COAL MINING: The Dangerous History of Life in a Coal Mine

Coal mining has evolved from a primitive, lethal endeavor into a highly mechanized industrial process. Between 1900 and 2020, over 104,000 miners died in the U.S. alone, facing constant threats from "fire damp" methane explosions, "chokedamp" suffocation, and structural flooding. Early operations relied heavily on the labor of women and children, who dragged coal carts through narrow crevices until the UK’s 1842 Mines and Collieries Act established age and gender restrictions following a tragic accident that killed 26 children. Technological shifts, beginning with the 1740 introduction of coal coking for iron smelting, eventually replaced manual labor with sophisticated machinery. Modern extraction now utilizes continuous miners that outperform 1920s daily yields in a single minute, longwall mining for automated block extraction, and massive dragline excavators for surface mining, significantly reducing the physical risks once inherent to the profession.