Oeynhausen, Karl von

SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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b. 4 February 1795 Grevenburg, near Höxter, Germany

d. 1 February 1865 Grevenburg, near Höxter, Germany

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German mining officer who introduced fish joints to deep-drilling.

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The son of a mining officer, Oeynhausen started his career in the Prussian administration of the mining industry in 1816, immediately after he had finished his studies in natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. From 1847 until his retirement he was a most effective head of state mines inspectorates, first in Silesia (Breslau; now Wroclaw, Poland), later in Westphalia (Dortmund). During his working life he served in all the important mining districts of Prussia, and travelled to mining areas in other parts of Germany, Belgium, France and Britain. In the 1820s, after visiting Glenck's well-known saltworks near Wimpfen, he was commissioned to search for salt deposits in Prussian territory, where he discovered the thermal springs south of Minden which later became the renowned spa carrying his name.

With deeper drills, the increased weight of the rods made it difficult to disengage the drill on each stroke and made the apparatus self-destructive on impact of the drill. Oeynhausen, from 1834, used fish joints, flexible connections between the drill and the rods. Not only did they prevent destructive impact, but they also gave a jerk on the return stroke that facilitated disengagements. He never claimed to have invented the fish joints: in fact, they appeared almost simultaneously in Europe and in America at that time, and had been used since at least the seventeenth century in China, although they were unknown in the Western hemisphere.

Using fish joints meant the start of a new era in deep-drilling, allowing much deeper wells to be sunk than before. Five weeks after Oeynhausen, K.G. Kind operated with a different kind of fish joint, and in 1845 another Prussian mining officer, Karl Leopold Fabian (1782–1855), Director of the salt inspectorate at Schönebeck, Elbe, improved the fish joints by developing a special device between the rod and the drill to enable the chisel, strengthened by a sinker bar, to fall onto the bottom of the hole without hindrance with a higher effect. The free-fall system became another factor in the outstanding results of deep-drilling in Prussia in the nineteenth century.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Honorary PhD, University of Berlin 1860.

Bibliography

1822, Versuch einer geognostischen Beschreibung von Oberschlesien, Essen.

1824, "Über die geologische Ähnlichkeit des steinsalzführenden Gebirges in Lothringen und im südlichen Deutschland mit einigen Gegenden auf beiden Ufern der Weser", Karstens Archiv für Bergbau und Hüttenwesen 8: 52–84.

1847, "Bemerkungen über die Anfertigung und den Effekt der aus Hohleisen zusammengesetzten Bohrgestänge", Archiv fur Mineralogie, Geognosie, Bergbau und Hüttenkunde 21:135–60.

1832–3, with H.von Dechen, Über den Steinkohlenbergbau in England, 2 parts, Berlin.

Further Reading

von Gümbel, "K.v.Oeynhausen", Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 25:31–3.

W.Serlo, 1927, "Bergmannsfamilien. Die Familien Fabian und Erdmann", Glückauf.

492–3.

D.Hoffmann, 1959, 150 Jahre Tiefbohrungen in Deutschland, Vienna and Hamburg (a careful elaboration of the single steps and their context with relation to the development of deep-drilling).

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