When sixteen-year-old coal digger Andy Stewart decides on his first day at work that there must be better and safer ways of knockin' the black out (a euphemism for extracting more coal from the earth), he sets about learning and developing technology to do so. But his lifelong friend and neighbor, Nick Rakos, takes a different route, through unionization, and they become bitter enemies. Both make marriages of convenience, but learn to love their wives...