Copper Mining 1960's similar to today...

[littlemissmartypants]

http://www.change.org/petitions/president-hamid-karzai-prevent-destruction-of-ancient-site-of-mes-aynak-the-environmental-damage-3


Copper mining and smelting has not undergone major technological revolutions except in terms of scale and mechanisation. This is largely because extracting the copper metal from the rock remains a complex business both in the preparation of the ore and the repeated stages of roasting, melting and remelting that takes places in furnaces.

This historic footage of mining and smelting in Utah, USA was shot in 1963 and demonstrates the processes of extracting copper that had been taking place since the turn of the twentieth century. The Utah mine was at the time one of the largest in the world. An open pit mine, dynamite was used to blast the rock face to reveal the copper ore lodes.

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http://copper.goskar.com/2012/09/23/historic-footage-of-copper-mining-and-smelting-in-the-1960s/#more-250

[Democrats_win]

1. What a neat video! Thanks for posting.

That railroad car that moved the train tracks is something! That mine in Utah is really famous!

I've been reading about gold ore extraction in Colorado and copper was really important because gold and silver dissolved in the copper matte in what is called the Swansea process. (Swansea was a famous smelting city in Wales.) This saved the gold industry in Colorado in the mid 1860s. The smelters in Colorado tried to find ores that contained copper so the process would work.
http://www.amazon.com/Ores-Metals-Mountain-Smelting-Timberline/dp/0870819461/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349458520&sr=8-1&keywords=ores+to+metals

Note that the extractive metallurgy used in Colorado came from European metallurgists. So, indeed the extractive metallurgy process is quite old. Recall that they've been using copper for centuries. However, with gold, the cyanide process would replace the Swansea process. Back then, it was part art and part science. The large commercialization of the process is something. Yet it is obviously something from Dante's Inferno