Mining in World History
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Mining in World History

Martin Lynch

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eBook - ePub

Mining in World History

Martin Lynch

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About This Book

This book deals with the history of mining and smelting from the Renaissance to the present. Martin Lynch opens with the invention, sometime before 1453, of a revolutionary technique for separating silver from copper. It was this invention which brought back to life the rich copper-silver mines of central Europe, in the process making brass cannon and silver coin available to the ambitious Habsburg emperors, thereby underpinning their quest for European domination. Lynch also discusses the Industrial Revolution and the far-reaching changes to mining and smelting brought about by the steam engine; the era of the gold rushes; the massive mineral developments and technological leaps forward which took place in the USA and South Africa at the end of the 19th century; and, finally, the spread of mass metal-production techniques amid the violent struggles of the 20th century. In an engaging, concise and fast-paced text, he presents the interplay of personalities, politics and technology that have shaped the metallurgical industries over the last 500 years.

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Information

Year
2004
ISBN
9781780230054

ONE

The Metallurgical Renaissance

LIQUATION

The German master miners had long known that the copper ores of central Europe contained abundant silver. What they did not know was how to get their hands on it. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that the invention of liquation – a process for liberating silver from copper – had the effect of reviving the ailing mineral fields of the region. Liquation appeared at the beginning of the Renaissance, a period of European intellectual awakening that originated in the palaces and grand households of the wealthy Italian city-states. The Italian princes and merchants were the middlemen between Europe and the Orient, and had prospered on the trade that flowed through their ports. Now their money, their interest in the forgotten works of the Greeks and Romans and their search for artistic magnificence provided the support for the new breed of scholars and artists to ply their trade. But when liquation first emerged into the light of day, the new thinking of the Renaissance would scarcely have had time to move out of Venice, Florence and their sister cities. Thus, liquation was not the product of the intellectual ferment of the new era. So whence came this technological leap forward?
The first documented case of the use of the process has been found in the archives of the municipal foundry of Nuremberg. The year was 1453.1 Its appearance in Nuremberg is not surprising. That city had for many years been one of Germany’s main centres of metal refining and fabrication. Copper and brass goods and all manner of metal utensils were made there using the ores that arrived in ox-drawn wagons from Saxony and Bohemia to the north-east. It was home to one of the largest mints in Germany. Already Nuremberg had a reputation as a leader in metallurgical techniques
Understanding the route of discovery of the Saigerprozess (the German name for liquation), as opposed to the location of its first use, requires a bit more guesswork. The metallurgical science of the day was crude indeed, as it was in all other areas of technology. One commonly held belief was that metals grew in the ground. The scientific method of observation and experiment did not yet exist except perhaps in matters of astronomy, and laboratory experimentation, if we may use the term loosely, tended to be the preserve of the alchemists. ‘The alchemists’2: is a convenient term for the widely diverse group of people who worked with metallic ores and all sorts of other natural substances, seeking to distil the essence of these materials both singly and in combination. They claimed to be able to change substances from one state to another. Lead, to take the clichéd case, could be ‘transmuted’ into gold if only the right ingredients were added and the appropriate words uttered. It was a shadowy pursuit, and the alchemists tended to obscure their practical endeavours within a thicket of mystical writings.
By the time of the Renaissance many had come to view alchemy as a dubious practice, and its precepts were the subject of debate amongst learned men. A grudging supporter was Vannoccio Biringuccio, an Italian metalsmith of some influence in the city-state of Siena.3 It seems that the Biringuccio family enjoyed the patronage of the dictator of that city, and Vannoccio Biringuccio became a master at the casting of bells and armour, eventually putting his lifetime of observations on smelting and related matters down in a book, Pirotechnia. His was a tempestuous life – twice he was exiled from Siena following popular revolts – and it is perhaps this background that explains the combative tone in which from the pages of Pirotechnia he denounces the alchemists. ‘How many alchemists have I heard lamenting, one because by some unfortunate chance he had spilled his whole composition in the ashes; another because he had been deceived by the excessive strength of the fire ... and yet another because he had poor and feeble materials!’4 He makes a telling point by asking why, when they have such powers freely at their disposal, the alchemists were usually poor men. Yet in a different part of the book, his diatribe having run its course, Biringuccio concedes that the practice of alchemy is, despite everything, a productive occupation that ‘gives birth every day to new and splendid effects such as the extraction of medicinal substances, colors, and perfumes, and an infinite number of compositions of things’.5 It is likely that liquation first saw the light of day in the sombre surrounds of an alchemist’s workshop.
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1 Europe, 1550
The next step was for a coppersmith to try his hand at putting the new process to practical use. Where better for this to be done than in Nuremberg, where there existed the skilled workers, many foundries and plentiful ores of all kinds? Soon there existed in Nuremberg five liquation works, and within another fifteen years the process had spread throughout Germany, Poland and the Italian Alps. As it spread, so European metal production leapt upwards. How did the process work? Essentially, it relied on the fact that when a furnace packed with a mixture of metallic lead- and silver-bearing copper ore was smelted, in the process of cooling down, the silver contained within the ore would be absorbed by the lead. The result was a congealing mass of molten metal, in which the silver had moved from the copper to the lead. The next step was to separate the lead from the copper. This was done by taking advantage of the fact that lead has a melting temperature far below that of copper. Large plate-like discs – called liquation cakes6 – were fashioned from the copper-lead mix and allowed to solidify. They were then placed in a special furnace and heated until the lead melted and drained out of the cake, leaving the still solid copper behind. The molten droplets were drained away in a gutter placed underneath the furnace grate. Once this was done it was straightforward to remove the silver from the lead using the time-honoured process of cupellation.
