Arizona republican., 1898-01-16
HE TURNS TO GOLD Wizard Edison Will psvslOp
 Abandoned Hines CAN WORK LOE GRADE ORES
His Wonderful Machines Take
 The Place of Mines
The Great Electrician Promisss a Revolution in Mining-No Prc D. erty That Cannot be Profitably Worked by Thomas A. Edison.

| New York, Jan. 15-In an interview
 with Thomas A. Edison today, the
 wizard is quoted as follows:
 'I do not believe that there is a
 single known gold mine in the United 1 States. abandoned or worked. that
 cannot operate at a profit. am sure
 that I can, by a new process which I
 have invented, profitably mine ore
 which contains as little as $1.25 worth
 of gold to the ton. and prefer low to | high grade ores.
 | After six years of the hardest kind of work, through the constant sacri- 1 flee of personal comfort and the ven | ture of vast fortune, another great l triumph has just been placed to Wiz l ard Edison's credit-a triumph over obstacles supposed by experts to be in- ] surmountable.
 This achievement is the invention of 1 a process for iron mining by which ! he is utilizing a grade of ore so low l that it has heretofore been considered 1 absolutely useless. By the use of ma chinery which he has invented, and on which he holds patents, he is go- ing to make millions of dollars out of material which no other manufac- turer could afford to even consider His process has been proved to be a success, and his assistant is respon- sible for the statement that MT. Ed ison "is going to make more money out of this than he ever made or will
 make out of his other inventions, z and that means a great deal when it is considered that out of his other in ventions the wizard had made enough SO that he could afford to risk more than $2, ,00O, 900 in his iron mining ven ture before getting dollar in return. He is now preparing to go into the
 gold mining business on large scale,
 and contemplation of the wizards
 past works makes it certain that a new era of gold mining will be in- augurated with his advent into the field. When he declares: 'I do no.
 believe that there is a single go mine in the United States, abandoned
 or worked. that I cannot operate at profit" it means much
 "This is not new idea of mine," said MT. Edison to correspondent who visited him at Edison, N. J.. "for I have been experimenting with gold ores on and off ever since 1875; but I have refrained from speaking for pub Iication on the subject because had not until very recently got my process perfected to point where I felt sure of my way.
 ''In mining gold shall employ sub stantially the same process that I am
 now using for mining iron. When | speak of mining it is not in the sense
 that the term is generally used. The
 day of the old fashioned miner-:the man who digs the ground with a pick 1 -is past so far as I am concerned.
 have no use for him. My mining is all
 done by machinery, and it does the work after a fashion that is practically
 automatic, too. Not man touches a 1 piece of the iron ore that we are talk
 ing out of the ground here; nor does
 a man touch even the finished product, ! the briquettes of iron, unless by acci- i dent after they have been dumped int l cars ready for shipment. Not hu-
 man hand touches either the ore or i briQuettes at any stage of the process.
 When we run at full capacity, about 1 5000 tons day, the entire force in al departments of our works will not ex-
 ceed 250 men. That means, of course,
 that our automatic machinery takes
 the place of several thousand men.
 The men we employ are not miners;
 they are machinists, engineers and
 laborers, and their work is simply to
 start the machinery, to watch it while 1 1t works and to make repairs. It has
 got to be so to mine low grade ore
 like ours, which yields only about 9
 per cent iron, and sell the product at
 the low prices quoted now. It could
 not possibly pay if manual labor were
 employed.
 ''To make a profit On this low grade
 gold ore on which it is my intention
 to work, the same automatic maebinI;
 cry must be employed.
 '1 take little stock from my point or view in Klondyke or any other place 1 where men pick up surface gold. The