Kind, Karl Gotthelf

SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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b. 6 June 1801 Linda, near Freiberg, Germany

d. 9 March 1873 Saarbrücken, Germany

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German engineer, pioneer in deep drilling.

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The son of an ore miner in Saxony, Kind was engaged in his father's profession for some years before he joined Glenck's drillings for salt at Stotternheim, Thuringia. There in 1835, after trying for five years, he self-reliantly put down a 340 m (1,100 ft) deep well; his success lay in his use of fish joints of a similar construction to those used shortly before by von Oeynhausen in Westphalia. In order to improve their operational possibilities in aquiferous wells, in 1842 he developed his own free-fall device between the rod and the drill, which enabled the chisel to reach the bottom of the hole without hindrance. His invention was patented in France. Four years later, at Mondorf, Luxembourg, he put down a 736 m (2,415 ft) deep borehole, the deepest in the world at that time.

Kind contributed further considerable improvements to deep drilling and was the first successfully to replace iron rods with wooden ones, on account of their buoyancy in water. The main reasons for his international reputation were his attempts to bore out shafts, which he carried out for the first time in the region of Forbach, France, in 1848. Three years later he was engaged in the Ruhr area by a Belgian-and English-financed mining company, later the Dahlbusch mining company in Gelsenkirchen, to drill a hole that was later enlarged to 4.4 m (14 1/2 ft) and made watertight by lining. Although he had already taken out a patent for boring and lining shafts in 1849 in Belgium, his wooden support did not qualify. It was the Belgian engineer Joseph Chaudron, in charge of the mining company, who overcame the difficulty of making the bottom of the borehole watertight. In 1854 they jointly founded a shaft-sinking company in Brussels which specialized in aquiferous formations and operated internationally.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur 1849.

Bibliography

1842, Anleitung zum Abteufen von Bohrlöchern, Luxembourg.

Further Reading

H.G.Conrad, "Carl Gotthelf Kind", Neue deutsche Biographie 10:613–14.

D.Hoffmann, 1959, 150 Jahre Tiefbohrungen in Deutschland, Vienna and Hamburg, pp. 20–5 (assesses his technological achievements).

T.Tecklenburg, 1914, Handbuch der Tiefbohrkunde, 2nd end, Vol. VI, Berlin, pp. 36–9 (provides a detailed description of his equipment).

J.Chaudron, 1862, "Über die nach dem Kindschen Erdbohrverfahren in Belgien ausgeführten Schachtbohrarbeiten", Berg-und Hüttenmännische Zeitung 21:402–4, (describes his contribution to making Kind's shafts watertight).

WK