50 Fun Facts About Mining

Which American author failed as a silver miner before taking a reporting job at a Virginia City newspaper in the 1860s?

Mark Twain first signed that pen name at the Territorial Enterprise in 1863 and later wrote humorously about his lack of success in the mines. By his own account it echoes a riverboat cry for two fathoms of safe water.

Which NFL team takes its name from the prospectors who poured into California during the Gold Rush?

San Francisco 49ers' first logo showed a mustached gold miner leaping in midair and firing a pistol from each hand. The nickname marks 1849, the peak year for arrivals.

Which US president made his fortune as a mining engineer and translated a Latin mining textbook into English?

Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou, both trained in geology at Stanford, published their English version of De re metallica in 1912. He had earlier managed the Sons of Gwalia gold mine in Western Australia.

Which dry goods merchant financed tailor Jacob Davis's 1873 patent for riveted work pants worn by Western miners?

Levi Strauss supplied the cloth and the money, but the copper rivets at the stress points were Davis's idea. Blue jeans only became fashion after 1950s film stars wore them.

Which American family, later famous for its art museums, built its fortune on mining and metal refining?

Guggenheim patriarch Meyer became a mining magnate after emigrating from Switzerland in 1847. One of his seven sons, Benjamin, went down with the Titanic in 1912.

In which country were 33 trapped miners winched to safety one by one in 2010 after 69 days underground?

Chile's rescuers lifted each man in Fénix 2, a capsule just 54 centimeters wide. The miners had been sealed in 700 meters down at the San José mine in the Atacama Desert.

Which savory bake became the lunch of England's tin miners, a full meal carried to work and eaten without cutlery?

Cornish pasty makers won protected status in 2011 after a nine-year campaign. Emigrating miners carried the recipe abroad, which is why versions turn up in Mexico, Australia and the United States.

Which chemist patented dynamite in 1867, taming nitroglycerin into an explosive that miners could handle more safely?

Alfred Nobel lost his brother Emil to a nitroglycerin blast at the family works in 1864. He tamed the liquid by soaking it into an absorbent earth.

Which gemstone is mined at Coober Pedy, the Australian town where residents live underground to escape the heat?

Opal turned up near Coober Pedy in 1915, and miners began moving in the following year. Their dugout homes hold a steady temperature while summer days outside often pass 40 °C.

Which mineral, whose Greek name refers to the sparks it throws when struck, is better known as fool's gold?

Pyrite is iron sulfide, yet it is sometimes found alongside small amounts of real gold. Early wheellock guns used a chip of it to strike the sparks that fired the charge.

Which British prime minister defeated a year-long coal miners' strike led by union firebrand Arthur Scargill?

Margaret Thatcher's government had built up ample coal stocks before the walkout began in 1984. The miners' defeat a year later allowed most of Britain's collieries to be closed.

Which country singer turned her childhood in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, into the song Coal Miner's Daughter?

Loretta Lynn wrote the words and music herself, then cut several verses because her producer feared the song would run too long. Sissy Spacek won an Oscar playing her in the 1980 film of the same name.

The Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s drew an estimated 100,000 prospectors to which far-northern region?

Yukon-bound stampeders each had to bring a year's supply of food, a rule the Canadian authorities set to prevent starvation. Most hauled it over the Chilkoot or White Pass trails.

Which 2000 film follows a coal miner's son who takes up ballet during a bitter strike in northern England?

Billy Elliot stumbles into a ballet class only because its usual studio has become a soup kitchen for the striking miners. Jamie Bell played the eleven-year-old.

Which US state holds Bingham Canyon, an open-pit mine so vast it ranks as the largest human-made excavation?

Utah's great pit near Salt Lake City is a copper mine about four kilometers wide. Its owners chose open-pit digging with steam shovels in 1904 because the ore body was huge but low-grade.

Which diamond, the largest gem-quality rough stone ever found, was unearthed in South Africa in 1905?

Cullinan was the name of the mine's owner, and the stone weighed 3,106 carats before cutting. Its biggest piece, the Great Star of Africa, forced a redesign of the British sovereign's scepter in 1910.

Which company, founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1888, went on to control most of the world's rough diamond trade?

