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Mente et Malleo: Practical Mineralogy and Minerals Exploration in 1632

Written by Laura Runkle

One of the advantages that the people of Grantville have in the novels 1632 and 1633 is their technology. With their tools, the people of Grantville can turn out cannon, rifles, and steam engines. With their chemical knowledge, they can create antibiotics, aspirin, and DDT. With their electronics, they can create diplomatic and broadcast radios. Everything's a piece of cake, right?

Need for Strategic Minerals

Everything is very far from a piece of cake. After making many cannon, the cutting edges of their machine tools will be worn out. There is no Hi-Speed^TM tool steel in the 1630s. It wasn't even invented until the late 1890s. In order to keep a cutting edge, the people of Grantville need some form of tool steel. Early tool steels contained iron, tungsten, and a small amount of carbon. Better tool steels also contain chromium and vanadium, and even more tungsten. Tungsten, chromium, and vanadium weren't known in the 1630s. The people of Grantville have no easy way of purchasing them.

Things get worse. In order to make pharmaceuticals, the people of Grantville need stainless steel, or glass-lined vessels. To make stainless steel, they will need chromium, nickel, and perhaps vanadium. Nickel wasn't known in the 1630s. (Yes, nickel ore was known. So were the ores for zinc and tungsten. The metals weren't known. More about those later.) For the proper glass, they will need borates. Borates were imported from Turkey and Italy.

There are many strategic minerals for Grantville that are necessary to gear down up-timer technology. Grantville has not brought the idea of strategic minerals to the seventeenth century, however. Already people are making a fortune in the creation of war-related brass and bronze. Gunpowder production was a booming industry.

The table below shows some of the resource needs to gear down Grantville's technology.

Even though this is a complex problem, the answer seems simple. Get out a CD-ROM atlas of the world, and search for needed minerals in or near Germany. If there isn't a CD-ROM atlas, look up mining sources for each of these metals. Then find maps of the places in a paper atlas, and start mining the material.

The problem comes down to three things: the politics of mining, the economics of mining, and the technical parts of geological surveying. Each of these will be covered in a section of this article.

There aren't enough up-timers to send out on the search. Only a few up-timers could be trained and sent out on surveys. No up-timers have all the needed skills. The last part of this article will deal with the role of the up-timers as they work with down-timers to obtain strategic minerals.

The Politics of Mining

It's important to remember that Grantville didn't appear in a vacuum. Germany had been mined for a very long time by 1632. Political structures, bureaucracies, and economies had already been built around mining. Some important resources aren't in friendly areas right now. Cryolite is found only in Greenland, a province of Denmark, which is at war with Grantville. A middling good ore of bauxite is at Vogelsberg, within striking distance of Duke Bernhard. It's very hard to start a mine in a war zone. But even outside of a war zone, there are problems with just walking up and digging.

Mining law is complex stuff. Seventeenth-century European mining laws differ from up-timer mining law. The most important variations in Germany were not from place to place, but from product to product. The up-timers don't just have to deal with a different set of rules—they need to remember variations on these rules for different products and different areas.

In Germany, the status of mineral ownership depended heavily on the sort of the mineral. The emperors gave rights, which were often theoretical, to sovereigns of all sort (rulers, abbeys, towns, and so on) in the Middle Ages. But these rights didn't include all minerals. Only silver, gold, lead, copper, tin, and salt followed the strict rules.

Other mineral resources (iron, coal, hard rock, sand, clay, etc.) usually belonged to the landowner. Usually. In some parts of Germany sovereigns claimed ownership for all minerals. These claims were only partly successful in the first half of the seventeenth century. However (mining law is complex), iron was sometimes treated as a valued metal if it was high-quality hard ore that was mined, rather than quarried.

In general, permission was needed to prospect for minerals. More permission was needed for mining, and for using nearby wood and water. Permission for prospecting came from the landowner. The permission for mining valued minerals came from the ruler and/or the mining administration of the area. Base minerals were mostly considered the landowner's property, and could be mined without much trouble from a mining administration.

