286 A SUBSTITUTE FOUND IN MASUT AND NAPHTHA. 



the distillation of petroleum. These combustibles are 

 brought from Baku by the Tiflis line, which has been 

 in existence for some years, to the Shamkhor station 

 at the foot of the mountain. With their help the 

 roasted ore is smelted in large round furnaces, 20 feet 

 in diameter, and worked up into copper. An electric 

 refining establishment at Kalakent transforms the raw 

 copper thus obtained into chemically pure copper, 

 whereby the silver contained in it is obtained as a 

 secondary product. As however it is difficult in winter 

 and during the rainy season to bring masut and naphtha 

 up the mountain from the railway - station to Kedabeg 

 on the impassable roads, a conduit has been constructed 

 of Mannesmann's weldless steel tubes, through which the 



" O 



masut is pumped up the slope about three thousand 

 feet from the plain. I hope personally to see this 

 contrivance in action this very autumn. Furthermore 

 the necessary arrangements have now been completed 

 for transforming the poorer ores, hitherto not paying 

 for the working up into refined copper, according to 

 a new process of my own, by a purely electrical method 

 without the employment of combustible materials. 

 For this purpose large turbines of over a thousand 

 horse-power have to be set up in the neighbouring 

 Shamkhor valley for working the dynamos , which 

 generate the necessary electric current. This current 

 has to be conveyed over the ridge, about 2500 feet 

 high, dividing Kedabeg from Shamkhor, in order to 

 extract and precipitate by the electric current the 

 copper from the powdered ore, at the very foot of 



