In a Coal Mine

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Description

This as an excerpt from a collection of books for schoolchildren about different jobs.

Vocal Characteristics

Language

English

Voice Age

Young Adult (18-35)

Accents

British (England - South East - Oxford, Sussex) British (General)

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
it a coal mine by even marched happen. Did you ever wonder how beds of coal happened to be in the earth? This is a storey centuries ago, so many 1000 centuries that even the most learned men could only guess at their number. Strange things were coming to path. The air was so moist and cloudy that the sun's rays had hard work to get through. It was wrong, nevertheless, for the crust of the earth was not nearly so thick as it is now. On much heat came from the earth itself. Many plants and trees grow best in warm, moist air, and such plants flourished in those days. Some of their descendants are living now, but they are dwarfs while their ancestors were giants, there is a little horse tail growing in our medal. On there are phones and club Mosses almost everywhere. These are some of the descendants, but many of their ancestors were 40 or 50 feet high. They grew very fast, especially in swamps. On when they died, there was no lack of others to take their places. Dead leaves fell and taped up around them. Stump stood and decayed, just as they do in our forest today. Every year the soft, black, decaying mass group, deeper as the crust of the earth, was so thin it bent and wrinkled easily. It often sank in one place and droves in another when these low, swampy places thank water rushed over, then pressing down upon them with a great weight and sweeping in sand and clay. Now, if you burn a heap of what in the open air, the carbon in the wood burns and only a pile of ashes remain burning means that the carbon in the works unites with the oxygen gas in the air. If you cover the woods before you light it so that only a little oxygen reaches it, much of the carbon is left in the fall of charcoal. When what decays is, carbon unites with the oxygen in the air, and so decay is really a sort of burning in the forests of today. The leaves and at length, the trees themselves fall and decay in the open air. But at the time when our call was for me, the water kept the air away and much carbon with left. This is the way call was made. Some of the layers or straw oughta off 50 or 60 feet sit on. Some are hardly thicker than paper. On top of each one is a stratum of sandstone or dark grey shale. This was made by the sand and mud, which were brought in by the water. These Shelly rock, split easily into sheets on DH, show beautiful fossil impressions of ferns. There are also impressions of the bark and fruit of truths, together with shells, criminals, corals, remains of fishes and flying lizards and some few trilobites crab like animals with a shelf somewhat like the back of a lobster but marked into three divisions, or lobes, from which its name comes, since the crust of the earth was so thin and yielding it wrinkled up as the earth cooled. Much is the skin of an apple wrinkles when the apple dries. This brought some of the strata of coal to the surface, and after a while people discovered that it could burn if a vein of coal cropped out on a man's farm. He broke some of it up with his pickaxe, shuffled it into his wheelbarrow and wield it home. After a while, hundreds of thousands of people wanted Cole and now attack to be mined. In some places, the cold Stratton was horizontal and cropped out on the side of a hill so that a level road could be dug straight into it. In other places, the call was so near the surface that it could be quarried under the open sky, just as granite is quarried. Generally, however, if you wish to visit a coal mine, you go to a shaft a squared black well, sometimes deeper than the height of three or four ordinary church steeples. You get into the cage, a great steel box, and are lowered down, down, down. At last, the cage stops and you were at the bottom of the mine. The miners faces hands. Overalls are all black with coal dust. They were tiny lamps on their caps on as they come near the walls of coal, it sparkles if it catches the light here and their hands an electric lamp. It is doing its best to drive out light, but it's glass is thick with cold us. The lone roof is held up by stout wooden timbers and pillars of coal. A long passageway stretches off into a black darkness than you ever dreamed off. Suddenly there is a blaze of red light, far down the passage, a roll, a medley of all sorts of noises, the rattling of chains, the clattering of couplings, the shouts of men, the crash of cold falling into the bins. It is a locomotive driving its line of cars loaded with coal. In a few minutes, it rushes back with empty cars that have refilled all along this passage way. Our rooms, that is, chambers, which have been made by digging out the coal above them, is a vast amount of earth and rock, sometimes hundreds of feet in thickness. There is always danger that the roof will cave in, and so the rooms are not made large and great. Palace of coal left to hold up the roof Not many years ago, the minor used to do all the work with his muscles. Now machines do most of it. The minor then had to lie down of his side near the wall of coal in his room and cut into it close to the floor as far as his attacks would reach. Then he bored a hole into the top of the coal, pushed in a cartridge trust in a slender squib, lighted it and ran for his life. The cartridge explode it and perhaps a tunnel. Two of coal fell. The miners help her shovel this into a car and pushed it out of the room to join a long string of cars. That is the way my name used to be done.