In practice, if the prospector or mine operator showed that they had enough money and people to carry out the mining in an orderly fashion, permission was almost always granted. A mine was a source of free royalties to the ruler of the territory. The landlord usually got one or more shares, and these shares sometimes had some special privileges. Claim sizes were pretty standard, but there was some variation by the resource.

The way mine ventures were organized is beyond the scope of this paper. They weren't organized in the same manner as shipping companies, although shares were bought and sold. The thing to remember is that share owners also had to pay ongoing operating expenses if the mine was not able to make a profit. Think of owning a share in one of these ventures as a game of financial chicken.

Mine operators needed to pay out shares and royalties. Royalties were paid out with money or with a portion of the ore. If royalties were paid with ore, every tenth or so standardized basket of ore was set aside for the ruler. Shares were usually paid out to owners on a quarterly basis with money. Miners were sometimes the owners of shares or part shares, and sometimes the employees of the mine operator, or both. Owners paid for work that needed to be done on the mine, even if the mine had not brought in a profit. Even though rulers received royalties, they did not pay mine expenses, unless they acted as mine operators as well, or were shareholders.

Timber for supports, smelting, and machinery had to be purchased from the local holders of wood rights. In many places, part of the mining profits were set aside for the support of churches and charities. Unless the church or charity was acting as the mine operator, it did not need to pay expenses.

Mine claims had to be worked. In some cases, mining claims were leases for three to ten years. In most cases, they were perpetual leases, as long as mining lasted. If mining ceased for a period of time, the mine claim was forfeit. That was usually not a problem. (As long as two or more miners were working, the mine would be working legally and could not be forfeit.) If the district mine administrator requested that a mine improve its drainage or ventilation, and some effort was not made for improvement, the mine operator was fined. In some places, the mine was forfeit, and could be mined by another operator. In practice, if a mine was taking money out of the pockets of the mine operator, rather than making profits, the owners had to subsidize the mine.

Rules existed for mines. By 1632, there had already been several notable mining disasters. Usually the resulting rules did not involve the safety of individual miners, but rather the safety of the whole mine—drainage, ventilation, and the placement of tunnels and shafts.

There were environmental laws for the users of wood rights and for smelters. Mostly these laws involved the harvest of trees and the use of water. Water rights were even more complicated in heavily mined districts. Deforestation was a risk near the larger mines and an ever-present danger near the smelting ovens. Before the up-timers go in and try to create a mining bureaucracy, they need to remember that bureaucracies and mining consortiums already exist under the aegis of each local ruler.

Even with those rules, mining was a hard, dirty, and very dangerous job. It still is today. There are very few civilian jobs with a greater risk to health and life than underground mining. Even the best drainage and ventilation of the time was not always good enough. Because the miners used open flames (candles or oil lamps with reflectors), pockets of methane gas sometimes caused explosions. Other times, they just suffocated the miners. In the lead and silver mines, arsenic poisoning was sometimes a risk.

The Knappschaft, or miners' guild, was different from many other guilds in the seventeenth century. All miners, not just the master miners, belonged to the Knappschaft. There were miners' strikes, and mining law was changed to accommodate some demands of the miners. The Knappschaft also paid for the construction of a chapel for before-shift prayer outside most mines, and paid for charities for the members and families. The Knappschaft was not a modern miners' union, but the reactions of down-timer miners to the UMWA will be filtered through their experience with their local Knappschaft.

Mining Economics

A mine is a hole in the ground that sucks up money. The world is full of abandoned mines that someone once felt worth starting. The greatest reason that mines are abandoned is that they don't pay enough to cover expenses.

