436

THE COLLIERY GUARDIAN.

February 28, 1913.

general use for unwatering. In 1763, a cylinder 74 in. in
diameter and 10| ft. long was in use at Walker Colliery.

It was very remarkable that, for 50 years after its intro-
duction,the steam-engine was used solely to unwater mines.
In 1776, the first engine—a pumping engine—to be placed
below ground was set to work at Whitehaven Colliery.
About the same time, the idea of a mechanical coal-cutter
seemed to have occurred to someone, for it was recorded in
a book published anonymously in 1835, that, 60 years before,
“Willy Brown's Iron Man" was set to work at the coal
face in Willington Colliery. This agent was to have done
the work of a giant, but, as he required a strong man to
work him and another to direct his blow, he was laid aside.
In 1877, a Newcomen engine, with a cylinder 26 in. in
diameter and a stroke of 5| ft., making 14 strokes per
minute, was set to work at Longbenton Colliery to raise
water to a height of 34 ft. at the rate of 146 cubic feet per
minute, the head of water being utilised subsequently to
drive a water-wheel which drew up a basket or corf of coal
weighing 6| cwt. in two minutes, That was one of the
first applications of steam power to coal winding, if not the
very first, although the application was not, of course,
direct.

Another improvement which became general about the
end of the eighteenth century was the use of plate rails for
underground carriages. Flat wooden rails survived for a
long period, but were superseded eventually, first by flit
and then by round-topped rails of cast iron. Round-
topped rails and flanged wheels of cast iron came gradually
into general use. The next improvement was wrought iron
rails. It was interesting to note that the first wrought iron
rails, invented by Birkenshaw, were rolled at Bedlington in
1820.

Though of great engineering and scientific interest, the
improvement made by Watt in the steam engine—he
improved the efficiency of Newcomen's engine to such an
extent that it became useful and economical for general
service—had no direct association with that district—a
thing that could be said of few important steps in mecha-
nical science. The work of Watt, for instance, was shortly
to result in an important development which must always
be associated with that district and with the name of
Stephenson. The end of the eighteenth century saw at
least the beginning of the general application of steam
power to mining work. A period that witnessed the change
from mere mechanical appliances to the steam-engine saw
a very great advance, with which only one subsequent
advance was comparable.

The construction of a system of canals covering the
country, which dated from the beginning of the nineteenth
century, greatly assisted the coal trade by enabling coal to
be cheaply transported, but the general adoption of Watt's
double-acting steam engine in factories, which also dated
from about that time, had, perhaps, the greatest influence
on the output of the collieries. Watt’s improvements had
far-reaching results, among them the application of steam
power to the haulage of coals. The first attempt was made
about 1805, when an engine was employed to draw coals
from the valley at Birtley to the high grounds of Black
Fell. That was shortly followed by perhaps the greatest
of the immediate results of Watt’s improvements—namely,
the development of the steam locomotive, which was first
used for surface haulage to replace horses at Wylam
and Killingworth collieries in 1813-14. The idea of
locomotion seemed to have occurred to Watt himself,
but the work was left for two mining engineers, of that
district—Wm. Hedley, of Wylam Colliery, and a little later
Geo. Stephenson, of Killingworth Colliery—though even
earlier attempts at locomotion by steam-power seem to have
been made by Trevithick, at Merthyr Tydvil, and by
Brunton, at Newbottle Colliery, in Durham. By 1850 coal
was being transported by rail to almost every part of the
country.

With the formation of the North of England Institute of
Mining and Mechanical Engineers in 1852 and the adoption
of the principle of co-operation in experience and know-
ledge, coalmining became, in a higher degree, a specialised
industry.

The steam engine was first applied to pumping, secondly
to winding, and thirdly to surface haulage. It was applied
to underground haulage and to ventilation in the early
fifties. In 1855 an exhaustive paper on the conveyance of
coal underground, in which was described a great number of
experiments, was presented to the North of England Insti-
tute by its first president, Mr. Nicholas Wood.

Mention was made of the successful use of compressed
air for the transmission of power below ground at the Govan
Colliery, in Scotland, in 1853. It was not, however, until
about 1870 that its use attracted the attention it deserved.
By that time the difficulties and inconveniences of power
transmission by ropes and steam had begun to be fully
appreciated. As a consequence, a number of compressed-
air-driven haulages were set to work in Northumberland
and Durham, and he thought he was right in saying that
the general adoption of compressed air was only stayed by
the possibility, soon to be realised, of adopting electricity
for power transmission.

