Word: pithead
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...Stora Kopparberg-a great subterranean copper "mountain" of unusually pure copper ore located among the gloomy forests of central Sweden. Toward the end of the Dark Ages, when copper was needed to arm Europe's growing armies, hundreds of men migrated to the copper mountain. At the pithead sprang up the village of Falun, Sweden's first industrial center, where the company still has its headquarters. At first each miner dug and smelted the ore himself, but by 1347 King Magnus Eriksson had granted a charter setting up a corporation of master miners. The largest copper supplier...
...dank and dark a sitdown strike as even militant or desperate men could survive, and soon about one-third of the strikers, worried about their families or tired of living like moles, got out by emergency exits. Wives and children of the remaining strikers gathered at the pithead to talk by phone to their men below on Mine Level 13. Spoleto's Archbishop Raffaele Mario Radossi, using the same phone, implored the strikers to surface and negotiate. Worried company officials struggled to keep the pumps operating and the ventilating system working so that the men would not fall victim...
...sixth day after the bump, Springhill had just about given up hope for 69 men still underground in North America's deepest mine. Exhausted rescuers still hacked through rubble at a painful 1 ft. per hour, but the women stopped coming to the pithead. Some families bought cemetery plots for their men. The newsmen left for other stories, and the coal-grimed town nursed its grief behind closed doors, wondering dully what it would do now that DOSCO (Dominion Steel & Coal Corp., Ltd., subsidiary of A. V. Roe Canada Ltd.) planned to close Springhill's last mine...
...pithead, a reporter shouted the news to a local man climbing out of his car. He stared blankly, sobbed "Oh my God" and sped off to town. Within minutes, doors slammed, feet echoed swiftly on the pavement, and once more Springhill raced to the pithead and waited...
Hope for the remaining 48 miners still missing rose briefly, then ebbed as the DOSCO rescue director announced that there was really no chance. The digging went on. At 4:45 a.m. on the ninth day, a miner 12,600 ft. from the pithead heard scratchings. "It sounded like a cat," he said. "I couldn't believe my ears." Again there was a frantic scrambling through 12 ft. of loose debris, and two hours, 40 minutes later seven more survivors began to come out. At week's end, 29 were still missing...