Getting Gold: A Gold-Mining Handbook for Practical MenJohnson, J. C. F. (Joseph Colin Francis)
History
Getting Gold: A Gold-Mining Handbook for Practical Men
Johnson, J. C. F. (Joseph Colin Francis)
Gold mines and mining
With respect to the men to whom the actual mining and treatment of ores
and machinery is committed the greatest mistakes of the past have been
that too much has been required from one man. The Mining Manager has
been expected to be a miner, metallurgist, engineer, and business man,
a combination not to be found probably in one man in a thousand. Such
Admirable Crichtons are rare in any profession or business, and that of
mining is no exception. Men who profess too much are to be distrusted.
Your best men are they who concentrate their energies and intellects
in special directions. The Mining Manager should, if possible, be
chosen from men holding certificates of competency from some technical
mining school and, of course, should, in addition, have some practical
experience, not necessarily as Head Manager. He should understand
practical mine surveying and calculation of quantities, be able to dial
and plot out his workings, and prepare an intelligible plan thereof for
the use of the Directors, and should understand sufficient of physics,
particularly pneumatics and hydraulics, to ensure thoroughly efficient
pumping operations without loss of power from unnecessarily heavy
appliances. Any other scientific knowledge applicable to his business
which he may have acquired will tell in his favour, but he must, above
all things, be a thoroughly practical man. Such men will in time be more
readily procurable, as students who have passed through the various
Schools of Mines will be sent to learn their business practically at the
mines just as we now, having given a lad a course of naval instruction,
send him to sea to learn the practical part of his life’s work.
But, of course, more is wanted on a mine than a man who can direct the
sinking of shafts, driving of levels, and stoping of the lode. Much loss
and disappointment have resulted in the past from unsuitable,
ineffective, or badly designed and erected machinery, whether for
working the mine or treating the ores. To obviate this defect a
first-class mining engineer is required.
Then, also, day by day we are more surely learning that mining in all
its branches is a science, and that the treatment of ores and extraction
of the metals is daily becoming more and more the work of the laboratory
rather than of the rule-of-thumb procedure of the past. Every mine,
whether it be of gold, silver, tin, copper, or other metal, requires the
supervision of a thoroughly qualified metallurgist and chemist, and one
who is conversant with the newest processes for the extraction of the
metals from their ores and matrices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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