3. Copper and Coal Through the Ages

The Neolithic Age, or New Stone Age, began about 10,000 BC in the Middle East and ended about 4500 BC.

Chalcolithic is derived from the ancient Greek khalkós for copper and líthos for stone. In the Near East and Europe it is the period after the Neolithic Age and before the Bronze Age, roughly between about 4500 and 3500 BC (Burton and Levy 2011).

Collier is derived from the Middle English word coal. The original sense was ‘maker of charcoal’; however, it came to mean a miner who worked in a colliery or coal mine and also a ship that carried coal. The Endeavour, which Captain Cook sailed on his first voyage that included surveying the east coast of Australia in 1770, was a collier.

To burn wood to a charcoal.

Metals are recrystallized by annealing to improve ductility prior to further working. Generally, the metal is heated until glowing and then allowed to cool to room temperature; however, copper and brass may be quenched in water.

An opening through which a blast of air enters a furnace in order to facilitate combustion. The tuyere may have been a reed some 2 cm in diameter with a pieced clay bulb at the far end so the reed would not burn in the heat of the smelting furnace.

The term Levant first appeared in English in 1497 to describe the East in general, derived from the French Levant ‘rising’, referring to the point where the sun rises. In modern usage, the region west of the Syrian Desert to the Mediterranean Sea, from Aleppo in the north to the Sinai in the south roughly delineates the Levant.

The Arabah referred to the section of the Jordan Rift Valley running between the Sea of Galilee through the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. Modern geographers define only the section from the Dead Sea south as the Arabah.

According to the few estimates available, about 8 kg of charcoal was required to smelt a kilogram of high grade Timna ore containing 32% copper (Merkel 1990; Bamberger et al. 1986), which equates to an ore to charcoal ratio of about 80:1 by volume.

Meteoritic iron is found in meteorites and made from the elements iron and nickel. Apart from minor amounts of telluric iron or native iron, meteoritic iron is the only naturally occurring form of the element iron on the Earth’s surface.

The bloomery was the earliest form of smelter capable of smelting iron. A bloomery’s product is a porous mass of iron and slag called a bloom.

Lake Homs is an artificial lake formed by a dam built around 284 by the Roman emperor Diocletian for irrigation purposes.

Stannary is derived from the Medieval Latin stannaria (tin mine), ultimately from Late Latin stannum (tin) and the origin of the symbol (Sn) for the chemical element.

Land held by a man from his lord for a fee.

Tin coinage was a tax on refined tin, payable to the Duke of Cornwall in the Stannary Towns. The oldest surviving records of coinage show that it was collected in 1156. It was abolished in 1838.

Penzance, on the western tip of Cornwall, made famous by Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, knew press gangs and privateers, Barbary pirates, Spanish raiders and adventurous smugglers. However, its most famous son was Humphry Davy who invented the Davey Safety lamp and chose not to patent his lamp so that miners could use it as widely as possible (Penzance Town Council 2015).

The ransom paid to Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor) was 150,000 Marks, over twice the annual income of the crown of England, hence the term a King’s Ransom (Farmer 2011).

One proposed starting date for the Renaissance is 1401, when Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of Florence.

HMS Victory, the predecessor to Lord Nelson’s Victory, that sank in 1744, was armed with bronze cannon. HMS Victory, Lord Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was armed with cast iron cannon.

In Benin and along the slave rivers of the Niger Delta, the price of a slave rose from 15 manillas in 1506 to 57 in 1517 (Falola and Warnock 2007).

A bronze head of Sulis Minerva was found at Bath. Sulis was a Celtic goddess of the thermal springs and the Romans adopted the name Sulis Minerva recognising the significance of the place to the local inhabitants.

The Dark Ages was originally a synonym for the Middle Ages; however, later historians considered only the period from the fifth century to the eleventh century as the Dark Ages.

The Middle Ages or Medieval Period delineates the period beginning with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century until the Renaissance in the fifteenth century.

Herbert Hoover, U.S. President from 1929 to 1933, was a mining engineer who worked in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, Australia in 1897/98 and subsequently in China from 1899/1900 during the Boxer Rebellion.

‘Copper-bottomed’ became synonymous with reliability and trustworthiness.

William Knox D’Arcy (11 October 1849–1 May 1917) made a fortune from the Mount Morgan Mine in Central Queensland, Australia. On his return to England he began investing in the exploration for oil in Persia in 1901. In 1908 with his finances running out, Mr. Reynolds the drilling supervisor received a telegraph ‘drill to 1600 feet and give up’. Fortuitously, on the 26 May 1908, when the rig drilling near the village of Masjid-i-Sulaiman in south west Iran reached 1180 feet, a fountain of oil burst out into the dawn sky. Within a year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would one day become BP, was in business (BP 2014b).