The mines in the twentieth-century CD-ROMs and atlases are mines that are profitable using twentieth-century techniques for mining, ore dressing, and smelting. With a few notable exceptions, the mines in the oldest encyclopedias in the Ring of Fire were mines that were profitable using nineteenth-century techniques and transportation. Many of these mines could not be profitable with seventeenth-century mining, milling, and transportation. They might not be profitable after high explosives have been developed, and sometimes even after steam engines are available. Someone will need to survey the areas around known sources of the strategic materials to see if it is feasible to mine them.

Factors beyond the ore are important for mining profit. An ore body would have to be unbelievably good if all of the other factors were bad. These factors include ventilation and drainage, energy for ore dressing and smelting, refractory material for smelting, and transportation at several different stages of the process.

The difference between prospecting and mineral surveying is that prospecting only takes the ore body into account. Mineral surveying takes all of the factors for the mine into account. Down-timers already knew this. The silver ore near Joachimsthal was so good that it was profitably mined, even with lots of disadvantages. Some of the ores in the Harz mountains were not so rich, and wood and water were much bigger considerations.

The ore body itself is an important part of any equation. What mineral is being searched for? How close is the ore body to the surface? If it is not directly at the surface, what type of overburden exists? Would a strip or open mine work? Would a (very expensive) underground mine be needed?

Every mine needs ventilation and drainage. Open quarries and strip mines have built-in ventilation, but they still need to be drained. Underground mines often need long ventilation shafts and drainage tunnels, which are very time consuming and costly to create. Water- and wind-powered drainage and ventilation pumps are less expensive to operate than animal- or human-powered pumps, but they depend on the location of the mine, and on the weather. Water- and wind-powered pumps need cooperative weather and climate.

Ore dressing separates the ore from unwanted minerals and rocks. It can be done with hammers, mills, washing, cradles, or other methods. Smelting melts and purifies the ore. Energy for ore dressing and smelting is a must, and it needs to be convenient to the mine, unless the ore is extremely rich. In the seventeenth century, ore dressing was most often done with a combination of water-powered hammer mills, water mills, hand mills with hard-rock millstones, and vigorous washing. Smelting was done with hard coal, charcoal, peat, or wood. In a drought, such as Europe had in the summer of 2003, water power would not be available for many mining tasks. Ore dressing, ore transportation, and drainage pumping would need to be done by gravity, animal power, or human power. All of these are more expensive than water power.

The heat needed to melt many ores and refine them can be quite high. Any smelter needs to be lined with stuff that can take this heat. This heat-tolerant lining is called refractory material or lining. The type of refractory material for smelting can be important. Steel made with one refractory lining is different from steel made with another refractory lining, for instance. Because refractory materials are just a special type of building material, they need to be easily quarried and transported. A convenient means of getting refractory material to the smelter is important.

In the twenty-first century, it's hard to imagine how difficult and expensive transportation was in the seventeenth century. Today, Europe has an excellent network of roads, canals, and railroads, created at great cost over the last few hundred years. These are set up to handle vast amounts of freight, and the shipping cost does not add large amounts to the cost of goods.

Transportation in the seventeenth century was horrible. There's a reason large cities were either on seaports or on rivers that could be navigated with barges. Many of the roads in Germany were muddy or rocky. The distance that a wagon could travel was limited by the strength of the animals pulling it. The transportation costs for wood and peat usually doubled the cost for townspeople not too far from the source. For some goods, customs duties and taxes alone doubled the price. Rocks are heavy, and so even more expensive to ship.

The most economical mines had either gravity-based transportation or river-based transportation close to the mine. Some mines in the Harz and the Erzgebirge already had very well-organized networks of horse carts. They also used water power to lift the ore and rocks out of the mine. Other mines used animals, children, women, or miners (in order of increasing expense) to pull rock to the surface. (In many iron mines, which in most cases didn't fall under the "normal" mining laws, women did much of the work.)

