The Davy lamp is a safety lamp used in flammable atmospheres, invented in 1815 by Sir Humphry Davy. It consists of a wick lamp with the flame enclosed inside a mesh screen. It was created for use in coal mines, to reduce the danger of explosions due to the presence of methane and other flammable gases, called firedamp or minedamp.
Kerosene, or paraffin, is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from Greek: κηρός (kērós) meaning "wax", and was registered as a trademark by Nova Scotia geologist and inventor Abraham Gesner in 1854 before evolving into a generic trademark. It is sometimes spelled kerosine in scientific and industrial usage.
Mining is the extraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earth. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. The ore must be a rock or mineral that contains valuable constituent, can be extracted or mined and sold for profit. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water.
Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a "pit", and above-ground mining structures are referred to as a "pit head". In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine.
A miner is a person who extracts ore, coal, chalk, clay, or other minerals from the earth through mining. There are two senses in which the term is used. In its narrowest sense, a miner is someone who works at the rock face; cutting, blasting, or otherwise working and removing the rock. In a broader sense, a "miner" is anyone working within a mine, not just a worker at the rock face.
Abraham Pineo Gesner, ONB was a Nova Scotian and New Brunswickan physician and geologist who invented kerosene. Gesner was born in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia and lived much of his life in Saint John, New Brunswick. He died in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was an influential figure in the development of the study of Canadian geology and natural history.
Coal oil is a shale oil obtained from the destructive distillation of cannel coal, mineral wax, or bituminous shale, once used widely for illumination.
A Carbide lamp or acetylene gas lamp is a simple lamp that produces and burns acetylene (C2H2), which is created by the reaction of calcium carbide (CaC2) with water (H2O).
A safety lamp is any of several types of lamp that provides illumination in places such as coal mines where the air may carry coal dust or a build-up of inflammable gases, which may explode if ignited, possibly by an electric spark. Until the development of effective electric lamps in the early 1900s, miners used flame lamps to provide illumination. Open flame lamps could ignite flammable gases which collected in mines, causing explosions; safety lamps were developed to enclose the flame to prevent it from igniting the explosive gases. Flame safety lamps have been replaced for lighting in mining with sealed explosion-proof electric lights, but continue to be used to detect gases.
Cannel coal or candle coal is a type of bituminous coal, also classified as terrestrial type oil shale. Due to its physical morphology and low mineral content cannel coal is considered to be coal but by its texture and composition of the organic matter it is considered to be oil shale. Although historically the term cannel coal has been used interchangeably with boghead coal, a more recent classification system restricts cannel coal to terrestrial origin, and boghead coal to lacustrine environments.
The Monongah mining disaster was a coal mine explosion on December 6, 1907, at Fairmont Coal Company's Nos. 6 and 8 mines in Monongah, West Virginia, which killed 362 miners. It has been described as "the worst mining disaster in American history" and was one of the contributing events that led to the creation of the United States Bureau of Mines.
Mine rescue or mines rescue is the specialised job of rescuing miners and others who have become trapped or injured in underground mines because of mining accidents, roof falls or floods and disasters such as explosions.
Mining in Australia has long been a significant primary sector industry and contributor to the Australian economy by providing export income, royalty payments and employment. Historically, mining booms have also encouraged population growth via immigration to Australia, particularly the gold rushes of the 1850s. Many different ores, gems and minerals have been mined in the past and a wide variety are still mined throughout the country.
Mining in Western Australia, together with the petroleum industry in the state, accounted for 94% of the State's and 46% of Australia's income from total merchandise exports in 2019–20. The state of Western Australia hosted 123 predominantly higher value and export-oriented mining projects and hundreds of smaller quarries and mines. The principal projects produced more than 99 per cent of the industry's total sales value.
The Castle Gate mine disaster occurred on March 8, 1924, in a coal mine near the town of Castle Gate, Utah, located approximately 90 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. All of the 171 men working in the mine were killed in the series of three violent explosions. One worker, the leader of the rescue crew, died from carbon monoxide inhalation while attempting to reach the victims shortly after the explosion.
A mining lamp is a lamp, developed for the rigid necessities of underground mining operations. Most often it is worn on a hard hat in the form of a headlamp.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to mining:
Mining in New Zealand began when the Māori quarried rock such as argillite in times prior to European colonisation. Mining by Europeans began in the latter half of the 19th century.
The history of the oil shale industry in the United States goes back to the 1850s; it dates back farther as a major enterprise than the petroleum industry. But although the United States contains the world's largest known resource of oil shale, the US has not been a significant producer of shale oil since 1861. There were three major past attempts to establish an American oil shale industry: the 1850s; in the years during and after World War I; and in the 1970s and early 1980s. Each time, the oil shale industry failed because of competition from cheaper petroleum.
Luther Atwood was an American chemist. He is known for creating new chemical products from the distillation of coal and petroleum.
