Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

WITH THE SALT WORKERS IN A CHESHIRE MINE. 337 seventeenth century, is the compressed-air cutter—a broad iron framework fitted with a horizontal iron wheel strongly and sharply spiked, that cuts deeply into the rock at the rate of 180 revolutions per minute. But at the time of my visit the cutter was idle, or rather awaiting adaptation, for in future it will be worked by an electric motor. In the fitful light of many candles adhering to the rock salt face, the miners toiled unremittingly. Beneath each drill hole two men faced each retire a few yards from the drill hole, and cluster against the wall of rock, hugging the face of the strata. The shot fires with a loud, reverberating report that fills the mine with weird echoes and rumblings, and flings half a ton of rock salt banging and clattering far out from the face. But the explosion, startling to the uninitiated, is only an incident to the hewers, and they are soon busy with pickaxe at their working place again, preparing for the next blast. other, half naked, and swung their muscular arms and their picks, systematically nicking into the base of the rock a herring-bone ridge that appeared to make little impression upon the strata, and yet so undermined it that the coming shot would have sufficient room to turn over. The driller, busy at the rock above, about a yard higher than the hewers, did not use a hammer. With his stemmer or drill, an iron rod eight feet in length and diamond pointed, he slowly twisted and ground a hole into the interior of the rock. Then he rammed home the coarse powder and applied the time fuse. The latter, a straw filled with fine powder and ignited by a bit of candle wick, is only three seconds in burning. A warning is given before it is lighted, and the miners move away. They do not, as in a coal mine, hurry this way and that. They 43 Meantime the rock salt from top or bottom bed is broken with wedge and hammer into handy size for transit in the tubs, which are run or “ ferried ” along the tramways to the shafts and sent to the surface. The men descend the mine at seven o’clock in the morning, break off for breakfast or “ snap ” at ten, and for dinner at one, and go up the shaft at three o’clock in the afternoon, when their clay’s toil is done. They are burly, muscular, good-humoured, and apparently contented. The work does not, like some methods of alkali manufacture, undermine the constitution or sap the vitality, and you come across hearty workers, vigorous though grey-bearded, in the recesses of the mine. Salt from the brine is used for the table and a variety of domestic purposes ; rock salt is utilised as food for animals and as a fertiliser