The whip shafts in Wheal Friendship were used to raise ore from the deep
bottoms up to the old inclined plane, up until its replacement in the late
1820's by the new inclined plane. They also may have served as a sump so
there may have been a limited amount of pumping, up a level or two to
where water could run back to an engine shaft. They were presumably worked
by a surface water powered drawing machine, so whether they could be
truely described as a whip (ie reciprocal action for drawing) is
debatable. The use of a drawing machine worked by the action of pump rods
at Friendship was considerably later.
Alasdair Neill
On Sat, 3 May 2008 19:01:52 +0000, Robert Waterhouse
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Dear List,
>
>What does the term 'whip' mean in an underground context? The C19 Wheal
Friendship section drawing shows two shafts called East & West Whip
Shafts, both of which are named as 'chain roads' higher up in the mine;
they both converge on the foot of Courtice's Shaft. I suspect the chain
roads carried chains on pulleys which transferred back-and-forth motion to
deep pumping machinery - do whips have something to do with this?
>
>Robert Waterhouse
>_________________________________________________________________
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