Breaker boy

Coal came into wide use in the late 1590s in the United Kingdom after the island nation was widely deforested and a ban was placed on the harvesting of wood by Charles I of England, so that forests could be used solely by the Royal Navy. A newly emergent middle class increasingly demanded glass for windows, and the glass-making industry relied heavily on charcoal for fuel. With charcoal no longer available, the glass industry turned to coal. Demand for coal also increased after the invention of the reverberatory furnace and the development of methods for casting iron objects such as cannons. Coal is often mixed with impurities such as rock, slate, sulfur, ash (or "bone"), clay, or soil. The second function of a coal breaker was to remove as many impurities as economically desirable and technologically feasible, and then grade the coal based on the percent of impurities remaining. The smaller lumps of coal were considered non-marketable and left in the mine. Beginning about 1830, surface processing of coal in the US began concurrently with various canal projects in the Eastern Seaboard. These developments lagged behind that of Great Britain, better matching the timing of similar developments in Continental Europe. Great Britain, with its heavily deforested landscapes, simply had to find economic alternatives sooner, stimulating coal, iron, and machine developments leading ultimately to railroads and the infant industrial chemicals industries of the 1860s. Lumps of coal were placed on plates of perforated cast iron. "Breakers" would hammer on the coal until it was in pieces small enough to fall through the holes. A second screen caught the coal, and it was shaken, by hand, animal, steam, or water power to remove the unmarketable smaller lumps. This "broken and screened" coal was worth much more than "broken" coal or lump coal. ==Use of breaker boys==

. Photo by George Bretz, 1880s Until about 1900, nearly all coal breaking facilities in the United States were labor-intensive. The removal of impurities was done by hand, usually by breaker boys between the ages of 8 and 12 years old. The use of breaker boys began around 1866. For 10 hours a day, six days a week, breaker boys would sit on wooden seats, perched over the chutes and conveyor belts, picking slate and other impurities out of the coal. Breaker boys working on top of chutes or conveyor belts would stop the coal by pushing their boots into the stream of fuel flowing beneath them, briefly pick out the impurities, and then let the coal pass on to the next breaker boy for further processing. Others would divert coal into a horizontal chute at which they sat, then pick the coal clean before allowing the fuel to flow into clean coal bins. The acid burned the hands of the breaker boys. ==Public condemnation==

, 1911. Public condemnation of the use of breaker boys was so widespread, that in 1885 Pennsylvania enacted a law forbidding the employment of anyone under the age of 12 from working in a coal breaker. Technological innovations in the 1890s and 1900s, such as mechanical and water separators designed to remove impurities from coal, dramatically lowered the need for breaker boys, but adoption of the new technology was slow. ==Union activities==

Breaker boys were known for their fierce independence and rejection of adult authority. Among these were the strike which culminated in the Lattimer massacre and the Anthracite coal strike of 1902. ==References==