polhamma, a merchant. The father died in 1669 and the son was sent by his stepfather to an uncle in Stockholm who found him a place in the Deutsche Rechenschule. After the death of his uncle, he was forced to find employment, which he did with the Biorenklou family near Uppsala where he eventually became a kind of estate bailiff. It was during this period that he started to work with a lathe, a forge and at carpentry, displaying great technical ability. He realized that without further education he had little chance of making anything of his life, and accordingly, in 1687, he registered at the University of Uppsala where he studied astronomy and mathematics, remaining there for three years. He also repaired two astronomical pendulum clocks as well as the decrepit medieval clock in the cathedral. After a year's work he had this clock running properly: this was his breakthrough. He was summoned to Stockholm where the King awarded him a salary of 500 dalers a year as an encouragement to further efforts. Around this time, one of increasing mechanization and when mining was Sweden's principal industry, Pohlem made a model of a hoist frame for mines and the Mines Authority encouraged him to develop his ideas. In 1693 Polhem completed the Blankstot hoist at the Stora Kopparberg mine, which attracted great interest on the European continent.

From 1694 to 1696 Polhem toured factories, mills and mines abroad in Germany, Holland, England and France, studying machinery of all kinds and meeting many foreign engineers. In 1698 he was appointed Director of Mining Engineering in Sweden, and in 1700 he became Master of Construction in the Falu Mine. He installed the Karl XII hoist there, powered by moving beams from a distant water-wheel. His plan of 1697 for all the machinery at the Falu mine to be driven by three large and remote water-wheels was never completed.

In 1707 he was invited by the Elector of Hanover to visit the mines in the Harz district, where he successfully explained many of his ideas which were adopted by the local engineers. In 1700, in conjunction with Gabriel Stierncrona, he founded the Stiersunds Bruk at Husby in Southern Dalarna, a factory for the mass production of metal goods in iron, steel and bronze. Simple articles such as pans, trays, bowls, knives, scissors and mirrors were made there, together with the more sophisticated Polhem lock and the Stiersunds clock. Production was based on water power. Gear cutting for the clocks, shaping hammers for plates, file cutting and many other operations were all water powered, as was a roller mill for the sheet metal used in the factory. He also designed textile machinery such as stocking looms and spinning frames and machines for the manufacture of ribbons and other things.

In many of his ideas Polhem was in advance of his time and Swedish country society was unable to absorb them. This was largely the reason for the Stiersund project being only a partial success. Polhem, too, was of a disputatious nature, self-opinionated almost to the point of conceit. He was a prolific writer, leaving over 20,000 pages of manuscript notes, drafts, essays on a wide range of subjects, which included building, brick-making, barrels, wheel-making, bell-casting, organ-building, methods of stopping a horse from bolting and a curious tap "to prevent serving maids from sneaking wine from the cask", the construction of ploughs and threshing machines. His major work, Kort Berattelse om de Fornamsta Mechaniska Inventioner (A Brief Account of the Most Famous Inventions), was printed in 1729 and is the main source of knowledge about his technological work. He is also known for his "mechanical alphabet", a collection of some eighty wooden models of mechanisms for educational purposes. It is in the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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Educated at Wittenberg University during 1547–8, Ercker obtained in 1554, through one of his wife's relatives, the post of Assayer from the Elector Augustus at Dresden. From then on he took a succession of posts in mining and metallurgy. In 1555 he was Chief Consultant and Supervisor of all matters relating to mines, but for some unknown reason was demoted to Warden of the Mint at Annaberg. In 1558 he travelled to the Tyrol to study the mines in that region, and in the same year Prince Henry of Brunswick appointed him Warden, then Master, of the Mint at Goslar. Ercker later moved to Prague where, through another of his wife's relatives, he was appointed Control Tester at Kutna Hora. It was there that he wrote his best-known book, Die Beschreibung allfürnemisten mineralischen Ertz, which drew him to the attention of the Emperor Maximilian, who made him Courier for Mining and a clerk of the Supreme Court of Bohemia. The next Emperor, Rudolf II, a noted patron of science and alchemy, promoted Ercker to Chief Inspector of Mines and ennobled him in 1586 with the title Von Schreckenfels'. His second wife managed the mint at Kutna Hora and his two sons became assayers. These appointments gained him much experience of the extraction and refining of metals. This first bore fruit in a book on assaying, Probierbüchlein, printed in 1556, followed by one on minting, Münzbuch, in 1563. His main work, Die Beschreibung, was a systematic review of the methods of obtaining, refining and testing the alloys and minerals of gold, silver, copper, antimony, mercury and lead. The preparation of acids, salts and other compounds is also covered, and his apparatus is fully described and illustrated. Although Ercker used Agricola's De re metattica as a model, his own work was securely based on his practical experience. Die Beschreibung was the first manual of analytical and metallurgical chemistry and influenced later writers such as Glauber on assaying. After the first edition in Prague came four further editions in Frankfurt-am-Main.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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Robert, the son of Thomas and Ada (Crooks) Stanley, helped to finance his early training at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, by working as a manual training instructor at Montclair High School. After graduating in mechanical engineering from Stevens in 1899, and as a mining engineer from the Columbia School of Mines in 1901, he accepted a two-year assignment from the S.S.White Dental Company to investigate platinum-bearing alluvial deposits in British Columbia. This introduced him to the International Nickel Company (Inco), which had been established on 29 March 1902 to amalgamate the major mining companies working the newly discovered cupro-nickel deposits at Sudbury, Ontario. Ambrose Monell, President of Inco, appointed Stanley as Assistant Superintendent of its American Nickel Works at Camden, near Philadelphia, in 1903. At the beginning of 1904 Stanley was General Superintendent of the Orford Refinery at Bayonne, New Jersey, where most of the output of the Sudbury mines was treated.

