CONYNGHAM - Early miners used open flames for their lights and caged canaries to check for deadly gas. They lit a fuse and ran when blasting coal into chunks, which they loaded onto carts that donkeys pulled to the surface.
Engineers from Northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite region will celebrate the miners of yesteryear and their society's 100th anniversary on Thursday at the Valley Country Club in Conyngham.
The group known as the Pennsylvania Anthracite Section of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration formed in Wilkes-Barre so members could share technology.
"We pretty much have the same function we did then. People get together to talk about what's new," said Michael Korb, a former chairman of the society who is set to lead the group again next year.
In the society's first meeting on May 17, 1914, the engineers discussed techniques for mining beneath sand and gravel. A paper was presented, discussed and rewritten for a national gathering.
Korb said he and other engineers still follow the same process, as when he presented a paper to the society about using water in mine pools as a source of geothermal energy, heard comments from the members and presented research to a national group.
"The centennial is a chance to take a look back, talk about some people involved and what we can do differently in the future," he said.
As Korb reflected on the changes in mining technology, he also thought of his grandfather, Charles Hubert Hiles, who was a miner.
Another engineer, Joseph Michel, remembers his father, Michael Michel, by displaying mining mementos in his office in Hazleton.
John Stuart "Stu" Richards, who will give the main speech at the society's centennial celebration, said his grandfather's career helped motivate him to write "Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region."
When speaking to the society about the history of mining, Richards said he will explain the saying that a miner is "once a man, twice a boy" as it applied to his grandfather, George Richards.
Miners like his grandfather started working in the mines as boys and became so broken down in their later years that they were relegated to the work of boys once again.
"To me, these are the hardest-working people that you'll ever come across," said Richards, who also collects and performs old mining songs. "My grandfather worked until he was 57. He died in 1942 in the mines and looked like he was 80 because of the continuous work since he was 7."
Korb and Michel both still own the lunch buckets that their relatives carried into the mines.
Korb's grandfather got the lunch bucket as a gift from his wife-to-be, Sylvia, on his birthday, Dec. 23, 1917. They married two days later on Christmas.
"She was a schoolteacher, and they both had the day off," Korb said while laughing at the recollection.
Hiles worked in the bituminous or soft coal fields of western Pennsylvania.
"He was a miner his whole life - a rather short life. He died when he was 54. He had black lung," Korb said.
Respirators to protect lungs against coal dust that causes the lung disease known as black lung, gas detectors, battery-powered lamps and power drills were among the innovations of the past century.
Michel, a retired engineer, said his father came to Jeddo from Austria-Hungary in 1922.
"He didn't want to go into the coal mines, but there was no place else to work," he said.
His father was relieved to quit after 28 years underground and open a bar called Mickey Mikes Place in Freeland.
For a display in his office, Michel hooked his father's lunch box, helmet with carbide lamp, overalls and tin canteen to a chain hoist from a mine.
Carbide lamps, which gave way to electric lights by 1920, according to photos in Richards' book, had predecessors. Michel displays some, along with picks, shovels and hand drills.
He called one light a Sticking Tom. It is a candleholder that a miner could pound into a wooden support or hang on a hook.
Another lamp, rectangular, held grease that kept wicks burning in each corner.
A frog lamp, in Michel's lingo, burned oil and was made in Germany.
Michel said surveyors held lamps next to a rod, and their partners would peer through the darkness to spot the flame and note the elevation.
The surveyors recorded where the coal was mined. Their maps and drawings reveal technical skill and artistic talent, which Michel displayed.
He unrolled a linen scroll showing the layout of mines beneath Humboldt. The penmanship was immaculate and the lines that showed the main tunnels or gangways and the cells where coal was dug through the room-and-pillar technique, were straight.
"They had to go down, measure all this stuff: the cuts, the elevations the main gangway, and put it all on paper," Michel said. His collection includes hundreds of maps and drawings of mines and mining towns, as well as surveyors' tools.
One surveyor's transit had dumpy legs, and the surveyors using it inside the mines wouldn't have had room to stand up, either.
Equipment wasn't all that changed in the mines.
The region's landscape, though, has been altered.
Pits remain from strip mining, a process first noted in Pennsylvania reports in 1930 but which became more common about World War II, Korb said.
The skyscrapers of the coal region are gone, too. About 280 processing plants called coal breakers, several stories high with chutes angling to the ground, once served as landmarks throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Korb said 14 remain. None are as tall or distinctive as their predecessors.
Breakers disappeared as the industry contracted.
About 180,000 men worked in anthracite mines in 1914, about when Korb's grandfather went underground for the first time. Today the mines employ about 1,000.
The United Mine Workers of America, which gained support after sheriff's deputies shot striking miners to death at Lattimer in 1897 and a pivotal strike in 1902, closed its district office in Hazleton long ago.
As production declined, so did fatalities.
More than 121,200 people died in the mines between 1847 and 1980, Richards writes.
After 1870, when nearly 15 men died in the mines for every ton of coal removed, safety laws took effect.
Korb said later legislation, such as in 1906, had more effect.
"That made a difference. Things changed pretty fast," Korb said.
Still, 600 miners died in 1914, whereas none have died in the region for the past few years, he said.
To become a miner, laborers had to study and pass a test to earn a certificate.
Richards published the mining certificate of his grandfather in his book. His grandfather was working in the Gowen mine near Hazleton when he collapsed and died. A doctor listed the cause of death as a heart attack, so Richards' grandmother was unable to collect black lung payments until former Congressman Gus Yatron intervened in her case more than a quarter-century later in 1970.
Another mining certificate hangs on the wall of Michel's office. His father earned the certificate in 1930 after working eight years as a laborer.
Certified miners could detonate explosives.
"My father used dynamite with a fuse. You lit it and ran like hell," Michel said.
Korb said electric detonators made blasting safer.
Equipment such as shears that remove coal from the vein reduced the need to blast, especially in the soft coal fields.
Richards' book contains a photo of a pick machine, a wheeled drill that could strike the coal face up to 210 times a minute and undercut coal faces in anthracite mines. Trolleys powered by overhead electric wires started to haul coal to the surface instead of mules. Richards' book depicts one trolley, sometimes called an electric mule, from 1908, but wrote that the electric cars could ignite mine gas. Battery-powered cars proved safer, he wrote.
Miners thought mules could sense trouble and credited them with saving lives. Mules remained in the mines through the late 1950s, and a law banned them from the mines in 1964.
"I think there should be a monument to the mine mule for what they sacrificed," Richards said.