Today, a story about adaptation. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The first miners who stepped
into our great forbidding West weren't after gold.
They were after more useful metals -- tin and
copper. Gold didn't turn up in California until
1848. But miners had already crossed the
Mississippi by 1840.
Mining was terrible, hard, and dangerous work. It
took people as tough as they were smart. Our first
Western miners came out of the mines of Cornwall.
Then laborers, driven from Ireland by the potato
famine, joined them. They went into Colorado,
Nevada, Arizona, California. They brought along
their old methods and their old Catholic/Protestant
hatreds.
At first, Cornishmen and Irishmen wrecked whole
mining camps when they got drunk and went at each
other. Later they adapted. They learned to join
each other's fun on St. George's and St. Patrick's
day.
But, if you watched the old Poldark series on
Masterpiece Theatre, you caught a glimpse of the
highly honed Cornish mining technology. That same
expertise was still taking ore out of the American
West in this century.
Ground water is the worst problem in shaft mining.
A deep mine is a lot like a well. You have to take
water out constantly. The English started doing
that with Newcomen's steam
engine in 1712. Out of that came the Cornish
pump.
By the late 1700s those huge walking-beam engines
dotted Cornwall. They took on only the first of
Watt's steam-engine improvements. From then on, the
Cornish pump was a technology frozen in time --
frozen in 1769.
And what a great lumbering dinosaur it was! Around
1800, Erasmus Darwin, poet and friend of James
Watt, wrote about one:
Press'd by the ponderous air the Piston
falls
Resistless, sliding through its iron walls;
Quick moves the Balanced beam, of giant-birth,
Wields his large limbs, and nodding shakes the
earth.
Now Cornish miners adapted Cornish pumps
to the American West. Here's a photo of one in
Tombstone, Arizona. Someone took it in the 1890s. A
great iron beam, 3 stories high, drives a rod down --
into the earth. It powers stage after stage of pumps,
hundreds of feet below. It empties tons of water a
minute. Yet it's still a machine from 1769 -- still
frozen in time.
The old Cornish pump, like the Cornish miners who
came here, had stunning adaptability. The Cornish
pump was simple and rugged -- a perfect fit to its
purpose. It was like the DC-3, the violin, or
silverware. It was a machine so well conceived that
it outlived competition. It even outlived
improvement.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
