The Legacy of American Copper Smelting

The Legacy of American Copper Smelting PDF Author: Bode J. Morin
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572339861
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures, from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity. Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations, copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to have particularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into a large-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, the United States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper mines in Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s. Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry. In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry. Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.

The Legacy of American Copper Smelting

The Legacy of American Copper Smelting PDF Author: Bode J. Morin
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572339861
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures, from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity. Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations, copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to have particularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into a large-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, the United States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper mines in Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s. Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry. In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry. Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.

Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting

Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting PDF Author: Edward Dyer Peters
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copper
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting

Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting PDF Author: Edward Dyer Peters
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781020095573
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This comprehensive guide provides detailed technical knowledge of modern methods of copper smelting, including the technical processes, tools, and equipment used in the copper industry. It also covers the history of the American copper industry and its contribution to the industrialization of the nation. A valuable resource for researchers and professionals in the field of metallurgy. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Profit

Profit PDF Author: Mark Stoll
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509533257
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed. Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place. This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences.

Copper Smelting

Copper Smelting PDF Author: Henry Hussey Vivian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copper
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description


Swansea Copper

Swansea Copper PDF Author: Chris Evans
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439123
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The first book to detail the global impact of copper production in Swansea, Wales, and how a major technological shift transformed the British Isles into the world's most dynamic center of copper smelting. Eighteenth-century Swansea, Wales, was to copper what nineteenth-century Manchester was to cotton or twentieth-century Detroit to the automobile. Beginning around 1700, Swansea became the place where a revolutionary new method of smelting copper, later christened the Welsh Process, flourished. Using mineral coal as a source of energy, Swansea's smelters were able to produce copper in volumes that were quite unthinkable in the old, established smelting centers of central Europe and Scandinavia. After some tentative first steps, the Swansea district became a smelting center of European, then global, importance. Between the 1770s and the 1840s, the Swansea district routinely produced one-third of the world's smelted copper, sometimes more. In Swansea Copper, Chris Evans and Louise Miskell trace the history of copper making in Britain from the late seventeenth century, when the Welsh Process transformed Britain's copper industry, to the 1890s, when Swansea's reign as the dominant player in the world copper trade entered an absolute decline. Moving backward and forward in time, Evans and Miskell begin by examining the place of copper in baroque Europe, surveying the productive landscape into which Swansea Copper erupted and detailing the means by which it did so. They explain how Swansea copper achieved global dominance in the years between the Seven Years' War and Waterloo, explore new commercial regulations that allowed the importation to Britain of copper ore from around the world, and connect the rise of the copper trade to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. They also examine the competing rise of the post–Civil War US copper industry. Whereas many contributions to global history focus on high-end consumer goods—Chinese ceramics, Indian cottons, and the like—Swansea Copper examines a producer good, a metal that played a key role in supporting new technologies of the industrial age, like steam power and electricity. Deftly showing how deeply mineral history is ingrained in the history of the modern world, Evans and Miskell present new research not just on Swansea itself but on the places its copper industry affected: mining towns in Cuba, Chile, southern Africa, and South Australia. This insightful book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the historical roots of globalization and the Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon.

Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting

Modern American Methods of Copper Smelting PDF Author: Edward Dyer Peters
Publisher: Theclassics.Us
ISBN: 9781230267807
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ...salt also undergoes decomposition, yielding at first a basic sulphate of copper, which, upon losing its acid, becomes a dioxide and eventually a protoxide of that metal. These last changes, however, require a protracted high temperature. The oxidation of the iron present is pretty well advanced at the time of the maximum formation of cupric sulphate; but it is not until the decomposition of at least 75 per cent. of the last-named salt that the formation of sulphate of silver begins with any considerably energy. When once fairly started, however, this interesting and important reaction progresses with great rapidity, and the decomposition of the comparatively large proportion of sulphate of copper present furnishes ample oxidizing influence for the minute quantities of sulphide of silver. The maximum formation of the latter substance usually coincides with the almost entire destruction of the former salt, and it is at this point that the Ztervogd calcination should terminate, as any further exposure of the silver salt to heat lessens its solubility in water, and may even threaten its existence. The complete decomposition of the argentic sulphate is only accomplished by a long exposure to a high temperature, which is now easily borne by most ores and mattes, the easily melted sulphides having been converted into almost infusible oxides and basic sulphates. Galena (sulphide of lead), when present, is converted almost entirely into a sulphate of that metal, which, by a higher temperature, is partially decomposed with the evolution of sulphurous acid and the final production of a mixture of free oxide of lead with sulphate, the proportions of these two substances varying according to the quantity of foreign sulphides present. Zincblende...

Restoring Layered Landscapes

Restoring Layered Landscapes PDF Author: Marion Hourdequin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190240326
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
'Restoring Layered Landscapes' explores ecological restoration in complex landscapes, where ecosystems intertwine with important sociopolitical meanings.

The City That Ate Itself

The City That Ate Itself PDF Author: Brian James Leech
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 0874175984
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Winner of the Mining History Association Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018 Brian James Leech provides a social and environmental history of Butte, Montana’s Berkeley Pit, an open-pit mine which operated from 1955 to 1982. Using oral history interviews and archival finds, The City That Ate Itself explores the lived experience of open-pit copper mining at Butte’s infamous Berkeley Pit. Because an open-pit mine has to expand outward in order for workers to extract ore, its effects dramatically changed the lives of workers and residents. Although the Berkeley Pit gave consumers easier access to copper, its impact on workers and community members was more mixed, if not detrimental. The pit’s creeping boundaries became even more of a problem. As open-pit mining nibbled away at ethnic communities, neighbors faced new industrial hazards, widespread relocation, and disrupted social ties. Residents variously responded to the pit with celebration, protest, negotiation, and resignation. Even after its closure, the pit still looms over Butte. Now a large toxic lake at the center of a federal environmental cleanup, the Berkeley Pit continues to affect Butte’s search for a postindustrial future.

Copper for America

Copper for America PDF Author: Charles K. Hyde
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816532796
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This comprehensive history of copper mining tells the full story of the industry that produces one of America's most important metals. The first inclusive account of U.S. copper in one volume, Copper for America relates the discovery and development of America's major copper-producing areas—the eastern United States, Tennessee, Michigan, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Alaska—from colonial times to the present. Starting with the predominance of New England and the Middle Atlantic states in the early nineteenth century, Copper for America traces the industry's migration to Michigan in mid-century and to Montana, Arizona, and other western states in the late nineteenth century. The book also examines the U.S. copper industry's decline in the twentieth century, studying the effects of strong competition from foreign copper industries and unforeseen changes in the national and global copper markets. An extensively documented chronicle of the rise and fall of individual mines, companies, and regions, Copper for America will prove an essential resource for economic and business historians, historians of technology and mining, and western historians.