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By 1994, Chris had figured out how to rate any coal mine roof, on a scale of 1 to 100.

He’d created new understanding of the effects on roof strength of various properties of rock masses:
the thickness of the sedimentary layers, their sensitivity to moisture, their response to being whacked by a ball-peen hammer, and so on.

He’d reduced these to a checklist that any coal mine engineer anywhere in the world could use to evaluate his roof and know just how much support it required.

And then he’d traveled to coal fields across the United States to personally deliver to mining engineers the new knowledge,
in the form of software he’d written.

“Technology transfer has always been central to what I do,” he said.

“If you don’t transfer it, you’re just wasting taxpayers’ money.”

It was all voluntary.

Congress never passed any law that ordered coal mine companies to use the Chris Mark software.

The last specific rules on the subject passed by Congress had been written in 1969 and said only that coal mine pillars needed to be sized appropriately for their conditions.

It never specified what that meant.

“It’s not like we told them, ‘Hey, you have to use 70 foot-wide pillars here,’” said Chris.

“We just said, ‘Here’s a solution.’

I knew it was better than anything they had before.

There was no competition out there.”

A mining engineer named Phil Worley, who’d spent his entire career working for coal mining companies, put it another way:

“It was like somebody turned on the lights.”