Oral History Interview with T.E. Chadwick

T. E. CHADWICK May 11, 1977

[Begin Interview]

Chadwick: What was known as the (lift?) method. It was really a hand stripping operation. One of these (?) went undercover in the (?) stream, and they took the overburden off of it with the new scrapers. And they lifted the coal up in bars. And that coal was loaded on a raft that, in constructing the raft, they had one polar log on either side of an oak log. An oak log just barely will float. And if they try to float down a bunch of logs of oak by themselves, well they’d be sunk all along the shoreline. They put a poplar log on either side. Then on top of that, they put down (?) lumber and made a raft out of it. And they rode this coal on the raft, and they pulled (or poled?) it down the (?) River and sold it at different locations down the river. Now that was the first type of mining. (?) with the farmers–

Interviewer: (?)

Chadwick: And at all parts down the river, there were wharfs. And they took various items down the river, like cured hams, and they took down a side of, a smoke side meat, or unsmoked side meat. They took various things down and sold it at the different wharfs as they went down. And that was the center of transportation down the river at that time. That was the only transportation they had.

Interviewer: Now how did– [glitch]

Chadwick: All of the (controversies of the resin over the long-formed deed?), if you’re acquainted with it know what that means. And their contention was that somebody (?) at that time, when those days were made, and people had no idea what they were selling. But the earliest method we know is stripping. However, it wasn’t as extensive as it is today. But it was a form of strip mining.

Unknown: They just stripped in the streams, stream beds. Now they strip them on top of the hill.

Interviewer: Okay, (?), could you tell us a little bit more about that? How they would–

Chadwick: Well, ordinarily, the water would wash the dirt and overburden off, and you’d find the coal in the stream bed, just like you’d find sandstone or shale in the stream beds now, and then find a layer of coal. And they found the burn, they started in front of the stream, steam, the stream beds. I’ll get it right pretty soon.

Interviewer: So, the (?) matter, then, it floated on downstream.

Chadwick: Sometime, when they had, they’re supposed to have said, sometimes the stream that the coal was unusually hard or firm, the stream itself would wash off the overburden and expose maybe several feet of the coal with nothing over it. And that’s the way that the people–

?: That’s the way they first found it.

Chadwick: That’s the way they found the seams. And today, that’s the way we locate seams when we go in an area where we don’t know the elevation. We look in the beds of streams, and under cliffs, where streams have washed it and exposed it. All the coal majors in this country, as you know, lay like the butter between two slices of bread. (?) level. And every coal seam has formed a bench. You know what a bench is. Around the outcrop of it, there’s a level strip. You come down, and the level’s off, you have a bench. Well now, when you get on those benches, if your (?) temperature or meter records the elevation, we have in the here and now what was known as our geodetic maps. And those maps show the various coal seams at what elevation they’re generally found in this area. And if you take a (?) temperature and walk up one of these hills, you know when you get about to a coal seam. Then you find one of those benches, then you know definitely which coal seam you’re in. And to face it up, and see what it is, you’re going to (?) a bulldozer and rake it on that bench, rake back to the, what we call the high wall and measure the coal and sample it. Domestic mines, they didn’t go in there for a (?). They went in and worked till they left. If it had a sandstone ripple or a very dense shell roof over it, they worked it sometimes three or four hundred feet from where they first went in, right along the outcrop.

Unknown: You didn’t go any farther than where you could see daylight.

Unknown: (?) go too far back (?) dangerous. They got too far from daylight.

Unknown: (?)

Chadwick: Usually, they just need that coal in the wintertime, for heat. And after they get their crops finished, along about August, then they start with this mine and dig coal for themselves and their neighbors around them.

Interviewer: (?)

Chadwick: Domestic mines, usually they just did the mining in the fall, after they had their crops finished. And they’d get coal for themselves and for their neighbors around in the community. They worked that place, (?) and after a while it would fall in outside here. And then they’d just move around the hill and put in another opening. Go back in the hill and drive back that way. And when they made one of these openings and laid down two by fours, timbers, you know what a two by four is, to make, that was the rail. (?) on the bottom. And they’d get these little (?) wheels and make a little car. And made the part of that domestic coal, they would push out– [pause] They made these little cars to run on this rail, and they put oh, it held probably five bushels. And then, at the end, they usually had these coal veins are up some elevations above the ground level below. They only worked these lower majors that we’re telling you about in the early years. The lower seams is all. They didn’t go up on the hill, work any. And–

Unknown: They didn’t go down (?)

