This Is What Modern Mining Replaced!

This episode of Aged Skills takes viewers on a detailed journey through the full history of lignite mining in the Rhenish district of Germany. In the nineteenth century, small crews of three men worked tight pits by hand, using pickaxes, shovels, and wicker baskets to extract coal seam by seam. Once the pit reached a workable depth, a wooden windlass was set up to hoist the heavy baskets to the surface. The coal was then sorted, with valued pieces of fossil wood and dense chunks set aside, while the rest was prepared for shaping into fuel blocks. The hand-moulded lignite fuel blocks known as Glücken were the forerunners of the modern briquette. Crushed coal was mixed with water and kneaded underfoot into a workable slurry, then packed into tapered wooden moulds and turned out onto flat drying yards. The shaped bells were left to dry for several days, stacked into pyramids, and sold primarily in June. A skilled moulder working with an assistant could produce five hundred to six hundred blocks in a single day, earning two silver groschen per hundred pieces, with an allowance of fuel blocks for personal use on top of wages. By the eighteen nineties, mechanical briquette production had replaced hand moulding, and within another two decades, machine excavators replaced the pickaxe altogether. The video follows this transformation all the way through to the modern Fortuna open-cast mine near Bergheim, the Karl briquette factory in Frechen, and the industrial processes that now handle over one hundred and twenty million tonnes of lignite per year. Steam presses dating from around nineteen hundred compact dried coal dust into briquettes at a rate of up to one hundred and forty tonnes per press per day, before the finished product is bundled, palletised, and dispatched by rail. Lignite, also known as brown coal, has been extracted in the Rhenish region for centuries. Known in earlier times as black earth or peat, it was burned for domestic heating long before its industrial potential was recognised. The Frechen area was a particularly important centre of production, where mines transitioned from small family plots to open-cast operations covering thousands of hectares. Today, eighty-five percent of Rhenish lignite is converted into electricity, while the remainder goes to processing plants, continuing a tradition of coal use that stretches back well over two hundred years. Original source material: Rheinische Braunkohle. Kuhlenbau und Klüttenmachen Published by Alltagskulturen im Rheinland © LVR-Institut für Landeskunde und Regionalgeschichte CC BY 4.0