Geevor Tin Mine
Geevor Tin Mine is a tin mine in the far west of Cornwall, United Kingdom, between the villages of Pendeen and Trewellard. It was operational between 1911 and 1990 during which time it produced about 50,000 tons of black tin. It is now a museum and heritage centre left as a living history of a working tin mine. The museum is an Anchor Point of ERIH, The European Route of Industrial Heritage.
History
Tin and copper have been mined from the general area of Geevor since the late 18th century. It was originally a small enterprise known as Wheal an Giver, "a piece of ground occupied by goats". The area was worked under the name of East Levant Mine until 1840 and then as North Levant from 1851 to 1891 when it closed. During the 1880s as many as 176 workers were employed at the mine, but in the ten years after North Levant's closure the site saw only intermittent activity by a few miners.
At the turn of the 20th century a group of St. Just miners who had emigrated to South Africa were forced to return by the outbreak of the Second Boer War. They leased the area and conducted more thorough prospecting, being encouraged enough to set up a company called Levant North (Wheal Geevor) in 1901. This was acquired by the West Australian Gold Field Company Ltd. in 1904 which brought together various mines under the name of Geevor Tin Mines Ltd. in 1911, not long after the price of tin had rapidly risen to £181 a ton in 1906 from a low of £64 in 1896.
Tin mining
Tin mining began early in the Bronze Age, as bronze is a copper-tin alloy. Tin is a relatively rare element in the Earth’s crust, with approximately 2 ppm (parts per million), compared to iron with 50,000 ppm.
History
Tin extraction and use can be dated to the beginnings of the Bronze Age around 3000 BCE, when it was observed that copper objects formed of polymetallic ores with different metal contents had different physical properties. The earliest bronze objects had tin or arsenic content of less than 2% and are therefore believed to be the result of unintentional alloying due to trace metal content in the copper ore It was soon discovered that the addition of tin or arsenic to copper increased its hardness and made casting much easier, which revolutionized metal working techniques and brought humanity from the Copper Age or Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age around 3000 BC. Early tin exploitation appears to have been centered on placer deposits of cassiterite.
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