It is the year 1869,and Britain is now theworld's first industrial nation.In the first halfof the 1700s,Britain was an agriculturalcountry,and most people lived and worked inthe countryside.Since then,things havechanged.Factories were built in towns,andpeople moved off the land to work in them.Townssuch as Manchester,Sheffield,Birmingham,andGlasgow expanded and became cities,where noisy,dirty factories turned out all kinds of goods.Coal is the fuel that powers the machines in factories.It drives steam trains across the land,and steamshipsacross the oceans.It brings light and heat to townsand homes.You are just one of an army of 330,000miners,or“colliers,"working in Britain's coal mines,digging up more than 100 million tons of “blackgold"a year.Your life is hard and often dangerous,and you soon learn that you really wouldn't want tobe a 19th-century British miner-not for all the coalat the bottom of your local pit!