Bisbee daily review., 1917-05-27
AIR BUBBLES MAKING PATENTS GOLD MINES
 FOR THEIR OWNERS
Writer In Current Opinion Tells of The Progress Made In The Mining Industry Through introduction of Rotation.

Current Opinion says: Beating the white of an egg into a stiff froth is a very simple operation. It consists merely of beating air into the albu- men until it's mass is saturated with tiny bubbles Neither is the iridescent soap bubble a novelty. Yet, despite our familiarity with bubbles of all kinds, nobody realized until a few years ago that there was a pile of money in them During the last four years, we learn from W. V. Woehkle in the Sunset Monthly, they have lit- orally turned the practice of metall- urgy upside down.
 They are producing millions in ad- ditional profits every week for the min ing industry; they have made avail able the metal contents of billion tons of lean ore hitherto considered worthless, and pretty soon will be yielding a cool million a month in royalties which, according to recent decision of Supreme Court, must promptly travel to London into the pockets of the British bubble paten- tees.
 In one single copper mine. the air bubbles, with practically no additional expense, increased output 10000 pounds of copper day. At 20 cents a pound the additional revenue due the bubbles is $24,000 every day in this one mine, A Montana mining company (Anaconda,) having lately put in bubble plant at modest cost of few hundred thousand, increased its output from the same tonnage by 50,000.000 pounds the first year and got 25 cents pound for the metal A zinc mine Butte & Superior) added the bubbles to its equipment and lift ed the output 100000 day.
 The Former Choice of Evils.
 To gain proper understanding of the function and importance of air bubbles in mining, not only of Amer ica but of an entire world, we have to remember that copper, lead, zinc and silver are rarely found in pure metallic state. Early mining engineers were confronted by choice of two evils. They found rock and ore so intimately mixed that, if they crushed the ma terial into a coarse pulp, good part of the ore remained enclosed in large grains of rock, as nuts are in shells, and could not be recovered When the material was finely pulverized minute metallic particles refused to sink, swam merily along with the powdered rock and were lost. This water-separation process rarely re covered more than 50 per cent to 70 per cent of metal contents.
 Then came the oil separation pro- cess, greatly reducing the loss, which, however, remained enormous in the aggregate. Then came the revolution izing discovery of the bubble, as a metal-saving device.
 In the rich Broken Hill mining dis trict of Australia, where waste metal reached proportions of special magni- tude, there had accumulated a few years ago twelve million tons of tail ings and shines which contained the incredible total of four billion pounds of zinc. not counting vast amounts of lead and silver At five cents a pound, the normal market value, the zinc alone was worth s240,000.000, bu, since there existed no known method of separating it from the crushed rock with which it was mixed, value of the four billion pounds did not reach 30 cents-until the tiny bubble came along.
 It was the theory of A. E. Cater mole, an Australian mining engineer, that the well-known affinity of oil for metallic surfaces would cause the oil to seek out each of the little fiecks of metal floating in the water and en- velop it, while the violent stirring would bring these oilcoated specks into contact and paste them together until heavy enough to sink in the bot tom when the stirring ceased.
 So promising was the Cattermole oil-pasting and sinking process that the patents were bought by a syndi- cate of London mining men endowed with foresight and tenacity But
 
 tual practice on a commercial scale, results did not live up to the theoreti- cal perfection. So the syndicate or dered its laboratory force to make an almost endless series of experiments with different quantities of oil, of water, with different rates of agita- tion and other vrsying factors, to de- termine under which conditions the metal particles could best be made to sink.
 A Mass Meeting In Froth.
 Believing that buoyancy of the oil was at bottom of the trouble. they used less and less of it. stirred the pulp harder and harder. Then, when they were using barely three pounds of oil to the ton of ore, when they were chasing the mixing arms through the pulp at HOO revolutions per min ute, something totally unexpected happened. Instead of going down, nearly all the metallic particles held a mass meeting on top of the water, in a thick frOth that stayed frothy.