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Transformative Innovation in Mining and Metallurgy

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Metallurgical Design and Industry

Abstract

Established techniques supplied metal for the Industrial Revolution until the electrical age, urbanization, and accelerated transportation in the late nineteenth century created demand that could be met only with transformative innovations in mining, mineral beneficiation, and metallurgy. These happened. Earth- and rock-moving technologies pioneered in Massachusetts transferred westward and enabled underground- and open-pit mining on a scale never before seen. Beneficiation by froth flotation opened low-grade ores to exploitation. Electrowinning and electrolytic refining made pure and light metals. Then concerns about mineral depletion raised by nineteenth-century economists, echoed by mid-twentieth-century geologists, adopted by government agencies, and amplified by futurists were dispelled when geochemists untangled the processes of ore formation, only to be replaced by the realization that sinks, not sources, were limiting. Quantitative methods of tracing the flow of metals with their production wastes and emissions from extraction through use and onto discard revealed the size of the legacy from past mining and consequences of future production. Accidents with toxic tailings and acidic mine waters exposed the unfunded costs and lurking hazards of abandoned mine wastes. Now miners’ biggest problem was not finding more ore; it was gaining acceptance of their operations by communities, environmentalists, and regulators. Transformative innovations to make mining tolerable and remove the legacy of past extraction practices are the agenda for the twenty-first century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Using the sun’s azimuth for direction required that the surveyor know time accurately, usually with the aid of a chronometer. We don’t know if Burt had a chronometer.

  2. 2.

    Since there was no iron smelting in upper Michigan, the newly mined ore had to be sent to blast furnaces on the lower lakes. A steam-powered vessel had been brought in pieces and erected on Lake Superior in 1845, but sending ore to the lower lakes proved uneconomic since it had to be offloaded, carried, and reloaded at Sault Sainte Marie. Upper Michigan entrepreneurs, who had abundant wood fuel at hand, then built charcoal-fired blast furnaces near the mines. Since they clear-cut the forest and sold off the cleared land to immigrant farmers, their wood supply gave out. It was then cheaper to ship ore south to the fuel rather than mineral coal north to the ore (LaFayette 1990). Once the Soo Canal was completed in 1855, the transition to use of lake ore in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other steelmaking centers near coking coal was underway (Evans 1942, Reynolds 2012). Erroneous carbon 14 dates are a curious consequence of this trade. Some steelmakers used mixtures of charcoal-smelted and coke-smelted pig in their Bessemer converters. In one example excavated iron artifacts claimed to have been made in pre-colonial America on the basis of their radiocarbon dates were actually fragments of barbed wire made of steel converted from mixed pig.

  3. 3.

    Lewis H. Merritt, from Chautauqua County, New York, joined explorers for mineral resources in northern Minnesota by 1855 and convinced himself that there must be large iron resources west of the Vermilion and other early Lake Superior iron mines, but now buried under a cover of glacial deposits. He passed his enthusiasm on to his five sons. They prospected whenever time and money allowed from 1874 onward, using a dip needle as an indicator of buried ore, thereby ignoring the prevalent belief that nonmagnetic ore would have no magnetic signature. When in 1889 the Minnesota legislature authorized the sale of leases on state land, Leonidas Merritt, the senior brother, got 31 leases that would require royalty payment of 25 cent/ton. In November 1890 the brothers followed up a magnetic anomaly, test pits, and drilling with their Missabe mine. They raised enough capital to get a rail connection in place and commenced mining (Evans 1942). A mining boom on the Mesabi Range followed, and the Merritt’s Missabe would eventually be the largest mine on the range.

  4. 4.

    Jackling’s Bingham and other ventures gained him wealth enough to build an elegant Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in Woodside, an affluent community near San Francisco, in 1926. His house gained notoriety when Steve Jobs purchased it as a teardown, only to be stymied by preservationists (LeCain 2009).

  5. 5.

    Although the fracture toughness of rock can be reduced by stress corrosion, the large friction losses in grinding remain.

  6. 6.

    Achieving selective adsorption of additives to get the needed surface energies on the sulfides was complicated by their surface structure sensitivity. This is illustrated by the search on the surface of a galena crystal with a cat’s whisker needed to make a crystal radio work.

  7. 7.

    Jevons saw coal consumption dependent on population and intensity of use. He noted that since 1800 the population of Britain had doubled but that coal consumption had increased eightfold. He expected that with this rate of growth, the coal supply would be exhausted because of the difficulty of mining at greater depths. His text was written to attract popular attention, which it did. His later work in economics was on a sounder basis (Keynes 1936).

  8. 8.

    Mill’s argument is primarily about population rather than constraints arising from finite resources. He asserted that previous economists believed sustained growth was needed to avert universal poverty arising from population growth. Mill saw stable population as essential to avoiding widespread poverty, advocated a more uniform distribution of wealth, and limits on inherited wealth. He felt that population was already large enough that people need opportunities for solitude, the presence of wildlife, and some land left uncultivated. Only in 1973 did Herman Daly revive the steady-state, sustainable economic model.

  9. 9.

    The predicted collapse was rescheduled for a later date in the Limits to Growth, the 30-Year Update (Meadows et al. 2004).

  10. 10.

    Jared Eliot, minister and doctor in colonial Connecticut, invested in iron mines and with his son, Aaron, was building a cementation steelworks. He had noticed that magnetite was separated from glacial sands by running water, collected it, and made iron from it. The essay reports on this successful experiment (Gordon and Raber 2007).

  11. 11.

    Predictions of metal scarcity arising from exhaustion of metal resources were made by individuals and by government committees in the first part of the twentieth century. They were joined by non-government, not-for-profit organizations. Now in the twenty-first century, a worldwide organization, the International Resource Panel, has taken up the task (Ali et al. 2017). Economic drag due to exhaustion of metal-bearing mineral sources has yet to emerge. Identification of more potential resources continues apace (Kessler and Wilkinson 2008).

  12. 12.

    A “petrified miner” was also recovered in 1719 in Sweden’s Falun copper mine and identified as Fat Matts, who disappeared in the mine in 1677 (Rydberg 1979).

  13. 13.

    The flow resulted from liquefaction due to pore pressure rise in water-saturated slate fines. See also K. T. Ericson on the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood that caused 125 deaths and destroyed 507 homes in West Virginia (Erickson 1976).

  14. 14.

    Local hotel proprietors made the most of a bad situation by advertising the health benefits to be had from the sulfur-rich local air (Quinn 1993).

  15. 15.

    The infamous Johnstown Flood among others originated in the failure of an earth-fill dam.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Brian Skinner for many insights on mineral resources, Barbara Reck for an update on her most recent research in life cycle analysis, Dennis Meadows for the diagrams that illustrate his current thinking on the Limits of Growth, and Margaret Anex for a critical reading of the manuscript. Patrick Malone shared the story and pictures of his explorations of the Tri-State lead-zinc district.

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  1. Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Robert Gordon

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  1. Department of the Classics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , Urbana, IL, USA

    Brett Kaufman

  2. School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Clyde L. Briant

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Gordon, R. (2018). Transformative Innovation in Mining and Metallurgy. In: Kaufman, B., Briant, C. (eds) Metallurgical Design and Industry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93755-7_3

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