MINING: Coal Mole

At a mine of the Sunnyhill Coal Co. near New Lexington, Ohio one day last week, amazed mine experts watched a huge (26-ton) machine in action. With surprisingly little noise, it tore into a seam, spewed a continuous stream of coal into a truck that followed. Within a minute and a half, the five-ton truck was almost full; in that time the machine had come close to the average U.S. production per man-day (around five tons). The machine’s lone operator apologized because it had taken so long; he was running the digger at slow speed.

The dream of a continuous mechanical miner—one that will perform the slow, costly and dangerous operations still necessary in even the most mechanized mines —is not new. Since war’s end at least six companies have secretly developed models. Joy Manufacturing Co. actually went so far as to announce the results of a private test of one (TIME, April 5). But Sunnyhill’s mechanical mole—the “Colmol”—was the first to back up its claims with a public demonstration.

Among the designers of the Colmol was Sunnyhill’s 37-year-old President Clifford H. Snyder, who started in business with a $75 second-hand truck. He now runs a company that grosses $25 million a year. Along with Co-Inventors Arnold E. Lamm, Sunnyhill’s executive vice president, and V. J. McCarthy, a coal man of Youngstown, Ohio, he built a prototype of the machine around an old army tank, worked out the bugs in a company warehouse, that was guarded day & night.

The working model is a low-slung, 25-ft.-long, electric-motored contraption which travels on caterpillar tracks. It has two horizontal rows of rotary steel drills which chew out the coal and sweep it on to a conveyor, which carries it over the tail of the machine into mine cars.

The Colmol thus combines two operations—breaking and loading—which now require separate crews and machinery. It also eliminates two chief mining dangers—cutting and blasting. One of the problems it creates for mine owners is that it turns out coal too fast (up to 1,000 tons a shift) for mine elevators. Faster ways—perhaps conveyor belts—must be devised to carry the coal to the surface.

Sunnyhill, which has few manufacturing facilities of its own, still has one big obstacle to overcome: production of the machine. (Joy is already working on commercial versions of its model.) But Sunnyhill’s machine has already created so much interest among would-be manufacturers that the company expects limited production to start “within a few months.”