Copper and nickel were separated there from the bessemerized matte by the celebrated "tops and bottoms" process introduced thirteen years previously by R.M.Thompson. It soon occurred to Stanley that such a separation was not invariably required and that, by reducing directly the mixed matte, he could obtain a natural cupronickel alloy which would be ductile, corrosion resistant, and no more expensive to produce than pure copper or nickel. His first experiment, on 30 December 1904, was completely successful. A railway wagon full of bessemerized matte, low in iron, was calcined to oxide, reduced to metal with carbon, and finally desulphurized with magnesium. Ingots cast from this alloy were successfully forged to bars which contained 68 per cent nickel, 23 per cent copper and about 1 per cent iron. The new alloy, originally named after Ambrose Monell, was soon renamed Monel to satisfy trademark requirements. A total of 300,000 ft2 (27,870 m²) of this white, corrosion-resistant alloy was used to roof the Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York, and it also found extensive applications in marine work and chemical plant. Stanley greatly increased the output of the Orford Refinery during the First World War, and shortly after becoming President of the company in 1922, he established a new Research and Development Division headed initially by A.J.Wadham and then by Paul D. Merica, who at the US Bureau of Standards had first elucidated the mechanism of age-hardening in alloys. In the mid- 1920s a nickel-ore body of unprecedented size was identified at levels between 2,000 and 3,000 ft (600 and 900 m) below the Frood Mine in Ontario. This property was owned partially by Inco and partially by the Mond Nickel Company. Efficient exploitation required the combined economic resources of both companies. They merged on 1 January 1929, when Mond became part of International Nickel. Stanley remained President of the new company until February 1949 and was Chairman from 1937 until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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Within the long tradition of celebrated teachers at the Mining Academy in Freiberg, Kegel can be considered as probably the last professor teaching the science of mining who was able to cover all the different disciplines. As was the case with a number of his predecessors, he was able to combine theoretical research work with the teaching of students and to support his theories with the practical experience of industry. He has apprenticed at the Mansfeld copper mines, went to the School of Mines at Eisleben (1896–8), worked as an engineer with various mining companies and thereafter became a scholar of the Berlin Mining Academy (1901–4). For twelve years he taught at the Bochum School of Mining until, in 1918, he was appointed Professor of Mining at Freiberg. There, one year later, as a new approach, he introduced lectures on brown-coal mining and mineral economics. He remained Professor at Freiberg until his first retirement in 1941, although he was active again between 1945 and 1951.

