Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. IMPROVEMENTS OF MIXING IN THE SOUTHERN AND WELSH MINES. COAL MINING ENGINEERS. IIETTON COLLIERY. In the Lancashire district, the upper seams of coal gave out but little explosive gas, and the mines there were worked on a small scale. Many hoisting shafts were used at a colliery even in the present century, and the ventilation was not very perfect. You would see one engine in the centre of a group of shafts used to wind the coal from all of them. There was a system of drums and counter-shafts connected to the main shaft of the engine; and some of them were set at right angles to the main. The work had neither system nor centralization in it, and the yield of no particular mine had approached to one-half of that of the average collieries of the North. After the sinking of some of the shafts through the rocks to a lower series of veins, a great deal of gas was encountered in the Rushy Park and Little Delph coal seams now extensively worked at the collieries near St. Helens and "Wigan. Those seams yield a coal of excellent quality, and they vary in thickness from three to five feet. But the men who had been employed as managers in the upper seams made but little progress in these below; and in spite of the means devised, the out-put of the collieries was limited. Matters of business brought Mr. John Wales, well known as a mining engineer of the North, and Mr. Wilson, a wire-rope manufacturer of Haydock, Lancashire, together, and those were met at the house of Mr. Wilson by an opulent colliery owner having an extensive colliery near St. Helens. The conversation flowed naturally into the subject of coal mining. Mr. Johnson was the colliery owner, and he expressed astonishment at Mr. Wales's account of the Hetton collieries, whose admirable system of working...