ABSTRACT
In early times, where the rock or ore was too hard to release from the face with hand tools such as the hammer and gad or the pick, it was first loosened by a process known as “fire-setting”. Fire-setting was gradually replaced by the use of explosives. Blasting powder was first used in Schemnitz in 1627, in the Oberbiederstollen mine by a miner from Tyrol called Kaspar Weindl. The drilling of blastholes now became an important skill in the repertoire of the miner. Until the late nineteenth century, holes were drilled in hard rock by successive blows on a chisel-pointed drill steel with a heavy hammer. In 1871, Simon Ingersoll and the Rand brothers developed the “piston drill”, which was also operated by compressed air. Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine were developed by 1846, but these were not used for rock blasting until Alfred Nobel invented the fulminate detonator in 1867 as a safe, reliable method of detonating these high-powered explosives.