In 1924 Kegel took over a department at the State Research Institute for Brown Coal in Freiberg which he extended into the Institute for Briquetting. In this field his main achievement lies in the initially questioned theory that producing briquettes from lignite is a molecular process rather than the result of bituminous factors. This perception, among others, led Rammler to produce coke from lignite in 1951. Kegel's merits result from having established all the aspects of mining and using lignite as an independent subdiscipline of mining science, based on substantial theories and an innovative understanding of applied technologies.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Mining and extraction technology, Weapons and armour

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The son of a barber-surgeon who deserted his family to serve in the Swedish army, Nobel showed little interest in academic pursuits as a child and was sent to sea at the age of 16, but jumped ship in Egypt and was eventually employed as an architect by the pasha. Returning to Sweden, he won a scholarship to the Stockholm School of Architecture, where he studied from 1821 to 1825 and was awarded a number of prizes. His interest then leaned towards mechanical matters and he transferred to the Stockholm School of Engineering. Designs for linen-finishing machines won him a prize there, and he also patented a means of transforming rotary into reciprocating movement. He then entered the real-estate business and was successful until a fire in 1833 destroyed his house and everything he owned. By this time he had married and had two sons, with a third, Alfred (of Nobel Prize fame; see Alfred Nobel), on the way. Moving to more modest quarters on the outskirts of Stockholm, Immanuel resumed his inventions, concentrating largely on India rubber, which he applied to surgical instruments and military equipment, including a rubber knapsack.

It was talk of plans to construct a canal at Suez that first excited his interest in explosives. He saw them as a means of making mining more efficient and began to experiment in his backyard. However, this made him unpopular with his neighbours, and the city authorities ordered him to cease his investigations. By this time he was deeply in debt and in 1837 moved to Finland, leaving his family in Stockholm. He hoped to interest the Russians in land and sea mines and, after some four years, succeeded in obtaining financial backing from the Ministry of War, enabling him to set up a foundry and arms factory in St Petersburg and to bring his family over. By 1850 he was clear of debt in Sweden and had begun to acquire a high reputation as an inventor and industrialist. His invention of the horned contact mine was to be the basic pattern of the sea mine for almost the next 100 years, but he also created and manufactured a central-heating system based on hot-water pipes. His three sons, Ludwig, Robert and Alfred, had now joined him in his business, but even so the outbreak of war with Britain and France in the Crimea placed severe pressures on him. The Russians looked to him to convert their navy from sail to steam, even though he had no experience in naval propulsion, but the aftermath of the Crimean War brought financial ruin once more to Immanuel. Amongst the reforms brought in by Tsar Alexander II was a reliance on imports to equip the armed forces, so all domestic arms contracts were abruptly cancelled, including those being undertaken by Nobel. Unable to raise money from the banks, Immanuel was forced to declare himself bankrupt and leave Russia for his native Sweden. Nobel then reverted to his study of explosives, particularly of how to adapt the then highly unstable nitroglycerine, which had first been developed by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, for blasting and mining. Nobel believed that this could be done by mixing it with gunpowder, but could not establish the right proportions. His son Alfred pursued the matter semi-independently and eventually evolved the principle of the primary charge (and through it created the blasting cap), having taken out a patent for a nitroglycerine product in his own name; the eventual result of this was called dynamite. Father and son eventually fell out over Alfred's independent line, but worse was to follow. In September 1864 Immanuel's youngest son, Oscar, then studying chemistry at Uppsala University, was killed in an explosion in Alfred's laboratory: Immanuel suffered a stroke, but this only temporarily incapacitated him, and he continued to put forward new ideas. These included making timber a more flexible material through gluing crossed veneers under pressure and bending waste timber under steam, a concept which eventually came to fruition in the form of plywood.

In 1868 Immanuel and Alfred were jointly awarded the prestigious Letterstedt Prize for their work on explosives, but Alfred never for-gave his father for retaining the medal without offering it to him.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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Buddle was educated by his father, a former schoolteacher who was from 1781 the first inspector and manager of the new Wallsend colliery. When his father died in 1806, John Buddle assumed full responsibility at the Wallsend colliery, and he remained as inspector and manager there until 1819, when he was appointed as colliery agent to the third Marquis of Londonderry. In this position, besides managing colliery business, he acted as an entrepreneur, gaining political influence and organizing colliery owners into fixing prices; Buddle and Londonderry were also responsible for the building of Seaham harbour. Buddle became known as the "King of the Coal Trade", gaining influence throughout the important Northumberland and Durham coalfield.

