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."

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