Chadwick: They cut a two by four off about four feet long on either side, and braced it together, and put it on hinges. And when that little car ran on that, why they didn’t tilt it. They raised the end gate of it and dumped it in a bin, a little small bin they had, or dumped it directly into wagons or sleds, and sledded it away from the mine. Now that was one of the earliest forms of mining that I’ve been associated with. That is, the transportation of it.

Interviewer: What time do we put on that? What time?

Chadwick: Well, that was, I was born in 1903, and anytime around 1908, 1909, 1910, and on up, they mined that way. Big operations started coming in this area in around 1913. After the Civil War.

Interviewer: Okay. You were telling us about the lights a little bit ago.

Chadwick: Well, the earliest form of lights that were used in the mines were pine knots. You take a pine knot, and there’s enough rosin in it, you can almost light it with a match and it will burn for hours and make a torch. And they took those, they’d cut a knot out and leave a wood handle on it, a part of the wood that they cut it from. And they’d nail it up to a timber or a cap board or something over a timber that furnished the light. Then, from that, they had what is called a lard oil light. It was, had the little chamber for the oil. The earliest ones held probably about two ounces or three ounces of oil. And it had a cotton wick in it, too. But the candle will only burn about a couple of hours, of the type that they had in the early years. And another thing they used was just take a tray of oil and put a wick in it out over the edge of the container, or saucer that they had it in. And set it up. And that was a form of torch that they used. And then, from that, the lamp that came out then was, burned a type of oil that was called lard oil. It had great big globules of just almost pure lard in it. I know I was sold thousands of gallons of it. [laughs] and it was a wick ran out, that had a little opening at the top, pour the oil in. And the top wick went through a little old nozzle, sort of like a–

Unknown: Like an old-fashioned coffee pot.

Chadwick: Old fashioned coffee pot. And there were two sizes of it. One, the mule driver had a large one. It held about three or four times as much. And he hung that light on the (??) of his animal that was pulling the car of coal. And the miners had a little cotton cap. And they wore those little lights. It was all that they had. It probably gave the illumination of possibly four or five candles, I’d say. It was all the illumination they had at the face of the coal. Now they drilled a hole with a breast auger, a hand auger. It was, a breastplate was a metal strap run across their, fit across their chest with a side fitting back on their side that had a sleeve in front that the auger just fit right back in the sleeve. And then they could put pressure on it from that breastplate. And they drilled in, oh, for a maximum of five feet probably was as far as they ever drilled.

Interviewer: Okay. Can I stop here? [pause]

Chadwick: I believe I was talking about the way that they prepared the coal for loading. They drilled these holes in four or five feet with a breast auger, which was about, oh, an inch and a half or an inch and three quarters in diameter. And then they–

Interviewer: We’ve got an airplane. [pause] We can go ahead.

Chadwick: We talked about the drilling, the shoot the coal. When they drilled these holes in, they charged it with black powder. And black powder came in various sizes. The smaller the size, the quicker the pattern. And it was marked in F, double F, and triple F. And coal, the more pervious of substance which you’re shooting, the more pervious it is, the slower powder you’d want to bring it out. If you put a quick acting powder in, why it would just blast out the (?) They put a slow acting powder, it would bring the full effect of the shot out. And they take, they put this powder in. they had a long rod that they forced a hole through their stemming. They used various things for stemming, mostly clay. And pushed this rod through, back to the pattern. Then they set it off with a squib. And a squib was a little thing that they were about five and a half inches long, and about a quarter inch in diameter. And they had a pointed nose on them. And they shot just like a–

Unknown: Like a rocket.

Chadwick: Like a rocket. When they lift the thing, it went to the extremity of that hole, in contact with that powder that was firing it. And that’s what set the blast off. And later, of course, then they used the fuse and the cap. And they used a different type of powder. Why of course I think that they used black powder with a fuse and the cap, too. But it was a fire cap, a kind of a thing that set a fire off in the powder.

