History of coal mining

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of coal mining stretches back roughly 25,000 years, to a settlement on Landek Hill in what is now Ostrava, Petřkovice, where radiocarbon dating places the oldest intentional use of black coal somewhere between 25,000 and 23,000 years BC. That is not a typo. People were gathering and burning coal long before any civilization we would recognize existed. By the time the Greek scientist Theophrastus wrote his geological treatise On Stones around 371-287 BC, he was already describing coal as an established material that metalworkers relied on. The Aztecs burned it for fuel and shaped jet, a form of lignite, into ornaments. The Romans moved it along the North Sea coast to Yorkshire and London. And yet for most of human history, coal remained a curiosity, a local convenience, a substance of modest importance. What changed? How did a black rock pull an entire planet into an industrial age, reshape the labor movement, and ultimately become the most politically charged fuel in history? The answers run through every continent, touch on slavery, mass death, environmental ruin, and the lives of millions of ordinary people whose names almost no one remembers.

• 2. Before Industry

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  Archaeological evidence in China places surface mining of coal and household use at approximately 3490 BC. That puts coal in the hands of human communities thousands of years before it reached Europe in any organized form. When the Romans arrived in Britain, they were already exploiting all major coalfields except those of north Staffordshire and south Staffordshire by the late 2nd century AD. They burned it in hypocausts to heat public baths and private villas, and archaeologists have found coal stores at forts along Hadrian's Wall alongside evidence of a smelting industry at places like Longovicium.

  After the Romans left Britain in AD 410, the record goes largely quiet for centuries. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 mentions a rent that included twelve loads of coal, a detail that suggests coal never fully disappeared but remained marginal. Then in 1215, shortly after the sealing of Magna Carta, coal began to be traded along the coast of Scotland and north-east England, where carboniferous strata were exposed on the seashore. People called it "sea coal." It was not suitable for domestic hearths of that era and went mostly to artisans for lime burning and metalwork.

  The growing use of coal brought the first signs of public alarm. By the end of the 13th century, coal smoke in London had become a serious grievance, and in 1306 a Royal proclamation prohibited artificers of London from burning sea coal in their furnaces and ordered them back to wood and charcoal. That proclamation failed to stop anything. By the middle of the 16th century, wood supplies in Britain were beginning to fail, and coal's place in everyday life expanded rapidly as a result. In 1575, Sir George Bruce of Carnock at Culross in Scotland opened the first coal mine to extract coal from under the sea on the Firth of Forth, sinking a forty-foot shaft from an artificial island into the sea bed and connecting it to drainage and ventilation shafts. Contemporaries considered the technology one of the industrial wonders of the age.

• 3. The Industrial Turning Point

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  Britain developed the main techniques of underground coal mining from the late 18th century onward, and the transformation was staggering in scale. In 1700, Britain's annual coal output was just under three million tons. Between 1770 and 1780 it reached roughly six and a quarter million long tons per year. By 1815, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, output had climbed to sixteen million long tons. By 1830 it had passed thirty million tons.

  The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the 18th century before spreading to continental Europe, North America, and Japan, was built on coal's ability to power steam engines. International trade expanded rapidly when coal-fed steam engines drove the railways and steamships of the Victorian era. Coal was cheaper and more efficient than wood fuel in most engines, and the geography of central and northern England, with its abundant coalfields, concentrated mines in those regions alongside the South Wales coalfield and Scotland.

  Deep mining brought engineering challenges that earlier surface scratching had never posed. Before 1800, roughly forty percent of coal could be extracted from the deep Tyneside pits, which ran between three hundred and a thousand feet down. Wooden pit props to support roofs were only introduced around 1800. The circulation of air and the control of explosive gases were the critical engineering problems. Fires were lit at the bottom of upcast shafts to create air currents, later replaced by steam-powered fans. The Davy lamp and Geordie lamp protected miners by burning firedamp, or methane, safely within the lamp housing, using metal gauze or fine tubes to prevent combustion from spreading into the surrounding air, though the illumination these lamps gave was very poor.

  The use of women and children in mines, at a fraction of the cost of men, was standard practice until an Act of August 1842 abolished it. Coal output in the United States followed a comparable arc: from 8.4 million short tons in 1850, it doubled every ten years, reaching 270 million by 1900 and peaking at 680 million short tons in 1918.

• 4. Disasters Underground

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  Mining has always been especially dangerous. Explosions, roof cave-ins, and the sheer difficulty of underground rescue made coal mining among the deadliest industrial occupations ever practiced. The worst single disaster in British coal mining history occurred at Senghenydd in the South Wales coalfield. On the morning of the 14th of October 1913 an explosion and the fire that followed killed 436 men and boys. Only 72 bodies were ever recovered.

  Most explosions were caused by firedamp ignitions followed by coal dust explosions. At the Hartley Colliery Disaster of 1862, there was no explosion at all. Instead, a cast iron beam from the haulage engine broke and blocked the single shaft, entombing the miners below. Deaths in coal mine disasters were mainly caused by carbon monoxide poisoning, known as afterdamp.

  Japan's worst mining incident occurred at the Mitsubishi Hojyo coal mine on the 15th of December 1914 on Kyushu Island, where 687 people died. Europe's worst mining accident was the Courrières disaster in northern France, which killed 1,099 miners on the 10th of March 1906. China's deadliest recorded accident, the Benxihu Colliery fire, killed 1,549 miners on the 26th of April 1942. In Belgium, gas explosions were a chronic problem throughout the 19th century. At the Zwartberg mine in 1966, strikes and revolt triggered by an announced reorganization of the Belgian coal industry resulted in the deaths of two miners.