Performed crudely, liquation was very inefficient and hardly worth the cost of the lead that had to be purchased to allow it to proceed. This is one reason why the process tended to be operated on a large scale. The typical building in which it was housed measured, according to one contemporary, 50 × 20 yards. Small-scale ‘backyard’ operations would not allow the careful control that had to be exerted to make the process a success. So tricky was it to operate that the technical guidance of the Saigerprozess tended to remain for long in the hands of the experienced master metalworkers from Nuremberg. Under their skilful guidance the moribund mining districts of central Europe came once more to life.
The first regions to prosper as liquation began to spread were Schneeberg in Saxony and Schwaz in the Tyrol. Then the mines around the town of Annaberg came into production, and not long after came Marienberg. Both were situated in the Erzgebirge, the mountains separating Saxony from Bohemia. In 1516 was found the biggest of the Renaissance silver strikes, Joachimstal. Its fame and prodigious production became such that it would eventually, via the coin known as the Joachimstaler, give us the word dollar. In addition to the new finds, liquation helped to revive the older fields. In this way Rammelsberg and Freiberg became once again a hive of activity, as did some of the abandoned fields in Bohemia. All of these enterprises needed capital to sink the wide shafts and to build machinery and smelters, and so the new driving force in the industry was the rich merchant. Mining attracted some of the greatest merchants of the age, including the French royal banker Jacques Coeur and the Medici, the Florentine family of bankers and popes. Mostly, however, money for mine and smelter construction flowed in from the towns.7
The merchants of Augsburg, situated next door to the Tyrol and the Austrian Alps, funded much of the activity in those regions. The rich burghers of Nuremberg and other large German towns did the same in the mountains of Bohemia and the Harz. Like investors of any age they were after quick returns on their money. And quick returns there were to be had. At the time Europe was experiencing something akin to a copper shortage, and prices were buoyant. There had been a rise in the demand for all the traditional uses for copper, and many new uses appeared. Ships were becoming larger, more numerous and more sophisticated. Their instrumentation was fabricated from copper, as were their coverings and screws. Building fashions, especially roofing, now required copper, where once lead had been used. European armies came to depend more and more on artillery when besieging opponents’ strongholds, a development that meant a dramatic increase in the production of brass cannon. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that when word got out of a rich copper strike, investors clamoured for a piece of the action.
The liquation works were hungry for lead and initially were held back for the lack of it. So when a large lead-bearing outcrop was found at Tarnowitz, near the Polish city of Cracow, rapid development was soon underway. One of the men to drive it was Jan Thurzo. In addition to financing the sinking of mine shafts he built a large Saigerhütten in Cracow, a city situated on the road between Hungary and the Baltic port of Danzig.8 Thurzo’s smelting works became one of the principal industries of the city, taking the Hungarian ores and transforming them into copper and silver that were then sent on to Danzig for export to Holland, France and England. Such was its consumption of wood for fuel that the works was likened to Mt Etna because of the clouds of smoke that billowed from its furnaces. A special road was built across the Carpathian mountains so that the transport of the metals could proceed more rapidly. It was known as Thurzo’s Road. Other Saigerhütten were built in the town of Villach at the foot of the Bleiberg. In a similar way to Cracow’s position on the trade route north, Villach was nicely situated on the route south from Germany and Hungary to the port of Venice. The lead of Bleiberg and Tarnowitz was also exported to Nuremberg, Aachen and Cologne, where it was used in the Saigerhütten of those cities. In this way, a network of metal-trade routes began to criss-cross Europe.
If the liquation industry was the highest achievement of the metallurgical art of the time, the iron works were not far behind. They had become formidable industrial complexes. The bellows had grown so powerful that now molten iron could be produced at will. There is a record of a blast furnace in the south Netherlandish town of Namur in 1410.9 Four decades later another is known to have been in operation in nearby Liège. As the Chinese had known well, the product of the blast furnace operated in this way will be brittle. A sharp shock can cause the iron to shatter. Its uses were, therefore, somewhat limited. Nevertheless, by the time of the Renaissance some important applications for this ‘cast iron’ had been found. Molten bronze had long been poured directly into moulds in order to produce church bells, and the technique had been transferred to the fabrication of bronze cannon.10 In the late medieval period, smelter men had discovered that iron, too, could be poured directly into moulds to make bells and, much more usefully, cannon.
The cast-iron cannon ordered by England’s Henry VIII for his Continental battles were manufactured near Liège, a town that lay at the heart of a thriving heavy industrial region. The easily accessible coal deposits in the surrounding hills were exploited to provide fuel that, although it could not be used in the blast furnaces, could be effectively employed in the subsequent refining steps required for the fashioning of fine weapons and armour. It was a first for Europe. From Namur, just down-river, skilled furnace operators migrated to northern France and across the Channel to England, taking with them the secrets of cast-iron manufacture. If King Henry had wanted brass cannon instead of the less expensive iron variety, he could have found them in Liège too. For that town, along with Aachen to the north, had become an important centre of brass-making thanks to the discovery nearby of large and easily worked calamine deposits (brass is an alloy of copper and zinc; calamine is a zinc-bearing ore).