Interviewer: Is the (?) undercutting the sticks?

Chadwick: Well, I’ll get to that right now. Prior to the drilling, of course, the earliest form, they took a pick and just cut a groove, a V-shaped groove back, oh, two and a half feet. From out here, at the front of it would be probably ten inches, and the zero at the back end of it. And to give a face for that coal to shoot out. What they wanted was as much block coal or size coal as they could get. They didn’t want it shot up in fine. [horn blaring.]

Interviewer: (?) pause. [pause] Okay.

Chadwick: But from the undercutting with the pick, they developed a cutting machine known as an air puncher. It was merely a jackhammer drill of (?) size that, and they ran air pressure lines into it, to the face. And it was on two heavy wheels with probably about three inches face on the wheels. And the men that operated them, it had handlebars on it just like a wheelbarrow. And the men that operated it wore heavy wood soles, or some of them even wore wood shoes. And they pushed this thing up and scratch it with their feet, sitting on their behinds. And they’d do what the men originally did with a pick. They’d pick it back, and they were able to get back a little further than they were with a pick. And when they’d pick it, and then they’d keep moving to the left across the face until they’d picked it all the way across. And that formed a face to shoot with. And then there was various machines developed after that. There was one that was called a saw. And it was more or less like the cutting bar on a modern machine, only they sumped (??) it up. Just went right in on the bottom, and it went in four to possibly five feet, and they moved it across, and pushed it in again. And formed a face. And it didn’t chip up so much of the coal in the fine sizes because they were only using about a five or a five and a half inch (curve?). Then they developed what’s known as a short wall machine. And one of the first was a Sullivan CE6 mining machine. They would pull it across the face. The first, they just thought they could just sump up, just go in. So then, somebody smartened up and decided well why not (put all that in to?) sump it up, why not pull it across the face and cut the (curve?) all the way across the face. So, they developed a chain that ran through from the back of the machine up towards the front of it. And over to a jack that was mounted between the roof and the bottom. It would pull that machine across evenly. Hold it straight in the face and pull it across. That chain was a very heavy thing. It was a man killer. And later on, then, they developed a cable system to pull that machine across. Then they developed on in through the mounted machines that were mounted on caps and mounted on rubber. And they went in and did the same thing. Only they were able to, they were what’s called arc wall machines. They had longer bars on them. They swung, cut in an arc. And a further development of those were that they could elevate it and cut anywhere in the seam of coal. And they could cut out a parting. They could cut that out and they could throw it in, (gob it in the rib?). And that way, they were able to get cleaner coal. And they could turn, the later machines, they could turn on the side and cut the bottom and cut the rib. (?) to the place they were driving, and left the rib, the walls to the place they were driving even. And also, they were able to shoot it out in large blocks that way. Because you had three faces exposed (you could pull to?). And after the mine had been done with a man pushing it out on these little cars, as more people came into the area, and more coal was demanded for domestic purposes and for blacksmith shops, they coked it and used it. All the bakery ovens originally were heated with coal. And then, they couldn’t produce the demand at that time, so then they went to ponies. Small mules and ponies and pulled that coal out. The mule had, around his butt, they had what they called a butt stick. And from the middle of it, a chain went back and hooked to the car. And they were, oh, four to six feet ahead of the car. And had a clevis on the end of that chain coming from that butt stick. And if the mule ran out of the place with it, why the driver could just pull a pin out of that clevis. The mule was taught and easily learned to just turn around away from the car. And the car went itself into that dump. Of course, they begin then to make metal dumps and metal rails. The first form of rail was a Z rail. And it went on for years, and it was developed about the time of the Civil War. And then from that to the T rail, which we use now. The Trail is a (raised form?) of rail. That’s what’s used on the railroads. Then the demand grew for coal, they went to early forms of locomotives to pull those cars. They were able to pull more than one car. In order to meet the demand, they had to increase their production. And locomotives developed from the very crudest type of locomotive to locomotives that weighed up to fifteen, eighteen tons. And they had, the trolley pole, which ran on a, the trolley wire, the pole had a wheel on the end of it, ran on the trolley wire. And they developed locomotives that would raise and lower that hydraulically. And also, they put air brakes on them. They developed a high state of efficiency. And then, from the locomotives, they went to belt transportation. And that’s principally the type that we use today. (?) mines are equipped with belts. However, a few are still operating with rail, as much as ten, eleven miles underground by rail.

