The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-09-24
NEARLY A MILE.

The Great Depth of Shaft of One of
 the Michigan Copper Mines
 A French engineer proposed last year to the directors of the International Exposition to be given in the French capital in the year 1900 the digging of hole to the depth of one mile. The idea was favorably received, but on in- vestigation the magnitude of the un- dertaking became so apparent that the idea has been dropped It will, there fore, be necessary for those who desire to descend mile into the bowels of the earth to come to Calumet, for nowhere else on earth are there available open ings of such depth. Within less than a mile of each other in this mining town there are three vertical shafts each nearly one mile in depth. The deepest of this trio is the Red Jacket shaft of the Calumet ard Hecla copper mine, which has reached it's full depth of for ty-nine hundred feet. Five Eiffel tow CTS could be dropped down this hole were it wide enough, and the top of the fifth would reach above the surface only to such height as would allow it to be easily covered by the steel shaft house now being built over the mon- strous hole.
 This shaft was begun in 1889, and it has taken seven full years to sink 1t, showing an average progress of seven hundred feet annually, nearly all of which has been in blue trap rock, one of the most refractory of minerals. r1<, the bed of an ancient sea. and is com- posed of pebbles and gravel worn by the action of the water, such as are seen on sea beaches or lake shores, ce- mented into a solid mass of gale and silica. By the percolationI of the -vaters and the decomposition of cer- tain constituents of the rock little cav- ities were formed, in which were de- posted small nodules of copper by the water.
 The Red Jacket shaft is fifteen and nehalf by twenty-five feet, in size in- side of the timbers, and contains six compartments, being fully equal in working capacity to half dozen min- ing shafts of ordinary size. The shaft is solidly timbered. The adamantine l firmness of the rock renders it secure | for all time to come, the timbers being | merely to carry the traffic of men and mineral, of water and electricity, which 1 surges between the sunlight and the 1 bottom. In four compartments will slip up and down the ponderous cages, carrying ten-ton loads of rock at the speed of express trains Up and down these cages will also ride the men who mine the rock from the old sea bed. In one compartment will be the great iron pump pipes, and down another de- scends the steady current of com pressed air which runs the drills mile below the engine house. Punched in
 slender cables are the copper wires
 which convey electricity to light the racesses of the mine, threads of wire
 that afford telephonic communication ! from the most remote drift to any oth- CT portion of the property, for the Cal
 umet and Hecla has a telephone eX-
 change of it's own, which in size and perfection of equipment puts to the blush the facilities of many pretentious 1 towns, and which reaches every office on the surface and every portion of the great mine. There are fire-alarm
 wires, too. for the Calumet and Hecla spares no cost to make its employees as
 safe as skill and lavish outlay of mon- ey can render them.
 The sinking of this shaft possesses deep interest from a scientific stand