History
The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 18th century, and later spread to continental Europe and North America, was based on the availability of coal to power steam engines. International trade expanded exponentially when coal-fed steam engines were built for the railways and steamships. The new mines that grew up in the 19th century depended on men and children to work long hours in often dangerous working conditions. There were many coalfields, but the oldest were in Newcastle and Durham, South Wales, Scotland, the Midlands, such as those at Coalbrookdale.
The oldest continuously worked deep-mine in the United Kingdom is Tower Colliery in South Wales valleys in the heart of the South Wales coalfield. This colliery was developed in 1805, and its miners bought it out at the end of the 20th century, to prevent it from being closed. Tower Colliery was finally closed on 25 January 2008, although production continues at the Aberpergwm drift mine owned by Walter Energy.
Coal was mined in America in the early 18th century, and commercial mining started around 1730 in Midlothian, Virginia.
Coal-cutting machines were invented in the 1880s. Before this invention, coal was mined from underground with a pick and shovel. By 1912, surface mining was conducted with steam shovels designed for coal mining.
Read more about this topic: Coal Mining
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)