The ideal mine, then, was one easily mined near the surface; close to a plentiful source of water for moving ore, ventilation, drainage, and ore dressing; with plentiful fuel for smelting; with an inexpensive source of nearby transportation; and close to the final market for the smelted material. Any mine that didn't have these would be worked harder for a smaller profit.

Geologic Surveying

Let's say that you have a known location of a mineral in friendly territory, that you want to mine it, and that you have a market with a guaranteed price, so that the economic aspect of the mining will be covered. Now it will be simple to get the mine started, right? Not so fast.

Although a mineral location is known in a book or on a map with a scale of 1:2,000,000, that doesn't mean that the mineral will be seen or recognized on the ground. A geologic survey team would need to find the spots for mining the mineral, and find the materials needed to transport the mineral to the market. The current maps also don't show if the mine is a surface mine or an underground mine. Drilling is very expensive, especially if you are not sure that you are drilling in the right place.

Most mineral field guides and rockhound magazines give driving directions to collection locations. They don't show when the mine or quarry was first worked, or even when the road was built. Even when the locations are mines and quarries that existed in the seventeenth century, there is no knowing whether the given mineral formation has been reached yet.

So surveying and prospecting need to be done, and there aren't enough up-timers to do it. Can the up-timers contribute anything? Certainly!

Although the down-timers have lots of experience in surveying a mine site for the economic and political factors, there are some techniques that up-timers know that would be very useful. Up-timers are aware of the chemistry of minerals and the environments in which the rocks formed. Up-timers also use fossils to date rocks over a large area. They know topographic mapping, and geologic mapping. Uptimers have tools for measurement, surveying, and mathematics that can be duplicated. They have worked out simpler methods of determining positions. Up-timers could offer training and tools to the down-timers.

Although the down-timers have lots of experience with minerals, rocks, and mining, they don't have systematic knowledge of minerals. That requires up-timer chemistry. It's no accident that chemistry and mineralogy developed hand in hand. The up-timers know the desired minerals. They could teach down-time prospectors and surveyors how to work with properties such as streak color, hardness, specific gravity, cleavage, and luster. The down-timers know of many of these properties, but not for the new ores.

Down-timers know how to look at the direction of a vein of mineral, and figure the trend and shape of the vein. Up-timers have had much more time to study how rocks are formed. Some geologists study the formation of rocks, figure how the layers of rocks fit together, and where desired resources might be likely to be found. (It would be wrong to say that down-timers don't know this. It's just that this area of exploration has grown by leaps and bounds over the past couple of centuries.) There wouldn't be time for up-timers to teach down-timers dedicated semester-long classes, but up-timer texts could be reproduced.

Up-timers know how to use fossils to determine the age of rocks over a large distance. This is very useful, since similar resources are often found in similar environments.

Topographic mapping and geologic surveying don't exist in the seventeenth century, although accurate surveying on a small to medium scale certainly does. Topographic lines, which connect areas of equal height, give an accurate picture of the lay of the land, all to scale. Geologic surveying throws in the information about the layers of rock in the area. When a geologic map is placed on a topographic map, and information about current mining operations is placed on the map, the result can be an accurate picture of good places to look for desired minerals.

Accurate surveying to scale needs good instruments. The towns of Augsburg and Nuremberg had many makers of fine instruments, including telescopes, and several types of surveying tools, including early theodolites. The surveyors of the time did not have alidades, mountain transits, nor pocket transits like the Brunton compass. (Geologic surveyors in the United States preferred alidades to theodolites, because they were much sturdier and less expensive than theodolites. Civil surveyors might still use theodolites instead.) The instrument makers would have been able to make them, but at a high price. Every instrument out of Nuremberg and Augsburg was a work of art and craft, produced one at a time. Each instrument took a craftsman from several weeks to several months.

The instrument makers did not have access to a circular divider. A circular divider makes it possible to put consistent small regular divisions (such as degrees and minutes) onto a circle. (The inventor of the circular divider shared in the longitude prize given out by the British admiralty, because it allowed the mass production ...