The transmission of power below ground by electricity
was a development comparable with that which followed
the first application of steam power to mining work, for it

was possible, by the aid of electricity, to employ usefully
80 per cent, of the power generated at the surface, under con-
ditions most favourable to economy, at almost any distance
from the mine shaft. A very early suggestion regarding
the future possibilities of electricity for underground work
was contained in a paper contributed by Mr. Henry Davy to
the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in
1882, and they had it from Mr. Mountain that one of the
earliest examples of the transmission of power by electricity
was at the North Seaton Colliery of the Cowpen Coal
Company in 1888, when a pump If miles from the shaft was
driven by an electric motor. Electricity was very quickly
and successfully applied to pumping and to haulage; in
fact, the great problem of the latter end of last century—
namely, the haulage of heavy trains of coal below ground—
was enabled to be successfully and economically overcome
by its aid.

At the beginning of the present century, the problems
which still lacked an adequate solution were, he thought,
but two—some mechanical means of getting the coal and of
handling it at the coal face, as distinct from its conveyance
to the shaft, and some better means of lighting the working
places than was provided by the oil safety lamp, although
the latter was hardly, perhaps, strictly speaking, a
mechanical problem.

From about 1880 to the present time, slow but steady
progress had been made in the application of mechanical
power to coal-cutting. Very little progress in that direction
had been made in the last 30 years in the north-eastern
coalfield. Part of the explanation was to be found in the
fact that the system of working best suited to coal-cutting
machinery—namely, longwall—was not the system commonly
adopted in Northumberland and Durham. An increase in
the employment of mechanical coal-cutters seemed certainly
to be due. The matter was one solely for the mining
engineer, for the problem presented by the efficient trans-
mission of power had been solved, and the high degree of
efficiency which was now attained by the use of all varieties
of spur gearing was one of the recent successes of mechanical
science.

As an example of the efforts which had been made by
electrical engineers also to meet the requirements of coal-
cutting, attention might be drawn to an electrical device
which automatically regulated the feed or forward travel
of a coal-cutter the moment a hard place necessitating a
demand upon the motor in excess of a predetermined
maximum was reached. As might have been anticipated,
the conveyance of coal at the coal face received early
attention from mining engineers in that district, and one or
two coal-face conveyors which had proved to be successful
were designed in that neighbourhood.

The attention that had been directed to the need for an
improved safety lamp was too recent to require any detailed
reference. What was wanted was a lamp that would give
two or three times the light of an oil safety lamp without
being appreciably heavier than the latter. Several lamps
were now obtainable which approached, if they did not
fulfil, those requirements, and one might predict with
confidence an early and enduring settlement of the problem.

The present century had witnessed nothing in mining
comparable with the wide adoption of electricity. The
application of the rotary principle to the production of
motive power by means of steam, due to Sir Chas. Parsons,
greatly assisted the cheap generation of electricity. Motors
totalling over 100,000-horse power were now at work in the
mines of Northumberland and Durham. For the various
operations of pumping, coal-cutting and coal conveyance,
electricity now stood pre-eminent, and a modern installa-
tion of electric motors might be made a thoroughly mecha-
nical job well able to withstand rough usage (for it might
be made " ironclad " throughout from the generator to the
motor). Further, the apparatus might be so protected that
if the current were rightly used—that was, only where the
risk of accident arising therefrom was, so far as could be
seen, negligible—the standard of safety was as high as that
to be attained by any machinery in any situation. An
important advance in the available means of protecting
electrical circuits had been made within quite recent years
—an advance comparable with the invention of the safety
valve in steam engineering (although its function was
somewhat different), namely, the development of safety
cut-out apparatus which had attained high practical
efficiency, acting on the principle that a circuit should be
opened and the conductors made dead immediately any part
of the current left the path mapped out for it by leaking
either to earth or to any neighbouring material. That
advance, like so many others, owed its origin and develop-
ment to inventive skill and energy properly belonging to
that locality.

They had seen that, at a not very remote period, two
solitary pumping engines lifted water from the mines on
the banks of the Tyne. Smokeless collieries were the rule
then. They had again in that district a few collieries—
and those the most modern—which were truly smokeless.
Few would refuse to subscribe to the ideal of smokeless
collieries, even if that ideal could not, with completeness,
be everywhere achieved.