Buddle's principal contribution to mining technology was with regard to the improvement of both safety standards and productivity. In 1807 he introduced a steam-driven air pump which extracted air from the top of the upcast shaft. Two years later, he drew up plans which divided the coalface into compartments; this enabled nearly the whole seam to be exploited. The system of compound ventilation greatly reduced the danger of explosions: the incoming air was divided into two currents, and since each current passed through only half the underground area, the air was less heavily contaminated with gas.

In 1813 Buddle presented an important paper on his method for mine ventilation to the Sunderland Society for Preventing Accidents in Coal-mines, which had been established in that year following a major colliery explosion. He emphasized the need for satisfactory underground lighting, which influenced the development of safety-lamps, and assisted actively in the experiments with Humphrey Davy's lamp which he was one of the first mine managers to introduce. Another mine accident, a sudden flood, prompted him to maintain a systematic record of mine-workings which ultimately resulted in the establishment of the Mining Record Office.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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The son of a mining officer, Oeynhausen started his career in the Prussian administration of the mining industry in 1816, immediately after he had finished his studies in natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. From 1847 until his retirement he was a most effective head of state mines inspectorates, first in Silesia (Breslau; now Wroclaw, Poland), later in Westphalia (Dortmund). During his working life he served in all the important mining districts of Prussia, and travelled to mining areas in other parts of Germany, Belgium, France and Britain. In the 1820s, after visiting Glenck's well-known saltworks near Wimpfen, he was commissioned to search for salt deposits in Prussian territory, where he discovered the thermal springs south of Minden which later became the renowned spa carrying his name.

With deeper drills, the increased weight of the rods made it difficult to disengage the drill on each stroke and made the apparatus self-destructive on impact of the drill. Oeynhausen, from 1834, used fish joints, flexible connections between the drill and the rods. Not only did they prevent destructive impact, but they also gave a jerk on the return stroke that facilitated disengagements. He never claimed to have invented the fish joints: in fact, they appeared almost simultaneously in Europe and in America at that time, and had been used since at least the seventeenth century in China, although they were unknown in the Western hemisphere.

Using fish joints meant the start of a new era in deep-drilling, allowing much deeper wells to be sunk than before. Five weeks after Oeynhausen, K.G. Kind operated with a different kind of fish joint, and in 1845 another Prussian mining officer, Karl Leopold Fabian (1782–1855), Director of the salt inspectorate at Schönebeck, Elbe, improved the fish joints by developing a special device between the rod and the drill to enable the chisel, strengthened by a sinker bar, to fall onto the bottom of the hole without hindrance with a higher effect. The free-fall system became another factor in the outstanding results of deep-drilling in Prussia in the nineteenth century.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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At the University of Prague he studied law, but thereafter turned to mineralogy, physics and different aspects of mining. In 1769–70 he worked with the mining administration in Schemnitz (now Banská Stiavnica, Slovakia) and Prague and later continued travelling to many parts of Europe, with special interests in the mining districts. In 1776, he was charged to enlarge and systematically to reshape the natural-history collection in Vienna. Three years later he was appointed Wirklicher Hofrat at the mining and monetary administration of the Austrian court.