Brimstone is the archaic name for sulfur; see Revelation 19:20 King James Version.

An excellent example of counter balancing is the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway, a water-powered funicular railway joining the twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth on the rugged coast of North Devon. Built in 1900 and still in service.

Thanks to the relentless efforts of John Newton, once a slave ship captain, William Wilberforce and many likeminded abolitionists, the Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal throughout the British Empire. John Newton’s hymn Amazing Grace is a reminder of the shame he felt having been party to slavery.

The mutiny, led by Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh, is chronicled in books, films, and songs. With Bligh navigating, he and his loyal crew travelled some 6000 km in the Bounty’s open launch from Tonga to Timor in 47 days.

Hemimorphite, Zn₄Si₂O₇(OH)₂·H₂O, is found in the upper parts of zinc orebodies, along with smithsonite, ZnCO₃. Because both minerals were found in close association they were assumed to be the same mineral and both were called calamine.

Spelter was an earlier name given to zinc.

James Watt’s modified Newcomen atmospheric engine helped bring about the Industrial Revolution. However, it would be another 60 years before George Stevenson’s locomotive would haul the first coal on a public railroad from Darlington to the port of Stockton that significantly reduced the price of coal delivered to Stockton. Watt estimated that a typical brewery horse, attached to a mill that ground the mash for making beer, pulled with a force of 180 lb. Rounding for convenience, he set the unit of one horsepower at 33,000 foot-pounds of work every minute. For example, a horse exerting one horsepower would raise 330 lb of coal 100 feet in a minute. The International System of Units (SI) unit of power is the watt and one horsepower equals about 746 watts. A healthy human can sustain about 0.1 horsepower. Providing this human can sustain this effort for nine hours then almost enough energy will be produced to light a 30 W bulb for 24 h. A Boulton and Watt engine rated at 10 horsepower that was built in 1785 for the London Brewery of Samuel Whitbread to drive the malt crushing mill can be seen at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

The South Sea Company (SSC) inveigled high profile investors into holding shares in the SSC and, with the sole right to all trade in the South Seas and since King George I of Great Britain was governor of the company, investors were keen to invest. In 1720 the share price increased from some £130 in January to more than £1000 in August. In September SSC shares collapsed, and by December 1720 were down to £124. Investors lost heavily, including Sir Isaac Newton who supposedly lost £20,000 and reputedly said ‘I can calculate the movement of heavenly bodies but not the madness of men’ (O’Farrell 2007).

Concurrently in France, Scottish financier John Law, who had infiltrated the upper echelons of French public finance partly through his friendship with the Duke of Orléans, was also generating a bubble. The Mississippi Company gained a monopoly on the development of France’s Mississippi Territory in North America. In 1718, Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, Governor of Louisiana set about building a capital, which, in honour of the Regent, he called New Orleans. The Mississippi Company, which had been renamed the Compagnie des Indes, also collapsed in 1720. The collapse of Banque Générale and the Compagnie des Indes, which coincided with the popping of Britain’s South Sea Bubble, plunged France and other European countries into a severe economic depression that contributed towards the French Revolution (Colombo 2012).

The more or less impure mass of metal that sinks to the bottom of a furnace, separating itself by gravity from the supernatant slag (Merriam-Webster 2015).

A market dominated by a small number of producers or sellers is described as an oligopoly.

A monopsony means there is one buyer and many sellers and the term may be applied to the cartel.

James Cook (later Captain Cook) worked on Whitby colliers shipping coal from the Tyne and Wear to London.

Gin gang refers to the shed that housed the gin (engine) and the horse that did the gang or going around in a circle to drive the gin.

His Locomotion No. 1 was the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public rail line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Approximately three tonnes of coal were required to produce two tonnes of coke (Beaver 1951).

The Carlists supported Carlos VII, claimant to the throne of Spain.

Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundusr) died on August 25, AD 79, while attempting the rescue by ship of a friend and his family from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that had just destroyed Pompeii.

Sulfide ore deposits exposed at the surface may through the ages gain a thick cap or gossan of iron oxide minerals. The word “gossan” comes from the Cornish language and refers to the red colour of the oxidised iron minerals.

The overestimate of gold reserves in a gold find at Busang, in Indonesian Borneo by a Canadian company in 1995 is considered one of the largest scams in the history of world mining. As was the case in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, there was no money left for distribution to shareholders when the company involved was wound up.

