Breaker boy

[4][5] Although public disapproval of the employment of children as breaker boys existed by the mid-1880s, the practice did not end until the early 1920s.

[7] A newly emergent middle class increasingly demanded glass for windows, and the glass-making industry relied heavily on charcoal for fuel.

Demand for coal also increased after the invention of the reverberatory furnace and the development of methods for casting iron objects such as cannons.

[8] Coal is often mixed with impurities such as rock, slate, sulfur, ash (or "bone"), clay, or soil.

[citation needed] In the US prior to 1830, very little bituminous coal was mined and the fuel of the early American Industrial Revolution—anthracite coal—underwent little processing before being sent to market, which was primarily ironworks and smithies producing wrought iron.

[10] Beginning about 1830, surface processing of coal in the US began concurrently with various canal projects in the Eastern Seaboard.

[10] A second screen caught the coal, and it was shaken, by hand, animal, steam, or water power to remove the unmarketable smaller lumps.

Others lost feet, hands, arms, and legs as they moved among the machinery and became caught under conveyor belts or in gears.

Many were crushed to death, their bodies retrieved from the gears of the machinery by supervisors only at the end of the working day.

[15] Breaker boys often formed and joined trade unions, and precipitated a number of important strikes in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania.