The High Speed Mole

The USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, 1959 Part III

Yakov Gumennik

FOREIGN coal operators and mining engineers who visit the Machine-building Pavilion at the Exhibition invariably stop for a long look at a bright red machine, a high-speed coal-tunneling combine, and a talk with Yakov Gumennik, its designer.

They tend to be a little skeptical that this light and compact caterpillar installation can burrow its way to a coal seam pressed down by a great wall of rock. But the figures reported daily from the pits of the Kuznetsk coal region in Siberia, where the machine is in use, speak in incontrovertible numbers. They say that its tunneling speed is an astonishing 98 feet an hour.

Yakov Gumennik has built a whole series of high-speed combines. The idea of creating a machine for vertical shaft tunneling came to him one day when he was helping to dig out miners who were trapped by fallen rock.

Gumennik assembled a small tunneling machine and tried it out before an audience of miners and mining engineers. What they saw was a low carriage carrying a wide cylinder. Gumennik backed it up against the seam. The air was switched on and disks with hack teeth emerged from the cylinder. As the disks revolved, they broke the coal. the machine crawled upward, its caterpillars gripping the walls of the drilled tunnel. The installation reminded the onlookers so much of the burrowing long-snouted animal that they christened it on the spot—"high-speed mole."

When scientists and machine designers came to see Gumennik's "mole," they raised objections to the hack teeth on the disks. "You're behind the times," they told him. "Why don't you use saw teeth?"

Gummenik didn't argue the point. He went out of the workshop and came back with two big chunks of coal. He gave one of the scientists a sharp saw and said, "Go ahead, saw the coal."

The scientist worked away at it, but he was so long at the job that the saw heated up. Cumennik waited until the scientist had sawed his way through, then he picked up the second chunk and said. "Watch this." With a single blow he broke it in half. Then to make his point again, he broke the halves in two.

"Nothing wrong with the idea of hacking," he said. "It does the job fine and has been for a long time. Now the hack teeth I put on the disks work on the same principle and they break the coal easily." That settled the argument.

The first machine was followed by another, then a third and fourth, all of them with hack instead of saw teeth. Gumennik's original combine weighed 11 tons and tunneled 65 feet an hour. That was far and away ahead of anything that had been done before, but it didn't satisfy the inventor. He decided to build a combine with a hydraulic transporter to carry away the cut coal. The new machine was a thoroughgoing success, its weight cut down to eight tons and its tunneling speed stepped up to 98 feet an hour. It won him the coveted Lenin Prize.

This tall restless inventor is something of a speed demon. He has squeezed speeds nobody would credit out of every car he has owned. When that palled on him, he switched over to motorboats and juiced them up to a dizzying 50.60 miles an hour. He is looking around now for new kinds of hot rods.