Born, who had been at a Jesuit college in his youth, was an active freemason in Vienna and exercised remarkable social communication. The intensity of his academic exchange was outstanding, and he was a member of more than a dozen learned societies throughout Europe. When with the construction of a new metallurgic plant at Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov, Czech Republic) the methods of extracting silver and gold from ores by the means of quicksilver demanded acute consideration, it was this form of scientific intercourse that induced him in 1786 to invite many of his colleagues from several countries to meet in Schemnitz in order to discuss his ideas. Since the beginnings of the 1780s Born had developed the amalgamation process as had first been applied in Mexico in 1557, by mixing the roasted and chlorinated ores with water, ingredients of iron and quicksilver in drums and having the quicksilver refined from the amalgam in the next step. The meeting led to the founding of the Societät der Bergbaukunde, the first internationally structured society of scientists in the world. He died as the result of severe injuries suffered in an accident while he was studying fire-setting in a Slovakian mine in 1770.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After attending schools in Langres and Dijon, Jobard worked in Groningen and Maastricht as a cadastral officer from 1811 onwards. After the Netherlands had been constituted as a new state in 1814, he became a Dutch citizen in 1815 and settled in Brussels. In 1825, when he had learned of the invention of lithography by Alois Senefelder, he retired and established a renowned lithographic workshop in Belgium, with considerable commercial profit. After the political changes which led to the separation of Belgium from the Netherlands in 1830, he devoted his activities to the progress of science and industry in this country, in the traditional idea of enlightenment. His main aim was to promote all branches of the young economy, to which he contributed with ceaseless energy. He cultivated especially the transfer of technology in many articles he wrote on his various journeys, such as to Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland, and he continued to do so when he became the Director of the Museum of Industry in Brussels in 1841, editing its Bulletin until his death. Jobard, as a member of societies for the encouragement of arts and industry in many countries, published on almost any subject and produced many inventions. Being a restless character by nature, and having, in addition, a strong attitude towards designing and constructing, he also contributed to mining technology in 1828 when he was the first European to practise successfully the Chinese method of rope drilling near Brussels.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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A direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, Treadgold worked as a schoolmaster, mostly at Bath College, for eleven years after completing his studies at Oxford University. He gained a reputation as an energetic teacher who devoted much of his work to sport, but he resigned his post and returned to Oxford; here, in 1897, he learned of the gold rush in the Klondike in the Canadian northwest. With a view to making his own fortune, he took a course in geology at the London Geological College and in 1898 set off for Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory. Working as a correspondent for two English newspapers, he studied thoroughly the situation there; he decided to join the stampede, but as a rather sophisticated gold hustler.

As there were limited water resources for sluicing or dredging, and underground mining methods were too expensive, Treadgold conceived the idea of hydraulic mining. He designed a ditch-and-siphon system for bringing large amounts of water down from the mountains; in 1901, after three years of negotiation with the Canadian government in Ottawa, he obtained permission to set up the Treadgold Concession to cover the water supply to the Klondike mining claims. This enabled him to supply giant water cannons which battered the hillsides, breaking up the gravel which was then sluiced. Massive protests by the individual miners in the Dawson City region, which he had overrun with his system, led to the concession being rescinded in 1904. Two years later, however, Treadgold began again, forming the Yukon Gold Company, initially in partnership with Solomon Guggenheim; he started work on a channel, completed in 1910, to carry water over a distance of 115 km (70 miles) down to Bonanza Creek. In 1919 he founded the Granville Mining Company, which was to give him control of all the gold-mining operations in the southern Klondike region. When he returned to London in the following year, the company began to fail, and in 1920 he went bankrupt with liabilities totalling more than $2 million. After the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation had been formed in 1923, Treadgold returned to the Klondike in 1925 in order to acquire the assets of the operating companies; he gained control and personally supervised the operations. But the company drifted towards disaster, and in 1930 he was dismissed from active management and his shares were cancelled by the courts; he fought for their reinstatement right up until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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Biringuccio spent much of his life in the service of, or under the patronage of, the Petruccis, one of the leading families of Siena. In his youth, he was able to travel widely in Italy and Germany, observing mining and metallurgical processes at first hand. For example, his visit to the brass-works in Milan was to be the source of the detailed description in Pirotechnia, published alter his death. He held various appointments in charge of mines or other concerns, such as the Siena mint, under the patronage of the Petruccis. During two periods of exile, while the Petrucci fortunes were in eclipse, he engaged in military activities such as the casting of cannon. That included the great culverin of Florence cast in 1529, also described in the Pirotechnia. In December 1534 Pope Paul III offered him the post of Director of the papal foundry and munitions. He did not take up the post until 1536, but he died the following year.

P irotechnia, which made Biringuccio famous, was published in Venice in 1540, three years after his death. The word "pirotechnia" had a wider meaning than that of fireworks, extending to the action of fire on various substances and including distillation and the preparation of acids. While owing something to earlier written sources, the book is substantially based on a lifetime of practical experience of mining and metalworking, including smelting, casting and alloying, and evidence in the book suggests that it was written between 1530 and 1535. Curzio Navo brought out the second and third editions in 1550 and 1559, as well as a Latin edition. A fourth edition was also printed in 1559. The appearance of four editions in such a short time testifies to the popularity and usefulness of the work.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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Having completed his studies at the Technological Institute in Stockholm and the Mining School at Falun, Crælius was awarded a grant by the Swedish Jernkontoret and in 1879 he travelled to Germany, France and Belgium in order to study technological aspects of the mining, iron and steel industries. In the same year he went to the United States, where he worked with an iron works in Colorado and a mining company in Nevada. In 1884, having returned to Sweden, he obtained an appointment in the Norberg mines; two years later, he took up employment at the Ängelsberg oilmill.

