Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America

Chapter 4: Modeling the Underground in Three Dimensions

113 The two-dimensional maps described in the previous chapters were the most common visual representations associated with the mining industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though these maps were important and could be beautiful, the most spectacular elements of the visual culture of mining were certainly the many models that attempted to display the invisible underground in three dimensions. Models first appeared in the American mining industry in the decades after the Civil War, but only became common in America after the turn of the twentieth century. Three-dimensional models were some of the most powerful representations of the underground, but access to their visual power came at a price. These models were expensive, hard to handle, and difficult to update with additional information. As a consequence, models were used only when more-traditional visual technologies, such as maps or drawings, were considered ineffective. The special power of models stemmed from their ability to communicate information to nonengineers in a way that was difficult for maps to do. Models were used mostly in classrooms, courtrooms , and exhibitions—situations where their inflexibility was not a detriment , and their particular powers were of paramount importance. This chapter will explore technical models in the American mining industry during its era of professionalization. This will include how they were made, their various forms, and a broad survey of their uses in classrooms and courtrooms. Chapter 5 will examine the story of a Modeling the Underground in Three Dimensions chapter 4 114  Seeing Underground particular model’s use in a mining lawsuit. The term technical models perhaps deserves further explanation. This term is used here to describe threedimensional representations of underground spaces that were constructed for the primary purpose of conveying measurable information about the underground, testing mechanisms, showing relationships between things, and so on. These technical models were not originally made to be put in a museum, even if some did end up there eventually. Technical models stand in contrast to lifelike display models, which are found primarily in museums and expositions. The purpose of display models is to portray a broader, less technically sophisticated image of mining work; these models were frequently directed at a general public audience. More will be said about display models, with their roots in expositions and museums, in chapter 6. There was some overlap between display models and technical models, but it is useful to make a distinction because it can help clarify issues of audience, authorship, and style. It may be helpful to compare technical models, part of the visual culture of mining, with other models used in scientific inquiry.1 The term model has multiple meanings. One way to look at a model is that it is a system of understanding that simplifies inputs and predicts outcomes , but that does not necessarily have a material representation. These theoretical models, such as those used to predict outcomes in economics, did not play a discernible role in the nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury mining industry and would not have been represented as technical models. Other scientific models, however, are material artifacts intended to depict physical relationships and phenomena in a scale different from that of the original, and thus bear some resemblance to underground mine models. The mine models discussed in this chapter were material artifacts that used three dimensions (instead of a map’s two) to represent underground spaces. While historians have long paid attention to the concepts that scientific models represented, the physical makeup of models, that constrains the way they can convey those concepts, has not been well studied.2 Mine models provide an excellent opportunity for this sort of historical analysis. Mine models functioned differently from many of the material models previously described by historians of science. For example, think of the three-dimensional ball-and-stick models of atomic particles that were used in twentieth-century chemical sciences to build molecular structures. Modeling the Underground  115 (These are no doubt familiar to every person who has endured basic-level chemistry.) These molecular models aided scientists in their work by being manipulable, flexible objects that themselves “embody, rather than imply, the spatial relationship of the molecule’s components.” Put another way, the “models mimic, mechanically, some of the important physical properties attributed to molecules.”3 Scientists could test hypotheses and experiment by manipulating the model. By simply rearranging the balls and sticks, the model helps them understand if a...