Interviewer: (?) ventilation from the time when you had the short trip (?)

Chadwick: Well, the earliest mines that I had anything to do with, the type of mines which we’ve been talking about here, they were ventilated by what’s known as a furnace. Now they’d drive two places in from the surface. And after they got back to where there were eight or ten feet of cover on top of the seam, they drilled a–

Interviewer: [pause] Okay, this is reel five, in Pikeville, on May eleventh. And if we could pick it up at the same place we did before.

Chadwick: Start again?

Interviewer: Yeah, about the–

Unknown: Why don’t you go through the whole thing of this early ventilation thing. Can you work with it like–

Interviewer: What’s that?

Chadwick: Okay. They would drive two places in from the surface to where the overburden over the top of the coal was twelve to eighteen feet thick. Then they would back up to where that overburden was that thick and drill a shaft down some eight or nine feet square. And align it with wood, one inch wood, and extend it up another ten feet above, and strip it so that it was airtight above the overburden. And they’d place a grate, which was usually made with short pieces of rail over, laid on a rock, in order for the ashes to drop through. And they built a fire on it with the coal from the mine that was being ventilated. And that hot air from that furnace rising through this shaft which they’d made, created a draft. And then they were able to pull the air in at the other opening that they had, and down and back through, as they advanced, back through the break throughs and back through the furnace, and up. That was the entire ventilating system of the mine at that time. And from that, they developed all sorts of fans. The fans were placed at the mouth of the first place that they started from the surface, and the air was pulled in at the second one and pulled down and around through the last break through. Each breakthrough would stop as they went in, and the air was pulled down through the last break through, and back to the fan. And they developed various fans that would develop high water gauge. A water gauge is a test of how much suction they had on the air. The earlier fans until, oh, some thirty years ago, would develop only a half to three quarters of an inch water gauge. But the newer fans would develop up to six and a half, maybe on up to seven inches of water. And the fact of the matter, going in the back of one of these fans, they usually have an opening. And when you, they had an air lock and two doors. And you opened the front door, and you’d go in and close it, and then you were able to open the other one. But if you opened the two doors together, it would suck you right through. It would pull you right into the fan. The ventilation hasn’t changed. The method of ventilating the mine hasn’t changed from all the years, going through the last break through and circulating around through the mine.

Unknown: As far as fans, before they got the (?)

Chadwick: Gasoline engines, too, the early ones, I worked on the ones that were operated with gasoline engines.

Unknown: (?)

Chadwick: (?) stopping, stopping made of (?) materials. We used a lot of wood to make stoppings, to force the air to go on further into the mine and to the last break through. Later, we used concrete blocks, which we’re using now. And they’re plaster, so that you won’t lose any ventilation. And they’re passing as high as 150,000 cubic feet a minute of air. They got fans that were developed there to carry through into the mine. And we’re required to have about 12,000 cubic feet per minute at the last open break through.

[now this sounds like a different interview. Definitely a different interviewer, female instead of male. At least three people involved]

And that means, my wife’s grandfather, great-grandfather, operated a slave mine down the river about eleven miles below here, before the Civil War. And they shipped the coal out on barges to the market down the river, I think as far as Cincinnati, maybe.

Interviewer: How big was the mine? How many men, and how much did they produce?

Narrator: I couldn’t tell you how much it produced.

Unknown: It was a stripper, surface mine.

Narrator: No, it was a deep mine.

Unknown: Oh, they had some deep mines.

Narrator: Had a deep mine, down at (Hura?).

Unknown: The railroads came in this country here about, between ’12 and ’13, around ’12 and ’13.

Unknown: Railroads came into (?) about 1904.

Unknown: Is that right? I didn’t think it was that early.

Unknown: People in the ‘80s.

Unknown: Yes. And it came in to (Beaver Tree?) 1912.

Unknown: It came into Pikeville in 1904.

Unknown: And you had another year on another (?)

