The Golden Chain BY THE END of the 1850 s, the majority of alluvial mines on the Plateau were beset with problems hauling ropes that had taken a real beating sinking through the layers of bluestone; sodden conditions in the shafts and excessive stretching of the ropes. These ropes were flat manilla measuring from three to six inches wide and five hundred feet long. Some had been mended two and three times. They frayed and rotted in the wet. The flat wire ropes were efficient but they too frayed, stretched and rusted, and by 1866 were £3.15.0 cwt. The urge to seek out new techniques by artisans surrounding the mines was always there. A man by the name of W S Round, introduced to the mining fraternity his patent - a hand-made flat iron hauling chain at £250 per thousand feet. His manufacturing works was at the corner of Urquhart and Lyons Streets and called the Cosmopolitan Iron Chain Works, named after the Cosmopolitan Gold Mine in Windermere Street. They were the first to use this chain in June 1859. It could be called the "golden chain of Ballarat". in the next ten years no other make of rope hauled up the breath-taking yields of gold as did these chains. The chain was used in the Band of Hope Mine on the famous Golden Point gutter (the best part of the nine and a half tons of gold was won there), close by the Great Redan extended had used it, so too the No. 3 Albion, (where the famous gutter went astray) Next door was the famed No.1 Albion on the Woolshed Lead which yielded a mere three quarters of a million pounds worth of gold while the chain was also to be found on the Frenchman's Lead, the Nelson Mine and their neighbours in the Working Miners-claim. It was also used i n the grand old Prince-of-Wales Mine on the Cobblers Lead, where a thousand feet of this chain ran down the shaft like quick-silver when the spider on the winding drum broke, scaring the daylight out of the miners below. It took four days to get it out again. No wonder these chains were a clanking success hauling up the rich yields from these shafts. The "golden chain" had a longer wearing life than the flat manilla and flat wire, and they were well used for a number of years. Years later it gave way to the round steel wire which is still being used today. The same chain was around the playing arena of the Sebastopol Football Ground for nearly a hundred years while a section of it is the front fence of the Sebastopol Bowling Club. Strange to say, but, some of the companies stopped using the flat chain in 1865. The Garibaldi Co. swapped their chain for flat wire rope. The Prince-of-Wales Co. using a new idea called charcoal wire rope the same year. Some claimed it took less power to work the engines, by using flat wire ropes. Yet again these same flat wire ropes had to be taken off the winding drum and run through a fire to keep them from turning brittle. |