THE NEW WORLD

Before we look more closely at this evolving industrial structure let us turn our attention to a different scene. It was during the Renaissance that for the first time in several thousand years the sailors of the Mediterranean began to venture out into the rougher waters of the Atlantic. In part this was the natural outcome of their awakening curiosity, and in part it was because their once-lucrative trade in spices and silks from the East was now blocked by the powerful and hostile Ottoman Turks. The sailors who ventured into the Atlantic were searching for an alternative route to the Indies. In addition to the abundant spices and silks, there was gold to be had. Had not Marco Polo told of an island empire off the coast of China possessing ‘gold in the greatest abundance, its sources being inexhaustible’?11 Marco Polo had gone on to say that the enormous treasure had inspired Kublai Khan to attempt two invasions. Here was a prize worth striving for, especially given the persistent shortage of gold in Europe.12
The Portuguese led the way, mounting a series of exploratory expeditions down the coast of Africa. Logic told them that if a ship followed the west African coast for long enough, it must at some point reveal a route to the East. After half a century of heroic adventure they had got as far south as the Guinea coast and there established a thriving trade with the African tribesmen who, in return for textiles, mirrors and slaves, exchanged the gold they brought with them from the interior. A fort was built, SĂŁo Jorge da Mina (St George of the Mines),13 the first permanent settlement to be established by Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa. The sea captains continued to push south, and in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, camping on the banks of the Fish River before returning the way he came. The next expedition, ten years later, was led by a Portuguese courtier named Vasco da Gama. After a twenty-month round-trip, da Gama sailed into Lisbon with a fleet laden with spices and other precious goods from the Indies. His arrival caused a sensation.
The Portuguese successes were surely at least part of the reason why the young monarchs of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, decided to support the Genoese sea captain Christopher Columbus in his quest to find yet another route to India. Columbus proposed the radical idea of heading west in order to reach the East, taking advantage of the fact that the world is a globe. Equipped with three small ships, in August 1492 he duly set out from the Spanish port of Palos and sailed away over the horizon. Seventy-one days later he landed on the Caribbean island he named San Salvador. After some island-hopping he eventually established a settlement on Hispaniola (Haiti). In one of the first journal entries of his epic voyage Columbus described the purpose of his expedition as being principally to oblige the Great Khan of the Indies in his request for instructors in the Christian faith. Probably more heartfelt, however, were the numerous and repeated observations about gold and spices. Soon after his arrival he recorded that in Hispaniola ‘there are many spices and great mines of gold and of other metals.’ Later on: ‘In another island, which they assure me is larger than Hispaniola, the people have no hair. In it, there is gold incalculable....14
Columbus was to be disappointed. By the time he set sail for home, of spices he had found little, while Hispaniola’s creeks and gorges had yielded but a small amount of gold. In all, he was to make four voyages to the West Indies, and on each he lifted a bit further the veil of mystery that hung over this new land. He never did visit the court of the Great Khan. Instead, he installed his unpopular brothers as rulers over the fledgling Spanish settlements. Their leadership, and that of Columbus himself, was so autocratic and divisive that complaints were made to Ferdinand and Isabella. They appointed Francisco Bobadilla to investigate, and in 1499 the discoverer of the New World was escorted home in leg-irons. The work of establishing Spanish dominion in the Americas was to be taken up by others.
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2 Spanish America, 1950
The real beginnings of Spanish settlement in the Americas date from the appointment of Bobadilla’s successor, Frey Nicolas de Ovando. Under his harsh regime the production of gold from Hispaniola increased steadily. It was dug from the rivers and streams of the island using the forced labour of Indian workers. The Spanish had no mining tradition, and they were not disposed to employ expert miners from central Europe. Instead they simply drove the Indians beyond the limits of their endurance. It was a wasteful and brutal business.15 Rules were established to manage the growing industry. The city of Seville was to be the only port through which trade with the colonies could be conducted, and the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) was established there to receive the New World bullion. Any precious metals found were subject to taxation at a rate of one part in five. Gold smuggling thrived. As production increased so did the Indian death rate, and it was not too long before Hispaniola was experiencing a labour shortage. Captives from West Africa were shipped in to provide slave labour to supplement the dying Indians. The supply was never enough and, prompted by the labour shortage as much as by any de...

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