Mechanisation and The 18th Century Copper Boom
In 1678 Clement Clerke introduced the coal-powered reverberatory furnace, greatly increasing the quantity of metal extractable from ore. The Mines Royal Act 1689 ended Crown ownership of Cornwall's mines, allowing private investors and local families to begin mining operations. At the same time, the Nine Years' War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) caused high demand for metals. As a consequence the Midlands, with easy river and canal access to the coal mines of Wales and northern England and to the metal mines of Cornwall, became a major centre for metallurgy. Ore was shipped from Cornwall up the River Severn to smelters in Gloucestershire where it was refined and sold on to the factories surrounding Birmingham. Financiers and entrepreneurs began investing in and reorganising the mines of Cornwall. With a shortage of manual labour in rural and lightly-populated Cornwall, and with a prevalent belief that women and children were best suited to ore separation (which required dexterity and good observation skills but little in the way of physical strength), the large-scale recruitment of women and girls to the mines began. It is around this time that the term "bal maiden" appears to have come into common usage, derived from the Old Cornish bal (mine). A significant proportion of Cornwall's young women quickly became involved in mining; by 1736 the vicar of Ludgvan was complaining that he was unable to hire servants as the young women of the town were "employed about copper".
In around 1720, two key innovations revolutionised the Cornish mining industry. The whim, a horse-powered mechanism for lifting ore to the surface, made mining in deep shafts practical, and the horse-powered pump allowed mining beneath the water table.
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