Piotr Nater
speaker
792 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 8 Aug
Piotr Nater’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The process is quite primitive, scarcely differing from that of the ancient Egyptians in quarrying granite.
The blocks are first marked out on the surface by a series of grooves.
One side is then deepened to the required thickness, and wedges being inserted under the block it is soon split off.
It is then split transversely into pieces of one hundred weight each, in which form it is ready for sale.
Those intended for Russia are rounded on the edges and corners until they acquire the shape of large cocoons, for the convenience of transportation into the interior of the country.
The number of workmen employed in the mines is one thousand five hundred, all of whom belong to the upper crust, that is, they live on the outside of the world.
They are divided into gangs, and relieve each other every six hours.
Each gang quarries out, on an average, a little more than one thousand hundred weight of salt in that space of time, making the annual yield one million five hundred thousand hundred weight.
The men we saw were fine, muscular, healthy looking fellows, and the officer, in answer to my questions, stated that their sanitary condition was quite equal to that of field laborers.
Scurvy does not occur among them, and the equality of the temperature of the mines, which stands at fifty four degrees Fahrenheit all the year round, has a favorable effect upon such as are predisposed to disease of the lungs.
He was not aware of any peculiar form of disease induced by the substance in which they work, notwithstanding, where the air is humid, salt crystals form upon the woodwork.
The wood, I may hear remark, never rots, and where untouched, retains its quality for centuries.
The officer explicitly denied the story of man having been born in these mines and having gone through life without ever mounting to the upper world.
So there goes another interesting fiction of our youth.
It requires a stretch of imagination to conceive the extent of this salt bed.
As far as explored, its length is two and a half English miles, its breadth a little over half a mile, and its solid depth six hundred and ninety feet.
It commences about two hundred feet below the surface, and is then uninterrupted to the bottom, where it rests on a bed of compact sandstone, such as forms the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains.
Below this there is no probability that it again
and again reappears.
The general direction is east and west, dipping rapidly at its western extremity, so that it may no doubt be pushed much farther in that direction.
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