His mining experience had shown him the demand for a reliable, handy and cheap method of drilling, particularly for prospecting purposes. He had become acquainted with modern drilling methods in America, possibly including Albert Fauck's drilling jar. In 1886, Crælius designed his first small-diameter drill, which was assembled in one unit. Its rotating boring rod, smooth on the outside, was fixed inside a hollow mandrel which could be turned in any direction. This first drill was hand-driven, but the hydraulic version of it became the prototype for all near-surface prospecting drills in use worldwide in the late twentieth century.

Between 1890 and 1900 Crælius was managing director of the Morgårdshammar mechanical workshops, where he was able to continue the development of his drilling apparatus. He successfully applied diesel engines in the 1890s, and in 1895 he added diamond crowns to the drill. The commercial exploitation of the invention was carried out by Svenska Diamantbergborrings AB, of which Crælius was a director from its establishment in 1886.

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See also: Fauvelle, Pierre-Pascal

SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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Pötsch was the son of a forest officer and could not easily attend school, with the consequences that it took him a long time to obtain the scholarly education needed to enable him to begin work on a higher level with the mining administration in the duchy of Anhalt in 1868. Seven years later, he was licensed as a Prussian mining surveyor and in this capacity he worked with the mining inspectorate of Aschersleben. During that time he frequently came across shafts for brown-coal mines which had been sunk down to watery strata but then had to be abandoned. His solution to the problem was to freeze the quicksand with a solution of chloride; this was better than the previous attempts in England to instal cooling coils at the bottom of the shaft. Pötsch's conception implied the construction of ice walls with the means of boreholes and refrigerators. By his method a set of boreholes was driven through the watery strata, the smaller pipes contained within the main bore pipes, providing a channel through which calcium chloride was pumped, returning through the longer pipe until the ground was frozen solid. He obtained a patent in 1883 and many leading international journals reported on the method the same year.

In 1884 he established the Internationale Gesselschaft für Schacht-, Brucken-und Tunnelbau in Magdeburg and he also became Director of the Poetsch-Sooy-Smith Freezing Company in New Jersey, which constructed the first freezing shaft in America in 1888.

However, Pötsch was successful only for a short period of time and, being a clumsy entrepreneur, he had to dissolve his company in 1894. Unfortunately, his decision to carry out the complete shaft-sinking business did not allow him to concentrate on solving upcoming technical problems of his new process. It was Louis Gebhardt (1861–1924), his former engineer, who took care of development, especially in co-operation with French mining engineers, and thus provided the basis for the freezing process becoming widely used for shaft-sinking in complicated strata ever since.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After attending the School of Mines at Bochum, from 1862 he worked as an overseer in the coal-mining district of Ibbenbüren until he joined a mining company in the Ruhr area. There, as head of the machine shop, he was mainly concerned with sinking new shafts. In 1873 he became the Technical Director of the Hannover mine, near Bochum, which belonged to Krupp. When the shaft hoisting was to be extended to a lower level Koepe conceived the idea of applying a friction winder to the hoist instead of a drum, in order to save weight and costs. His method involved the use of an endless rope to which the cages were fixed without a safety catch. The rope passed over pulleys instead of coiling and uncoiling on a drum, and he consequently proposed to have the motor erected on top of the shaft rather than beside it, as had been the practice until then.

Koepe's innovation turned out to be highly effective for hoisting heavy loads from deep shafts and was still popular in many countries in the 1990s, although the Krupp company did not accept it for a long time. He had severe personal problems with the company, and as Krupp refused to have his system patented he had to take it out in his own name in 1877. However, Krupp did not pay for the extension of the patent, nor did they pass the dossiers over to him, so the patent expired two years later. It was not until 1888 that a hoisting engine equipped with a friction winder was erected for the first time in a head gear, above the new Hannover II shaft. The following year Koepe left the Krupp company and settled as a freelance consulting engineer in Bochum; he was successful in having his system introduced by other mining companies. Ironi-cally, in 1948 the world's first four-rope winding, based on his system, was installed at the Hannover mine.

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