Blackfoot news. (Blackfoot, Idaho) 1891-1902, 1897-11-13
MODERN MErALLuRoY.
mere Have Been Many Failures but a
Steady Advance

s~''h many Dub u
Steady Advance.
The process man is always with us.
WIN each recurring period of ten or a
nozen years. he bobs up serenely with
new and revolutionary something 10
Whlch his predecessors gave labori0us
Dirth, maybe dozen, hundred or five
hundred years ago. He always is pro-
Inc with new desulphurizers. Some
lhirty odd years ago Colorado was
oferrun with his kind. and we never
saw one of his inventions which had
not preceding brother in some past
age. Once only did we find one which
we could not discover described in
some old and maybe forgotten metal
lurglcal record. That was a furnace
Dullt by Mr.. n. A. Willard, in Boulder
county, tweniy-one years ago. Glad Of
something new under the sun in that
line we wrote a full description of it.
Ihree months afterwards came a let
ter from Sweden telling of other roast
ing experiments and furnaces exactly
Ike Mr.. Wizards, which had long be-
Iore been tried and abandoned in that
land OF the midnight sun. But IL does
not follow because certain kinds of fur
naces have been tried and abandoned
as failures. that they may not, under
other conditions and with better skill.
De successful. In fact. almost every
successful thing has been a failure
somewhere and sometime
Notwithstanding many Of the expert
ments look puerile and may be foolish,
they are not without some general ben
eft. AT least someone learns some
thing. and the sum total of human
EnnkplaAU tn inc
thing not TO be despised in itself. But
as Mr.. Weller remarked about having.
with great effort, learned the alphabet.
II Is questionable whether II is worth
while going through so much to learn
so little. AT least the man who pays the
bills in most cases will appreciate the
Weller remark more than he viii. that
other chunk OF wisdom about the sum
total OF knowledge.
( There are few facts which might
well be called fundamental. that lie at
4 the basis of the improvements in metal
lurgy. They are that all ore must be
crushed to various degrees of fineness.
the degree depending upon the special
ore and the kind of process TO be used,
before the metal can be extracted. This
I is true as TO every method of treatment
".
cry kind of ore known. which is treated
other than by smel ing. where the met
ais can not be extracted by either ANAL
gamation of cyanidation, the ore must
be roasted. The object of roasting is
TO change the chemical combinations
+ into other combinations. which render
the metals iractible 10 some one of the
many kinds of treatment. This crushing
Y MI ffa Gff ~ lsa sxxr.. afaG ~.
ments Of cost in most processes. cOnse-
quently ii Is not To be wondered nj that
efforts should be made TO cheaper them.
+ These efforts are cummendable. These
/ efforts are bearing fruit every year. as
Witnessed by the Brown Horseshoe,
I Pearce Turret, Hopp. and other known
/ Improvements in furnaces. which are
modern in their perfection. though per-
haps old in conception. They are part
of the sum of human knowledge. They
are the Shadrach. Meshach and
Abednegoes who have passed through
the fiery ordeal and come out o. X.
They are the plus sign to the world at
large. though to the many who strewed
with wrecks the road reaching to an
tiquity. leading up TO and making them
possible, there was only minus sign
TO tell of the hopes and dollars that
I vanished forever. So il always proba-
bly, will be. Measured by the world
standard of golden profits, failures will
be more abundant than successes.
/ Somehow an all-wise providence failed
miserably in fixing things up as we
would like to have them, where the plus
sign would be more abundant than
minus. wisdom than folly. knowledge
| than ignorance, and where we would
all have more fun than trouble-Min-
4 ing Industry.