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Show Smelting In Ulali ijfP 1 Nearing the end of a long chain of industry in Utah molten metal Is being poured into slabs at Tooele plant. (Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of six articles on Utah's smelting industry.) The first complete metallurgical plant erected in the West was the Germania smelter ut Bingham, which included complete smelting and refining departments. The plant was designed as a lead smelter as copper ores in the Bingham district had not made their appearance in large quantities. quanti-ties. Then the red metal associated asso-ciated with lead was shunned, just as zinc was shunned and lost to the slag dump. Discovery of copper in the Highland High-land Boy mine at Bingham was followed by the erection of a copper cop-per smelter in the nineties. Copper Cop-per metallurgy was introduced to Utah as it was practiced elsewhere. Shortly after 1900 metallurgists took up the problem of treating the low grade ore of the Utah Cop-per Cop-per mine, ore then averaging 2 per cent copper. At first the mine supplied ores at times for six different dif-ferent smelters, but early in the twentieth century two large concentrators con-centrators were erected at Magna and Arthur and a copper smelter at Garfield. In this period was seen development develop-ment of the copper blast furnace and the beginning of reverbera-tory reverbera-tory operations on a large scale. At first the blast furnace had the advantage, but was supplemented more and iore by the reverbera-tory reverbera-tory fur-nice due to the increasing amount of concentrates and decreasing de-creasing amount of crude ore that required smelting. (The fifth article in this series will appear soon in these columns.) |