Silica dust affected the nonhuman world too.

Elaine Katz estimated that the total annual death rate among rock drillers reached a high of 109 per thousand in the 1900s. It can be years or even decades before the impact of silica particles is apparent, though in the early twentieth century the impact became clear very quickly as miners began dying in large numbers. Within the clouds of dust were silica particles dislodged by extractions and these became embedded in the lungs, first of the miners and then of everyone else.īeginning with a shortness of breath, silicosis, the disease caused by inhaling silica dust, is progressive and fatal. The miners’ labor transformed the earth, and their own bodies. One investigation in 1904 reported that anyone standing “with a drill at work boring dry holes becomes quickly covered in dust, and the grit is quickly noticeable, even in the mouth.” In the hot, dry underground environment-Johannesburg is the world’s largest city not built alongside a river, lake, or coast-this produced enormous clouds of dust. Gold was extracted using drilling and blasting by a racially divided workforce. One consequence was that much of the city’s population lived in close proximity to working mines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even today, one of the country’s largest banks, Standard Bank, has an abandoned gold mine in the basement of its Johannesburg offices. The gold mines that gave life to the city were sunk right through the city center, following the line of the reef. In this way, Johannesburg is built on gold in a literal sense.

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Gold dust carson