Industrial Sardinian Mining

In the course of the centuries of the mining exploitation, workers have used simple digging tools that involved hard and exhausting physical labour. The first significant innovation was the invention of the explosive powder. It was only after 1850 that the industrial era started in the mines of Montevecchio and Monteponi district, using technologically updated mechanical instruments and starting the real mechanization exploitation process of the mining activity. From then,  further inventions and changes were made thanks to the great creativity and professionalism of the mining technicians who progressively transformed a work based mainly on the human force using just a few of tools into a compound industrial system at the forefront of the world mining technique. Due to the need to give a strong impulse to the production, large machines were introduced that allowed the fast mining and processing of large quantities of tout-venat (the whole ground exploited from the underground, metals and waste rocks). In order to make those machines more specific to the different needs, the Montevecchio and Monteponi mines were the perfect test bed and forge for many constructing firms which led to improvements in the yield and performance of the machines that were subsequently built and sold. It should be pointed out, as for the Montevecchio shoveling machine, the prototype was conceived and built in the Montevecchio workshops, which then was  transferred the patent to the ATLAS COPCO company and marketed worldwide. Of course, one further improvement was also made when they used a mine railway to carry materials and workers in and out of the mines.