Mines Magazine Turns 100 - the Timothy and Bernadette Marquez ...

Getting Off the Ground: 1910-1930The opening pages of Volume 1, Number 1include a detailed technical discussion about theworkings of the new Ore Dressing and MetallurgicalExperimental Plant on campus. The alumnipages that follow contain news of campus andalumni. The football coach, Ted Stuart, writesabout recent revisions to the rules of football:“To a player of the ‘old guard’ the game will nowpresent many queer features, combining someelements of basketball, soccer and English rugby,to the exclusion of nearly every semblance of thegame he knew.” College Notes records that freshmenand sophomores recently met on the lawnoutside Stratton Hall for the Barbecue—an annual tradition thatreads more like a pitched battle between the years and includes nomention of a meal. In other news, 10 Chinese students are reportedto have registered for classes, eliciting this insightful commentary:“The Chinese Empire has taken a step along progressive lines, which,if followed, will cause her to be recognized as one of the great powersof the future.”Club Notes describes a meeting of the Integral Club in the gymnasiumat which Coach Stuart exhorted all those who were physicallyable to try out for the football team. The reporter writes, “He statedemphatically that he did not want ‘quitters,’ but wanted men withthe ‘Mines Spirit.’” The first dance of the season had taken place onSeptember 24, 1910, in Guggenheim Hall—music furnished by theC.S.M. orchestra. Club Notes also points out that the beginning ofthe school year saw 130 members of the Christian Association andabout 100 men were expected to attend Bible Study that year.The second issue opens on a sober note with ameticulous account by W. W. Evans ’08 of the October8, 1910, Starkville Mine explosion in which56 miners died. Located near Trinidad, Colorado,the mine was one of the leading producers ofcoking bituminous coal. With the awareness ofone who knows that careful documentation mighthelp prevent future accidents, or inform rescueattempts, Evans describes every step of the rescue,including such technical details as gettingfresh air into the mine using a fan “driven by a20-horsepower, direct-current motor, revolvingat a speed of 300 revolutions per minute … ableto move 50,000 cubic feet of air per minute.” Healso conveys the human tragedy: how the bodies were brought outand carefully wrapped in canvas and sprinkled with embalming fluidbefore the foreign laborers would approach the remains of their coworkers.It is a sad irony that Evans died exactly one month afterthe Starkville tragedy in an explosion at Delagua, Colorado on November8, 1910, while involved in another rescue operation. He was24 years old.Yefah Chen ’14 submitted an interesting essay found on page 4of Volume 1, Number 5 in which he predicts that human conflict,broadly defined, will culminate in a struggle between China and theU.S.: “By reason of the population of the two races, the intricacy ofthe different governments concerned in and its far reaching consequences,this will be the greatest and the last disturbance amongthe family of nations and will foreshadow [he likely means “overshadow”]all others of the past history.”It’s not the only time that, flipping through early editions of theColorado School of Mines 19