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Early Coal Cutters
Early coal cutters were either compressed air punching machines
or electric cutting machines that made their first appearance
in mines somewhere between 1861 and 1873.
The main purpose for coal cutting is to provide the coal with
more room to expand when it is shot. The more room the coal
has to expand in the shooting, the less it will be shattered.
The cutting machine working ahead of a mechanical loader must
be fast, because a place is loaded out many more times during
a shift by a mechanical loader than is possible with hand loading.
The cutting machine must be speedy enough to keep the cutting
sufficiently ahead of the mechanical loader so as to give time
for drilling and shooting and for other details that must be
attended to before the mechanical loader returns to the working
place.
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Large Cutter
A huge piece of machinery called a rotating steel toothed cutter
runs along the coalface tearing at the coal. As the coal is
broken away from the wall it falls onto a conveyor belt and
is sent to the surface. Longwall mining requires less men to
operate machinery as it usually only uses one massive cutter
and the shafts or rooms underground do not have to be as big.
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Central Machine Shop
The main function of the central machine shop is to repair and
maintain electrical and mechanical equipment used in the mine.
Typical jobs include the rebuilding of longwall stageholders,
continuous mining machines, ram cars, scoops and roof bolters,
overhauling longwall shields and fabricating chutes and hoppers
for coal preparation plants at the mines.
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Communications
Underground communications with the surface was an urgent factor
when considering the isolation and other problems with which
the miners could be confronted.
The telephone was invented in 1874, and three years later, in
1877, the first underground telephone network was installed
in the Caledonia Mine, Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. The Caledonia
mine phones were the first regular commercial or industrial
telephones in Canada and the oldest electrical coal mine telephones
in the world.
They were designed to be held in one hand and the person would
talk into the "mouthpiece" which was then held to
the ear and used as a receiver, or "earpiece." Four
slightly differing styles were produced during the latter half
of 1877. Later, a separate transmitter and receiver replaced
the inconvenient alternating of one piece between mouth and
ear.
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