Anatomy of a Mill (Jigs)
A long line of refining jigs at the Quincy Mill After leaving the final stages of the sizing process, the copper ore that entered the mill as pieces of rock have been reduced to a coarse gravel and...
View ArticlePutting the Pieces Together…
The Stella Cheese Factory? Before leaving the Stella Cheese Factory behind for good, there’s still one last mystery that I feel the need to explore. It has been said that when Stella moved into Baltic...
View ArticleMine Machines: Air Compressors
Before the application of electric generation to the Copper Country landscape, all of a mine’s mechanical power was only obtainable from steam. While this form of power was convenient for a mine’s...
View ArticleSmelter Tech: The Reverberatory Furnace
The copper that arrived to the smelter was anywhere from 70 to 90 percent pure. Due to the unique nature of Lake Superior copper, most of those impurities manifested themselves as pieces of foreign...
View ArticleSmelter Tech: Walker Casting Machine
An automated casting machine at work In the beginning, the finished copper from the Quincy furnaces were molded into ingots using a very labor intensive process. In essence workers would scoop out the...
View ArticleSmelter Tech: The Corliss Engine
While James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine may have been responsible for giving birth to the industrial revolution it would be the contribution of George Corliss that made it profitable....
View ArticleAn Artist’s Rendition
The ruins at Mohawk No. 6 – especially the impressive remains of the hoist building – have never been given the chance to adequetely shine here on CCE in the past. My first foray through the site...
View ArticleAnatomy of a Boiler House (p1)
In the twilight years of the Victorian Age the great industrial revolution had given birth to some of the largest and most impressive steam powered engines the world had ever seen. These monstrous...
View ArticleAnatomy of a Boiler House (p2)
When we last left out unsung hero of the steam age we had finished exploring one of the building’s four main building blocks. While the design, layout, and equipment used within boiler houses varied,...
View ArticleThe Gravity Stamp
Getting copper up and out of the earth was only the first step in a long process transforming copper rock into copper ingot. That raw form of the red metal was not retrieved alone, as it was usually...
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