AUSTRALIAN MINING-FIELDS 125 



Pyrite-smelting was brought within the range of practical 

 possibility by the invention of bessemerisation. In the very 

 year (1856) in which Bessemer announced his process, Keates 

 proposed the treatment of sulphide ores on the same principle — 

 viz. keeping the metal molten by the heat generated by the com- 

 bustion of the sulphur and iron in these ores. Later, attempts 

 on the same lines were made at Ducktown, in 1866, by Raht ; in 

 Hungary, in 1867, by Rittinger ; and by several metallurgists 

 from 1866 to 1868 at Bogoslowsk, in Western Siberia. Mr. Sticht 

 gives most of the credit of the pioneer work to John Hollway, 

 whose paper before the Society of Arts in 1879 he describes 

 as the " pyrite-smelters' gospel, voicing early aspirations." 

 Hollway used a Bessemer converter, and his scheme failed 

 because he tried both to smelt the ores by the burning of 

 the sulphur as fuel, and to recover sulphur as an element 

 at the same time. He therefore used a low-power blast 

 and low temperatures. The attempt to burn sulphur and 

 recover it at the same time, led to the failure of this 

 system when it was tried in Servia in 1881. This failure 

 and the dismissal of the proposal by Hussey Vivian as a 

 wild-cat scheme, " quite inapplicable to copper-smelting," did 

 not prevent the fresh attempts of Bartlett in Maine, and Austin 

 in Montana ; but the ores they used were not suitable or the 

 supplies were inadequate ; and when Mr. Sticht went to Mount 

 Lyell in 1895 not a single pyrite-smelting plant had been 

 successful. He, however, knowing that according to chemical 

 principles the process was theoretically possible, refused to 

 believe that mere mechanical difficulties would always neces- 

 sitate the waste of the fuels in these self-fuelled ores. He 

 persuaded the directors to let him put aside the smelting 

 process he had been brought to Tasmania to conduct, and to 

 adopt pyrite-smelting instead. He began with partial pyrite- 

 smelting, with the use of coke and a hot blast ; but, one by one, 

 he has overcome the difficulties in the way of the theoretical 

 ideal. Early in 1903 the hot blast was finally discarded ; four 

 furnaces do the work previously done by eight, and that without 

 the use of any carbonaceous fuel. The ores of the different 

 mines are so mixed that they, in the main, form their own 

 fluxes and supply the whole of their own fuel ; and Mount Lyell 

 accordingly profitably mines and smelts copper ores at the 

 unprecedentedly low cost of 13s. a ton. 



