Breakers are structures where coal is prepared for coal consumers. While today's breakers are modern, mechanized facilities, in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century coal mines, breakers were grim, black buildings where lumps of coal were crushed and then sorted by size.
In its November 1906 issue, Cosmopolitan Magazine described vividly the coal breakers, indigenous to the anthracite coal fields: "High-piled dumps of culm . . . stretch in lifeless table-lands around the belching breakers that are forever vomiting forth more dead matter to stifle the discouraged life of all green and growing things. . . . Hideous, unstable looking 'breakers' loom beside the spuming pits."
Coal moved from the mine pit to the cupola of the breaker where it was dumped into a heavy machine, a large perforated drum described by one writer as "a cyclopean cylinder." The drum broke or crushed the coal, which then fell through different size perforations into chutes that carried it to the ground floor. There it was loaded onto waiting wagons or freight cars. As the coal poured down the chutes, breaker boys sorted through the flowing black rivers to pick slate and rock from the coal.
The chutes, about three feet apart, zigzagged through the building, and the breaker boys, seated on boards laid across the chutes, controlled the flow of coal by moving their feet in the chute.
Is was difficult to tell the difference between the dark-colored slate and the black coal, and the breaker boys could detect the difference only by close scrutiny. They had to bend low over the chutes as they worked, picking slate and slag from the crushed coal as it poured past them to the cars waiting below. As a consequence, the breaker boys, some as young as eight years of age and others very old men, developed round shoulders and narrow chests.
One observer described the boys thus: "Cramped like Hindu idols, aged and blackened as the gargoyles of Notre Dame, rows and rows of these humped-up boys and broken-down old men sit beside the cataracts of coal, watching and snatching at the slate sweeping by in the black stream. All day long their little fingers dip into the unending grimy stream that rolls past them."
An open space in front of the chutes was reserved for a "breaker boss" who, armed with a stick, occasionally whacked the head and shoulders of any boy who betrayed a "lack of zeal."
Working in the breaker was a dirty business. A wet process to clean coal was available and would have greatly improved working conditions for the breaker boys, but the necessary machinery was expensive, and mine owners was were not interested in the comfort of their workers. That improvement was made only where the coal was so dirty that dry cleaning was impossible.
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