Identifier: industrialhistor00boll (find matches)
Title: Industrial history of the United States, from the earliest settlements to the present time: being a complete survey of American industries, embracing agriculture and horticulture; including the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, wheat; the raising of horses, neat-cattle, etc.; all the important manufactures, shipping and fisheries, railroads, mines and mining, and oil; also a history of the coal-miners and the Molly Maguires; banks, insurance, and commerce; trade-unions, strikes, and eight-hour movement; together with a description of Canadian industries
Year: 1878 (1870s)
Authors: Bolles, Albert Sidney, 1846-1939
Subjects: Industries Industries
Publisher: Norwich, Conn. : The Henry Bill pub. Company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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Page 712. Rescue of miners in Wales. ...the account reported in the New-York Tribune last year (1877)? ...mine in Wales... the roar of rushing water... he roll was called fourteen were missing. An exploring-party went down to look for them. They found all the galleries within a few hundred yards of the bottom filled to the roof; but a knocking heard behind a wall of coal indicated that some of the missing men were imprisoned alive in a gallery which sloped upward, its mouth being under water. The wall was several yards thick. Volunteers went at it with their picks. The prisoners worked from within. In a few hours they could hear one anothers voices. But, the moment a hole was broken through,the confined air, kept under great pressure by the rising water, burst out with a terrific explosion, and one of the imprisoned miners was shot into the opening as if he had been blown from a gun. He was taken out dead. Four others in the chamber with him were rescued uninjured. Knockings, however, were heard farther on ; and it appeared that other missing men were in a similar but still worse predicament- — shut into a chamber of compressed air. It is with
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7M INDUSTRIAL HISTORY the efforts to release this second party that the chief interest of the story begins. The wall behind which they were confined was in a heading that was flooded, and nothing could be done with the pick until the water had been Extraordi- pumped out. Divers first attempted the perilous feat of reachingnary energy the opening from the main shaft through half a mile of water, and displayed. ^ wag afterward ascertained that one of the men within had tried to escape in the same way. This, however, was impossible. It was not until the fifth day that the volunteers were able to begin digging. The distanceto be cut was a hundred and twenty feet. The work went on day and night with an eagerness that seemed like desperation ; and yet it was so slow ! Cutting through the solid coal in a gallery not more than three feet high, where the water, only kept down by constant pumping, threatened every moment to rise and in gulf them, with trouble from gas, and the danger of another explo-si

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