According to some reports, the world’s first mining operation in the world to use vessels for dredging ore from the sea bottom was developed in 1907 by Australian Edward Miles. He dredged the sea bottom around Thailand’s modern tourist island of Phuket to recover tin, which had been mined on the island for hundreds of years. By the 1960s some innovative entrepreneurs had begun to build iron rafts using drills to loosen the sea bottom allowing them to vacuum the residue to the surface in order to separate the tin.