When the Reserve Price Scheme collapsed in 1991, the Australian Wool Corporation Board was left with a stockpile of 4.8 million bales (about 830,000 tonnes) of wool and a debt of over $3 billion (Massy 2011).

It is not unusual for a gold mining company to produce copper. The Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company, later Mount Morgan Limited in Queensland, Australia, was a registered gold mine that produced some 250 tonnes of gold; however, it also produced approximately 360,000 tonnes of copper.

Two carloads may have been as much as three tonnes of explosive. Although this may have seemed huge at the time, it does not compare with the 450 tonnes of explosive placed by Canadian and Australian miners under Messines Ridge in WWI and detonated on 7 June 1917.

Flotsam as in flotsam and jetsam has the same word origin, from Anglo-French floteson.

The worthless rock in which valuable minerals are found is called gangue.

Margaret Knight who invented the flat bottomed paper bag had her idea stolen by Charles Annan. Annan argued that a woman could never design such an innovative machine. Knight displayed actual evidence that the invention indeed belonged to her and consequently received her patent in 1871.

Note that the Mrs. Everson 1885 patent had recognised this property.

Before mining commenced soon after the discovery of the orebody in 1883, Broken Hill in Australia was one of the world’s largest lead-zinc-silver orebodies, containing some 300 million tonnes of high grade ore (Dresher 2001).

Assuming the open-pit walls slope at 45°, then the top bench length will be 2π times, or approximately six times the depth of the pit. At some stage it becomes more economical to drive a tunnel into the pit and install a conveyor and in-pit crusher to convey the ore from the mine.

The sulfuric acid produced has many applications including the desiccation of potato vines, allowing an easier harvest as well as hardening the potato skin. The solvent extraction–electro winning (SW-EX) plants described later also benefit from the ready supply of sulfuric acid.

A megawatt (MW) is one million watts and a kilowatt (kW) is one thousand watts. An average size room heater rated at 1 kW consumes one thousand Watt-hours in an hour.

Assuming a 45° pit slope and a cylindrical vertical ore body the ratio of waste to ore increases in proportion to the depth cubed.

Ore refining by heating, such as smelting.

Ore refining by liquid processes, such as leaching.

See: Recovery of copper by cementation U.S. 3930847 A at http://​www.​google.​com/​patents/​US3930847.

Between 1943 and 1948, 48,000 men, known as the ‘Bevin Boys’ were directed to work in British coal mines. One in ten of those conscripted into military service were balloted to work in the mines. Approximately 43% of the Bevin Boys were ‘ballotees’, the remainder were those who volunteered to work in the mines after being called up.

The U.S. motorists’ subsidy to the ethanol industry was an estimated $83 billion between 2007 and 2014 as a consequence of the U.S. Government’s ethanol mandate (Bryce 2015). Paradoxically, the oil subsidy to citizens of Iran and Saudi Arabia was estimated to be almost $90 billion in 2013 (IEA 2015).

D’Arcy migrated to Rockhampton, Australia from England in 1866. In 1882, he joined a syndicate to develop the Mount Morgan gold and copper mine. Supported by a rich dividend stream and the sale of some of his shares in the mine, D’Arcy, then extremely wealthy, returned to England in 1887. In part, it was the proceeds of copper mining that funded the discovery of oil in Persia.

The thesis that cheaper kerosene saved the whales from extinction is not entirely supported by the evidence. After World War II, fats were rationed in Europe and new factories and more powerful ships were built to hunt and process whales for edible oil. The Tangalooma Whaling Station, just 75 min from Brisbane, Australia, operated from 1952 until 1962. In total, 6277 humpback whales were killed. In 1951, whale oil sold for around £140 per tonne. However, with the availability of other cheaper vegetable and fish oil, the price fell to about £60 per tonne in 1961. Additionally, the quota of 700 whales was not met. A lack of whales and a low price for whale oil caused the demise of the whaling industry in Australia. Visitors can now view whales not far from the old Tangalooma Whaling Station.

The Central African Copperbelt, one of the largest resources of copper in the world, straddles the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Bernardo O’Higgins (1778–1842) was a Chilean independence leader who, together with José de San Martín, freed Chile from Spanish rule in the Chilean War of Independence.

The cost of producing the metal, excluding royalties, interest payments and depreciation.

The Dardanelles, formerly known as the Hellespont, is a narrow strait in Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. During the second Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, the Persian King Xerxes constructed pontoon bridges to traverse the Hellespont. In World War I, the Allies in their attempt to capture Constantinople failed to break through the Ottoman mine field laid across the Dardanelles. A land invasion that included Australians and New Zealanders (the original ANZACS) was attempted and also failed.