Chadwick: They, the Beaver Creek area, the railroad came in around 1912 and ’13. They started operation there, and bringing coal out and stockpiling it along the latter part of ’13, early part of ’14?

Interviewer: Now tell us where it was.

Chadwick: Railroad came in, up the river to Peach Orchard, about in the 1880s. The railroads came into Bell County, and around the Pineville, (?) area, just about the turn of the century.

Interviewer: That’s good.

Chadwick: The earlier mining, we were probably getting as low as two tons per man that was involved in it per day. Two tons per day. And later, as they developed the mule hauls and small car hauls, it was built up to three to five tons per man. Then as we mechanized with the short (wall?) mining machine, we got up to eight or nine tons per man. And today, we’re getting between twelve and fifteen tons per man, where conventional mining is being used. And we’re getting up to probably twenty tons per man. And as late as, as late as 1925, in England, they were only getting one ton per man.

[End Side A. Begin Side B.]

Chadwick: –then as we mechanized with the short (wall?) mining machine, we got up to eight or nine tons per man. And today, we’re getting between twelve and fifteen tons per man, where conventional mining is being used. And we’re getting up to probably twenty tons per man. And as late as, as late as 1925, in England, they were only getting one ton per man. Well, the engineers’ duties started with a survey of the property and a feasibility study of the seam of coal which they proposed to mine. And a plan was developed to mine the coal. And the type of machinery was recommended to do, to perfect the plan, which they had laid out. And the mining camps, in the early years, the men had to live at the mine. We had no transportation of roads in passing. And they built what we called mining camps. And the men lived near the mine, where they could walk to the (?) to their work. And the engineer laid out the mining camps. They laid out the railroad, spur tracks off the main line up these hollers. It was necessary to know the grade which you were putting these spur tracks on, and how much grade work you’d have to do to hold it down to permissible or a tolerable grade, which is somewhere, one to one and three quarters percent grade.

Interviewer: Could you tell us a little bit more about the coal camps themselves?

Chadwick: In the mining camps, out of the steel areas, the steel production areas, they had developed what we called a double house. Now we call them duplexes. And they were able to get two family houses, that was three rooms down and three rooms up, about, what they were. Or two down and two up. And then the same thing was on the other side, with the same roof. They could house two families. That was for the families that lived in the mining camp. And then they had a good many single unit bungalow type houses that were maybe for a little higher-class man, that they were using. And then we had the large boardinghouses, that consisted of many rooms. Some had as many as fifty rooms in them. And they accommodated the single men that worked in and around the mines. Now the construction of those houses was known as what, as a Jenny Lind construction. Now if you know what that is, I’m speaking of the earlier ones. They boarded up with one-inch boards, they were using one-inch by twelve, fourteen, they could get them at that time about as wide as they wanted them, because our trees were much larger than they later were. And they used about a three-inch strip, about, the strips were about, oh, a half inch, or a little better. They were maybe five-eighths inch thick. And they stripped the cracks between those boards. That was the outside construction. And the inside, they used a heavy paper, I don’t recall the name of that paper, but it was a glued paper. It was a heavy paper that they put on the walls and the ceiling. And then the individual families, they later put fancy wallpaper. And some of them used even newspapers for insulation of their houses. And they all had chimneys in the early years. They burned coal in a grate, and they usually had more than one grate. They usually had one upstairs and one downstairs. That is a famous type of construction. They (?) had these strips, outside boards stripped up. And they were all over the state of West Virginia, in the mining area, and all over Kentucky. And the earliest one I know about was put in in Bell County right about the turn of the century at (Straight Creek?)

Interviewer: What was the first mine you worked at as an engineer?

Chadwick: (?) from the university, well, the first mine I worked at was back when I was just a lad. My father was a mine operator, a wagon mine operator, and later on, a rail operator. And I had a lot to do working with him at various mines which he owned and operated. And I went to the University of Kentucky. I graduated from high school in 1920, Pineville High. Went to University of Kentucky in the fall of 1920 and graduated in 1924 with a B.S. and E.M. degree. That’s mining engineer. M.E. is mechanical, and E.M. is mining. They just reverse the, and I’m registered both in civil and mining in Kentucky, and mining in West Virginia. And professional land surveying in Kentucky. I served fifteen years on the examining board for professional engineers. And I’ve had fifty-three years of continuous experience in the Eastern Kentucky coal fields.

