Abstract
SIR WARINGTON SMYTH was the first professor of mining at the Royal School of Mines, and his forty years of service coincide with one of the most momentous changes in the history of the world, namely, the growth ofindustry on a metallic foundation. Prof. S. J. Truscott showed, in his Warington Smyth Memorial Lecture delivered on May 5 (Pp. 38 + 2 plates. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Is. net)how to-day everything civilized man enjoys depends on metals ; without them rapid transport, modern housing, preservation of foodstuffs, etc., are impossible. Metals are durable as contrasted with vegetable and animal products, which are used once, whereas metals can be and are refabricated. The annual production of fresh supplies of metal merely augments the amount already in use, an amountgreater in value than the total of all other commodities utilized by man. Metals, with the exception of gold, are not found to any extent as native metal and have to be extracted from highly complex ores. The enterprise of the miner has made many valuable discoveries such as the Bessemerprocess for ferrous metallurgy, the McArthur cyanide process for precious metallurgy and the flotation process for the base metals, and probablythe same enterprise will find a cheap method of producing the light metals such as aluminium and magnesium. Further enterprise has rendered available vast sources of minerals which would otherwise have remained valueless, and in addition has shifted the centre of production of certain metals, for example, copper, from one continent to another. As the resultof the exploitation of these processes combined with similar advances inengineering technique, one part of gold in 200,000 is being won at a profit, and one hundred million tons of base metal minerals are being treated by the flotation process per annum.
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Metal-Mining Enterprise. Nature 141, 964 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141964c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141964c0