Breaker boy

A breaker boy was a coal-mining worker in the United States and United Kingdom whose job was to separate impurities from coal by hand in a coal breaker.

Though boys were primarily children, elderly coal miners who could no longer work in the mines because of age, disease, or accident were sometimes employed as breaker boys. The use of breaker boys began in the mid-1860s. Although public disapproval of the employment of children as breaker boys existed by the mid-1880s, the practice did not end until the early 1920s.