Interviewer: What was your first mining engineer duty? At your father’s mine, after you graduated.

Chadwick: No. Upon graduation, I came out of the university broke. And my profession was working with my brother as an automobile mechanic. And he was able to get me enough job to get me a little money. And I came to (Pond Creek?) here in Pike County, last day of the year of 1924. And started in an engineering (?) there, eighteen college graduates. And I was the low man on the totem pole. [laughs] I stayed there long enough to be the assistant to the chief engineer, which was Mr. (Foster Apple?) right here, at present. And later, when Ford Motor Company got out of the mining business because of the union organizations that were developing in this country about that time, Ford Motor Company sold their improvements and leased their coal to the Eastern Coal Corporation. And July, they took effect July 1, 1936.

Interviewer: What’s, okay, now you can go.

Chadwick: Engineering, starting out, he was what’s called as a rod man. he pulled the chain, and drilled the holes in the roof, and drove wood plugs in them, and (?) what we call a spad (??). It’s a little nail that has an eyelet in it that you can tie a string in it and a plumb bob over a transit. And his duties were either to (?) a backside to the spad behind him or go forward with the chain and insert a new spad in the roof, and give the transom alignment on it, which he was able to align to keep the places going in a straight line.

Interviewer: In other words, you were determining how the tunnels, how the shafts– okay, why don’t you tell us what an engineer does again. Explain about keeping the mine shaft straight. It will be a little hard for– [glitch] Okay.

Chadwick: A young engineer starting out is a rod man. his duties were either to go forward with the chain, and he took some notes of the entry which would enable the engineer to determine the amount of tonnage that had been removed in that entry. And then he drove a hole, drilled a hole in the roof, and inserted a wood plug, and drove a spad, s-p-a-d. It was a nail type thing with a hole which enabled you to run the string through and mount a plumb bob that you could center the transit, all transits have got a little center point right in the top of the telescope. When you level it up, you (?) around until it was right under the plumb bob. Then he turned 180 degrees from his backside, he took his backside and turned 180 degrees. And this young engineer, rod man, was what he was called, he went forward and inserted another one of those plugs in the roof in order that they could keep straight alignment of the entry and not get it where it was off centers or at an angle.

Interviewer: Why don’t you just tell us, you have to start–

Chadwick: They usually started two to four places from the (drift mouth?). A place is where, spaced about fifty feet from each other. And you remove the coal about twenty feet in width for each one of them, and cut, they cut in six or eight feet deep, and blast it down twenty feet wide to remove it. They advance one cut. That’s the lingo that they use around the mine.

Interviewer: (Why don’t we try it that way?)

Chadwick: The entries that we described were the holes that were driven back into the coal, which were probably more, better described as a tunnel. And it consisted of three or four of them. It was a main entry, and the air course right, and the air course left, or first and second, third and fourth air courses. And the main entry was called the heading. That was the main entry. And still is today, called a heading. And the engineer’s duty was to see that those tunnels were kept in a straight line.

Interviewer: Beautiful. Go on from there, (?) mechanization.

Chadwick: The first thing, mechanization in the coal mines reduced the number of employees tremendously. A mine that originally employed seven or eight hundred men probably would use a hundred. And as far as relieving them of any labor, of course you know that it’s back breaking to shovel coal in a mine car with a number five coal shovel. But it’s still very strenuous work in handling these machines, and very dangerous work, handling these various machines, from the cutting machine through the continuous miner, to the shuttle buggies that haul the coal back from the mechanical loaders back to the belt. But it’s not as dirty a work, and in all probability, it’s a little bit easier on the men. But they have to be a lot more technical, have a lot more IQ to work in a coal mine today than they did back in the earlier years, in the beginning.

Unknown: A weak mind and a strong back.

Interviewer: Why don’t you tell me that again?

