Among mine winding engines the deepest single-lift cage winder in the world was installed in 1941 at the Champion Reef gold mines in Mysore. It is a 2550/5100-hp equipment with bicylindroconical drum and is capable of raising 90 tons of ore an hour from a depth of 6556 ft; the maximum cage speed in mid-shaft is 3015 ft/min. A 2650/5300-hp Ward-Leonard equalized winder equipped with the M-V compound brake system was installed at the Rother Vale colliery in 1944. A skip winding equipment (as recommended by the Reid Report) is in hand for Mosley Common colliery, Lancashire, and will have a twin-motor Ward-Leonard drive rated at 4500/9000 hp 350 r.p.m.; later it will be doubled in capacity, and the rope speed will be 60 ft/sec. At its final rating of 9000/18,000 hp this will be the largest winder to be installed for winding coal, and it will far exceed the record held by a 5000/12,500-hp equipment supplied by the Company to a South African mine over twenty years back.

Every Koepe winder ordered in this country is being made by M-V. Those in hand are Ward-Leonard equipments, three of 1890 hp for the new Rothes colliery in Fife, two of 1860 hp for Bradford colliery, Manchester, and two of 1550 hp 36-5 r.p.m. for Clipstone colliery in Nottinghamshire. The only Koepe winders previously installed in Great Britain, a medium-sized coal hoist at Murton colliery and two men-and-materials hoists at Oldmoor and Newmoor in Northumberland, were supplied by M-V many years ago.

On all three of the Koepe winder contracts the Company is coordinating the engineering for the whole of the surface plant, working in collaboration with the civil, mechanical and constructional contractors. This is the outcome of a new engineering service that was made available in 1947. British collieries had long found that their limited technical staffs and the large number of contractors involved (sometimes as many as twenty) put difficulties in the way of reorganizing their mines or starting new ones, and successful collaboration with Walker Brothers of Wigan in supplying a complete winding installation for the Bickershaw collieries suggested that on large schemes the work of all the contractors could well be coordinated by the Company's mining engineers.

There has been rapid progress in the manufacture of winding engines ever since 1908, when the first large electric winder was installed in South Wales. By 1913 the aggregate horsepower of M-V hoists was 100,000, and at the time of writing it has reached the imposing figure of 744,000 hp, over 600 winders having been supplied. Today the Company can claim to have made the great majority of the electric winding equipments in operation—in coalfields at home, in the gold mines of South Africa and the Gold Coast, in the copper mines of Rhodesia, and in the coal and metalliferous mines of Australia, India and Russia.

Progress in the smaller industrial motors during the last thirty years has been most striking perhaps in the use of scientific cooling methods. These have resulted in a greatly increased output from a given amount of material: the horsepower has been increased, for instance,