In conclusion, he said that, although some might be
found to argue that to burrow into the past was a some-
what futile proceeding, or at best of little practical help as

regarded such engineering problems as remained partly or
wholly unsolved, it might serve to remind them, as an
association of engineers but recently established in the
district, of the eminent position which that locality could
claim in the history of engineering. It was a worthy task
to assist in maintaining that position as a pioneer of
engineering development which, right up to the present day,
the north-east coast had so honourably filled.

In the subsequent discussion Prof. W. M. Thornton
said he thought the paper pointed a moral. The ventila-
tion in the old days could not have been what was called
good, but there were certain fewer fires when they
remembered what the output was. Touching on other
points, Dr. Thornton mentioned that he believed there
was still a Newcomen engine working at Ashton. As he
understood Mr. Nelson’s paper, it had a purpose. The
message it conveyed to him was that they, in that
district, were now 30 years behind the times in the use
of coal-cutters in mines. They were the pioneers for
many years of mechanical power in mines, and now they
were letting it slip.

Mr. A. P. Gridley said that Mr. Nelson had brought
them presumably down to last December. He wished
to give a little information with regard to what would
presumably be the most modern colliery in the county
of Durham, or probably in the north of England, within
the two next months owing to the enterprise of the
Horden Collieries Company. Owing to some misunder-
standing at the new Blackhall Colliery, steam winding
engines were ordered. He and his colleagues thought
it was a mistake for an absolutely new colliery to use
steam for any purpose whatever. In spite of the fact
that for sinking purposes a large boiler installation and
steam plant and expensive buildings, stacks, &c., had
been erected, they succeeded in inducing the directors
of the company to cancel the order for the steam
winding engines, although these engines were actually
being built. The firm was going to take the opportunity
of making the colliery village a “ garden city.” They
had a green field to work upon, and he understood that
the intention was to have a park right in the centre of
the village. He believed that the shops—no doubt
public houses also—places of worship and houses were
to be built round that green space.

Mr. Mountain remarked that, as to the use of com-
pressed air, there was a compressor at a colliery near
Nottingham. It was of quite a comparatively recent
make, 13 steam cylinders with 5 ft. stroke. He con-
verted that into an electrical engine by putting an
alternator on the crank shaft. Before the conversion, it
did certain work requiring 485 indicated horse-power.
Afterwards, it did exactly the same work with 166 indi-
cated horse-power. He gave other examples of similar
economies effected by the conversion of steam machines.
Of coure, he added, compressors had been and would be
improved, but he was perfectly certain that—at any
rate, for working in the pit bottom—compressed air
could not compete with electricity for economy in heavy
haulage work. He complained that he had never seen
any figures of the actual cost of electric winding brought
forward. Would it compete with small coal at 8s. per
ton ?

A number of questions on various points were put
to Mr. Nelson, who, in reply, said he thought
electricity was safe to use where it was safe to use an
ordinary oil safety-lamp. Mr. Claude Palmer had
suggested that, at present, there was at least 50 per cent,
of longwall working in that district. The speaker
accepted that figure. He had been speaking, however,
really of the period from 1880 until then. He thought
that perhaps Mr. Palmer would agree with him that
the longwall system was the system which was growing
and the panel system that which was departing. Dr.
Thornton was correct in the matter of the coal-cutter—
there was a challenge in the paper. The question of
coal-cutting by machinery was a matter entirely for
mining engineers. The mechanical engineer and the
electrical engineer had done their part. It was for the
mining engineer to design machinery suitable for
cutting coal. He was told by an American engineer
that they had developed a machine for panel working
which was entirely successful and which was much
neater and smaller than the ordinary coal-cutter, which
was, in many cases, a monstrosity. He was somewhat
disappointed to hear that Mr. Gridley was introducing
the latest refinements at Horden Colliery. He hoped
Mr. Gridley would limit them as much as possible. It
was the suggestion of refinement in electricity that
drove people away. As to certain queries regarding the
new Rules, a questioner made the mistake of thinking
that the Rules could be made to meet all contingencies.
The Rules did not take the place of intelligence, and he
hoped that the day would be very far distant when
mining engineers would insist on being fed with a spoon.
On the subject of the cost of electric winding, he was