  The danger extended beyond the mines themselves. In 1966, a huge slag heap collapsed at Aberfan in South Wales, burying a school and killing 116 children and 28 adults. Coal's hazards did not stop at the pit head. During a 2015 investigation of Hunan province in China, occupational pneumoconiosis rates among migrant coal workers were found to be 98.31 percent.

• 5. Labor, Politics, and Power

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  Since 1890 coal mining has been as much a political story as an industrial one. The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, founded in 1888, claimed 600,000 members by 1908. In South Wales, miners developed what their historians have described as a community of solidarity, rooted in isolated villages where the workforce shared both the dangers and an evangelical egalitarianism shaped by Methodism. The union supported the Liberal Party, then after 1918 shifted to Labour, with some Communist Party activity at the margins.

  One cause of the UK General Strike of 1926 was miners' concerns over dangerous working conditions, reduced pay, and longer shifts. An unofficial strike began in 1969 after a pledge on surface workers' hours was not honored; an official strike in 1972, under the Wilberforce Commission, won increased wages. Less than two years later, Prime Minister Edward Heath called a general election over another strike called after an overtime ban had produced a Three-Day Week in Britain, and lost that election to Labour.

  In France, the Courrières disaster of 1906, which killed 1,099 men, became a turning point for labor organizing. In 1885, France had recorded 175 injuries per thousand workers per year. The mine safety campaign helped transform miners from a peasant psychology into a working-class consciousness, with worker-elected mine-safety delegates gaining real power. In Belgium, an announced reorganization of the coal mines in 1965 produced strikes and a revolt that cost two miners their lives at the Zwartberg mine in 1966.

  In the United States, under John L. Lewis, the United Mine Workers dominated the coal fields through the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak in 1914, there were 180,000 anthracite miners in the United States; by 1970 only 6,000 remained. Employment in bituminous coal peaked at 705,000 men in 1923, fell to 140,000 by 1970, and to 70,000 by 2003. UMW membership among active miners dropped from 160,000 in 1980 to only 16,000 in 2005, as mechanization and non-union mines came to dominate the industry.

  In Russia and Ukraine, militant coal miners formed the backbone of the revolutionary forces that finally brought down the Communist system in 1991, a reminder that the politics of coal have rarely stayed underground.

• 6. Country by Country

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  The Ruhr valley in Germany saw its first important mines appear in the 1750s, where coal seams outcropped along the rivers Ruhr, Inde, and Wurm. The Krupp family began operations near Essen in 1782. By 1850 the average mine there produced about 8,500 short tons per year and employed around 64 workers; by 1900 those figures had risen to 280,000 short tons and roughly 1,400 employees. The last hard coal mine in Germany closed on the 21st of December 2018.

  In India, commercial coal exploitation began in 1774, when John Sumner and Suetonius Grant Heatly of the East India Company started operations in the Raniganj Coalfield along the western bank of the Damodar River. Growth was sluggish until 1853, when steam locomotives arrived. By 1900 annual production had reached one million tonnes; by 1920 it was eighteen million tonnes per year.

  Poland's first permanent coal mine was established in Szczakowa near Jaworzno in 1767. In modern times coal covers roughly 65 percent of Poland's energy needs. Production for 1994 reached 132 million metric tons, declining to 104 million metric tons by 2002.

  Australia's coal history pivots on the Hunter River, which British settlers renamed Coal River after coal was found there in 1795. In 1804 the Sydney administration established a convict settlement at the river's mouth, naming it Newcastle. In 1984 Australia surpassed the United States as the world's largest coal exporter, with one-third of those exports shipped from the Hunter Valley region. Today Newcastle, New South Wales, is the largest coal port in the world.

  China produced over 2.8 billion tons of coal in 2007, approximately 39.8 percent of all coal produced worldwide that year. An estimated five million people work in China's coal-mining industry, and unofficial estimates suggest as many as 20,000 miners die in accidents each year. Migrant workers in Chinese coal mines face conditions that have been documented in critically acclaimed films, including Blind Shaft and Behemoth, both scrutinized and censored by Chinese authorities.

• 7. Decline and Legacy

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  By the late 20th century, coal had been largely replaced in domestic and transportation use by oil, natural gas, and electricity from nuclear or renewable sources. By 2010, coal still produced over a fourth of the world's energy, a figure that reflects how slowly even a displacement fuel is displaced.

  The British nationalization of most coal mines in 1947 under the National Coal Board began a long managed retreat. Under Alf Robens, pit closures accelerated as coal's role in electricity generation declined. The miners' strike of 1984 failed to stop the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher from shrinking the industry. The National Coal Board, later renamed British Coal, was privatized through the mid-1990s. The last deep coal mine in operation in the UK was Kellingley Colliery, whose final coaling shift came on the 18th of December 2015, ending deep coal mining in Britain entirely with the loss of 450 jobs.

  The Alberta coal rush around Drumheller began to collapse when oil was discovered at Leduc No. 1 in 1947, after which natural gas became the dominant heating fuel for western Canada. Between 1911 and 1979, 139 mines were registered in the Drumheller Valley, of which only 34 proved productive for many years. Atlas #4 Mine shipped its last load of coal in 1979 and is now the Atlas Coal Mine National Historic Site.

  Nova Scotia at its peak in 1949 had 25,000 miners extracting 17 million metric tons of coal. All subsurface mines there were closed by 2001. The Westray Mine near Stellarton had closed earlier, in 1992, after an explosion killed 26 miners. The Nova Scotia Museum of Industry at Stellarton now sits on the very site of the Foord Pit, which by 1866 had been the deepest coal mine in the world, a detail that measures just how far and how fast the whole story traveled.