What is Gold Mining?
Gold Mining involves the method of extracting gold from the ground. There are many mining methods used in time past. They include Pudding, Shaft Mining, Dredging, Panning, Cradling and Dry Blowing. The current method is open-cut gold mining. Among all the methods of gold mining, Panning is the oldest. This process which involves detaching gold from rock was launched in 1848 by Isaac Humphrey at Coloma.
In Mexico, miners developed Panning using a flat plate called Batea. As the commonest method on goldfields, this process was a slow one even among experts. This is such that in a 12-hour work, a miner spent the whole day washing 50 pans. The process involves loosening rock with pick and shovel. The broken particles are then taken with the help of wheelbarrow to bay where they are washed and swished using a metal pan. Here, the gold pieces fall to the bottom of the pan as the water detaches the rocks. This method is useful most especially for patient and persistent worker. With this method you will be sure to find lots of small pieces of gold.
Cradling method on the other hand was equally developed by Isaac Humphrey. This gold mining process entails using a wooden box having a handle on one side and a crumpled bottom enveloped by Hessian cloth.
On this instrument, large pieces of rock were separated and got rid of, were they not gold. Pebbles and small pieces of rock were washed in the bay. This technique has proven more successful than panning because the large amount of rock-strewn sands will be assessed to get the best quantity gold out of the rocks.