De Beers handled 80 to 85 percent of rough diamond distribution for more than a century. Rhodes had got his start renting water pumps to diggers during the diamond rush.

Yellowcake, a powder shipped from mines to nuclear fuel plants, is a concentrate of which radioactive metal?

Uranium oxide makes up about 80 percent of yellowcake. Much of the world's supply is never dug at all: solutions pumped through the deposit dissolve the metal and carry it out.

Which ore, named after a village in Provence where it was identified in 1821, is the main source of aluminum?

Bauxite takes its name from Les Baux, where geologist Pierre Berthier identified it. Most of what is mined is refined into alumina before electricity turns it into metal.

Which Tuscan town's quarries, worked since Roman times, supplied the white marble for Michelangelo's David?

Carrara has more than 650 quarry sites and has yielded more marble than anywhere else. David's block went by ox cart to the sea, then by barge up the Arno to Florence.

Until deposits turned up in Brazil in the 1720s, which country supplied nearly all of the world's diamonds?

India led world diamond production from antiquity until the mid-18th century, with stones dug from river gravels in the south. Those deposits were largely exhausted by the late 1700s.

Which chemist's 1815 safety lamp wrapped its flame in wire gauze so that explosive mine gas outside could not ignite?

Humphry Davy's gauze let air in, but its holes were too fine for a flame to pass out and light the gas beyond. Railway pioneer George Stephenson showed a rival lamp a month earlier.

Which flammable gas is the main ingredient of firedamp, the explosive hazard that seeps out of coal seams?

Methane-rich firedamp is explosive at concentrations between 4 and 16 percent. Miners named other gases the same way: afterdamp lingered once a blast was over, and stinkdamp smelled of rotten eggs.

Which disease won federal compensation for disabled US coal miners under the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969?

Black lung develops because coal dust that is not coughed out can be neither destroyed nor removed by the body. It builds up over years, inflaming and scarring the tissue.

Which grade of coal has the highest carbon content and burns with a short, blue, smokeless flame?

Anthracite gave Confederate blockade runners a smokeless fuel, so their boilers did not reveal them to Union ships during the Civil War. It is also difficult to ignite.

In which country can visitors tour Wieliczka, a 700-year-old mine with chapels and statues carved from rock salt?

Poland's best-known mine produced table salt from the 13th century until 1996, when falling prices and flooding ended commercial digging. Its rock salt is grey, more like granite than the white crystals of the table.

Which battery metal, long a source of blue pigment, is mined mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Cobalt may take its name from the kobold, a goblin that German silver miners blamed for a troublesome ore. In 1735 that ore yielded the first new metal found since ancient times.

Which metal, vital to rechargeable batteries, is drawn from brine under the salt flats of a South American Triangle?

Lithium-rich brine lies beneath Andean salt pans such as the Salar de Uyuni and the Salar de Atacama. As of 2017 the region was thought to hold about 54 percent of world reserves.

Which toxic metal do small-scale gold miners mix with ore to grab gold specks, then burn off with a blowtorch?

Mercury bonds readily with gold to form an amalgam, and heating drives it off as a vapor the miners breathe in. The Minamata Convention commits countries to reducing the practice and ending it where feasible.

Which South African city grew from a diggers' camp after gold was struck on the Witwatersrand in 1886?

Johannesburg's downtown streets are narrow because officials, doubting the gold would last, crammed as many plots as possible onto a small triangle of land.

The Comstock Lode, the first major silver strike in the United States, lies beneath Virginia City in which state?

Nevada's lode took its name from Henry Comstock, a Canadian miner. Its crumbling ore bodies kept caving in until engineer Philip Deidesheimer devised square-set timbering to prop them up.

Cerro Rico, the mountain that poured silver into the Spanish Empire, towers over the city of Potosí in which country?

Bolivia's silver mountain has been mined since 1545, when the Spanish began extraction there. They worked it with the mita, a forced-labor draft borrowed from the Inca.

Silver from the slave-worked mines of Laurion paid for the fleet of which ancient city before the Battle of Salamis?

Athens struck a rich new vein shortly before Persia invaded, and Themistocles persuaded the citizens to spend the windfall on 200 triremes instead of sharing it out.

The Sudbury Basin in Ontario, a crater left by a giant impact from space, is a leading source of which metal?

