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

Chapter 6: Mine Models for Education and the Public

192 The visual power of mine models made them perfect vehicles for teaching. Such models helped mining engineers convey, in a visual way, the spaces and technologies of industrial mining that they helped to create. Although mine models varied widely in their content and form, all helped engineers reach new audiences. One audience for a simplified understanding of industrial mines were young mining-engineers-to-be. Models could help students who had not yet developed a knack for making three-dimensional pictures in their mind’s eye visualize the complex spaces of a modern mine. Given the difficulty of seeing many mining technologies at full scale underground, a model could represent all at once a complete system or make a technology visible that could not be seen in the darkness below. Models could transport a mine to visitors, in order to reach audiences that could not view the site itself. Beginning in the late nineteenth century , mine models became increasingly popular at the great world’s fairs. The public embraced the opportunities for entertainment and education the fairs provided. Corporations grew to realize the immense opportunities to showcase their goods and services. In this context, models of mines made by corporations served commercial as well as educational purposes. After the fairs, such models often ended up in museums, to continue portraying their educational (and corporate) messages. With the help of likeminded curators, these models brought the ethos of mining engineers and Mine Models for Education and the Public chapter 6 Mine Models for Education and the Public  193 the corporations for which they worked to the exhibit halls of American museums. One well-documented example is the mine models displayed in the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Early technical models for education, especially those specifically representing mining engineering problems rather than more general geological questions, were generally made overseas. As mentioned in chapter 4, J. P. Lesley and several members of the Harden family made geological and block models in eastern Pennsylvania beginning in the 1860s, but their preferred materials made it difficult to make duplicates for mining schools located beyond the Eastern seaboard. The Hardens repeatedly discussed the problem of making transportable models. Harden normally made plaster negatives of his wooden and wax topographic models, so he could make plaster positives, which lent themselves to customizable coloring and duplication. The trouble was that plaster was expensive, heavy, and fragile. Harden and Harden moped, “[I]t is desirable that a cheaper method of duplicating models be found. . . . Plaster of Paris is for many reasons a good material; but its weight and its liability to damage in transportation render it unsuited.”1 The Hardens conducted experiments for years hoping to find a method of using paper or some other lightweight and inexpensive material to reproduce the topographical models, but never reported the success they sought. Overseas mining schools developed models and similar methods of instruction before they became widespread in American institutions. William Jones described for a popular audience the mining school of St. Petersburg , in the Russian Empire, and its attendant museum. In addition to mineral specimens and examples of tools and machinery, “There are also fac-simile representations, in miniature, of several mines, showing in what manner the metals are worked, and the kind of machinery employed.”2 More striking than the jewels or the models, however, was Jones’ trip into the full-size training mine, attached to the museum and used by students: “A guide precedes the visitor with two candles in hand, and after passing through several passages, and unlocking two ponderous doors, he is led into the gloomy recesses of a counterfeit mine, absolutely underground, furnished with all the machinery, tools, and implements used in a real mine. Here the pupils of the mining college are instructed, by an exact representation of various mines, how the different ores are found.”3 194  Seeing Underground Freiberg, in Saxony (Germany), was well known as a center of mine model making as early as the eighteenth century, and the mining academy there made extensive collections of models to further their students’ education. J. C. Bartlett reviewed the attractiveness of the foreign mining schools to prospective American mining engineers in the mid-1870s. Bartlett held highest regard for the mining academy at Freiberg, which had a longstanding reputation in mining engineering education. In addition to exposure...