Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

Valley of the Nile. During his visit to Egypt, while at Khartoum, he offered, entirely at his own expense, to equip the Gordon College with engineering plant, with a view to manual training of the natives. This he is doing; he is fitting the school of English technical instruction in the far- away desert with steam and electric engines and machinery, and with tools of various kinds for working in wood, lead, iron, and steel, so that the sons of the followers of the Mahdi may become adept in the ele- mentary arts of mechanical engineering. The existence of the mining engineer is chiefly remembered at the time of great colliery disaster, when he is prominent, and often heroic, in his efforts to save life ; but his daily work is equally responsible. He has to gauge the lie of the mineral, show the trend of the workings likely to be safest and most profitable, to insist on proper propping, to institute haulage and winding ; and, now coal-getting has been to some ex- THE ENGINEERING INDUSTRY. 369 LONDON AND NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY FOUR-CYLINDER COMPOUND PASSENGER ENGINE. {Photo kindly supplied by Mr. F. W. JFebbl) tent removed from mere hand labour to an expert industry, he must be ready, whether civil or mechanical, to avail himself of every improvement in machinery. Perhaps the greatest recent innovation has been in the method of coal-getting itself. The miner has for years picked the coal from beneath the face of the strata; now in some pits the coal - cutting machine, run along rails to the edge of the coal face, whirls its great wheel, driven horizontally by com- pressed air or electric motor, into the solid coal, and cuts it to such a depth that the upper part of the seam falls by its own weight. The machine is worked by the miner in a sitting posture ; and he can get far more coal with it than with the more irksome and laborious pick. Photo; A. B, Hughey Norwood. CONSTRUCTING A RAILWAY. 47