Nickel is so tied to the site that geologists also call it the Sudbury Nickel Irruptive. The impactor, 10 to 15 km across, struck about 1.85 billion years ago, and railway blasting exposed the ore in 1883.

An underground coal fire burning since 1962 has all but emptied the town of Centralia in which US state?

Pennsylvania's lost town had 1,500 residents when a fire lit to clean the dump is believed to have spread into old mine workings. By 2017 just 5 people remained, and the coal could burn for 250 more years.

Which term names the waste left over after a mill separates the valuable fraction from crushed ore?

Tailings are often stored as a wet sludge in ponds behind dams, and a breach can cause an environmental disaster. Rock stripped away to reach the ore is a different waste, called overburden.

Which everyday phrase for a decisive trial comes from the way assayers checked whether a metal was really gold?

Acid test spread as a figure of speech during and after the California Gold Rush. Nitric acid dissolves the streak left by a base metal but leaves a streak of real gold untouched.

Which song about a coal miner sinking ever deeper into debt gave Tennessee Ernie Ford a number one hit in 1955?

Sixteen Tons was written by Merle Travis about the mines of Rosewood, Kentucky, and first recorded by him in 1946. Ford's version began life as a B-side, then topped the pop chart for eight weeks.

Which process uses intense heat and a reducing agent such as coke to free a metal from its ore?

Smelting drives off unwanted elements as gas or as slag, leaving the metal behind. Limestone is often added as a flux to carry away the rocky impurities.

Which type of mining recovers loose gold from stream-bed sand and gravel instead of tunneling into solid rock?

Placer deposits form because gold is so dense that it settles in stream beds. The Romans worked such gravels on a vast scale at Las Médulas, feeding the site with seven aqueducts.

Which novelist went down a working coal pit in 1884 to research Germinal, his story of a miners' strike?

Émile Zola made lengthy visits to northern mining towns and saw the aftermath of a crippling strike at Anzin. The novel has since been published in more than a hundred countries.

Which tiny Pacific island nation has had about 80 percent of its surface strip-mined for phosphate?

Nauru's phosphate came to light by accident when a rock from the island, kept as a doorstop in a Sydney office, was tested and proved to be ore of the richest quality.

Which secret society of Irish coal miners saw twenty alleged members hanged after a Pinkerton detective infiltrated it?

Molly Maguires were convicted largely on the word of James McParland, a detective who lived among the miners under a false name. Some historians argue the coal operators manufactured the whole episode to crush unionism.

Which 1921 clash, the largest labor uprising in US history, pitted 10,000 armed coal miners against 3,000 lawmen?

Battle of Blair Mountain lasted five days, and private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. President Harding threatened to send in federal troops and Army bombers.

Which Christian martyr, linked in legend to a lightning bolt, is the patron of miners and others who use explosives?

Saint Barbara's father was struck by lightning after carrying out her execution, the legend says. Miners adopted her once gunpowder came into wide use underground in the 1600s.

Which gnome-like spirits of miners' folklore were said to steal unwatched tools and beckon men toward rich veins of ore?

Tommyknockers crossed the Atlantic with emigrant miners in the 1820s, along with tales of their warning knocks underground. They were pictured two feet tall, dressed in tiny miner's clothes.

Which term names a nearly horizontal passage driven into a hillside to enter or drain an underground mine?

Adit tunnels usually slope gently upward from the mouth so that water runs out of the workings by gravity. Everything below the deepest one has to be pumped dry.

What is pumped down Mponeng, an ultra-deep South African gold mine, to cool air heated by rock at 66 °C?

Ice slurry brings the tunnel air at Mponeng below 30 °C, and a trip from the surface to the deepest workings takes more than an hour. Bacteria have been found living in groundwater kilometers down.

Which US state's Homestake gold mine hosted the underground experiment that first detected solar neutrinos?

South Dakota's Homestake mine hid a 100,000-gallon tank of dry-cleaning fluid 4,850 feet underground to catch the particles. It closed in 2002 as the deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere.

Which blue-violet gem, named by Tiffany & Co., is mined only in one strip of hills about 7 km long?

Tanzanite was Tiffany's choice of name because its marketers thought blue zoisite would not sell. The first stones were found in 1967, and the mines were nationalized four years later.