Chadwick: Back in the old days, when you were hand building, all you had to do was [to] have a weak mind and a strong back. Now you have to be a mechanical miner to operate this new equipment that they have. They’re even now making a law that you’ve got to train these men. They’ve got to go through a training program. And whatever type of machinery that they’re going to work on, they’ve got to have a period of training and be certified by a man that knows what they should know before they go in and take hold of one of these machines.

Female Interviewer: Have they gone to other industries, or left the area?

Chadwick: We haven’t lost a great deal of miners. However, the state of Ohio and Indiana and Michigan, we lost about half of our population here, going to the industrial cities to work. And still have. If you listen to the radio now and hear somebody dies here, where their relatives are, they’re scattered in three or four states. But the last few years, a good many of these people are coming back to the coal fields. In the early years, coal mining was sporadic work. You may work two days a week, you may work three, you may not work any. And it was a feast or a famine with the coal miners. They were either making more money than they could spend, or they weren’t making anything.

Interviewer: How is it today?

Chadwick: Well, today it’s more or less stabilized. In order to hold your men today, you’ve got to be able to furnish them pretty fair weekly wage. And the union today is asking for a guarantee of the yearly wage for their miners. I don’t know how that will come out. But it shows you the extent of which they are trying to get a weekly wage. They go beyond that. They’re asking for a yearly, guaranteed wage.

Interviewer: Is the–

Chadwick: In the early years, on (Pond Creek?), for a number of years I was required to make a drawing that showed the cause of the accidents and take measurements of what happened and where it happened. And we averaged, I’d say we averaged in the (Pond Creek?) mine, or Ford Motor Company’s mines there, one a month of fatality. One a month. And we had to make these drawings of all that tended to be a fatal accident. Some of them were not fatal, but in many cases, they were total disability cases. And we made, I made hundreds of drawings. Now today, we’re not killing near as many men. [pause]

Interviewer: You started to say, “Today, we’re not killing as many miners.”

Chadwick: Per hours worked, it’s, we had a bad year the last year. But on the whole, we’re way down with the fatal accidents. About in the same proportion we’re down with road fatalities after we put this 55-mph speed limit in. We’re killing about a third less.

Interviewer: Okay. Would you tell me that, and say something about, “in mining today, it’s a lot safer,” or, “we’re killing a lot less.” But mention mining.

Chadwick: In mining today, it’s much safer than it was back in the early years. And there’s several reasons for that. The strict discipline that they have in the mine, the laws and regulations that require certain safety features, like roof bolting. Now we used wood timbers in the early years, altogether. And about, right around 1940, they began to develop roof bolting, which has resulted in saving of many lives in the coal mines. And as I said, the supervision and the rules under which you’re allowed to work or not work is very strict. You have to have safety timbers or safety jacks around where you’re working at [it] all time. And around this machinery, they’ve got safety hoods wherever a man stands or sits, he’s got, or even in the units that are mobile, they’ve got hoods, steel hoods over them, that stand 15,000 pounds per square inch. And that’s resulted in saving a lot of people’s lives. Oh, there’s various things. They can go into a number of things.

Interviewer: Hard hats and hard shoes.

Chadwick: Hard hats and hard shoes, and the illumination and lights that they use today is about ten or fifteen times as strong as they were back in the early years. They use electric headlamp, and that’s resulted in saving a lot of lives. And there’s various things in the handling of electricity. The rules under which you can string electric line down one of these tunnels or entries in the mine, coal mine today, it has to meet certain specifications. And where possible, they’re even putting this electrical, not the generation equipment, but the transformation equipment, the transformers, that reduce this power now from possibly around 2300 volts down to 220 or 440 volts, they’re endeavoring to hold most of that in one of the air courses. Not in the place where the men travel in and out. And that’s resulted in saving a lot of lives. (Engineer?) is, being one myself, and maybe I ought to toot my own horn, but he’s the main man about the coal operation. He has to involve himself in all phases of mining: the production, the safety, the preparation at the face, as well as preparation in the clean plaints. And as they get more complicated, the engineer’s job becomes more technical all the way down the line. As to recommend what types of cleaning plants you’re to have, and what results you can get out of it by using the different types of machinery. I’ve recently designed one in this county, seven and a half million-dollar plant that’s not been built yet. I said I designed it; I laid it out.

[cuts off abruptly]

[53 minutes]

[End Tape.]