In the development of mineral resources and in manufactures,
higher education is paying even larger proportionate returns
than in agriculture. Practically the entire $2,000,000,000
yearly mineral production of the United States is directly due
to a few chemical and electrical processes which were worked out
by highly educated scientists. For example, the cyanide process
of extracting gold, worked out in the laboratory in 1880 by
McArthur and Forrest, is responsible for fully one-third of the
world’s gold production, making possible the five million annual
production of the Homestake mine in North Dakota and the one
hundred and forty-five million of South Africa, and many other
similar cases. The Elkinton electrolytic process of refining
copper is in the same way used now in producing 700,000,000
pounds of copper annually in the United States. The Bessemer and
the open-hearth processes of producing steel, by which nearly
all of our 23,000,000 tons are produced annually, are due to
the scientific researches of Sir Henry Bessemer, of Thomas and
Gilchrist, and of Siemens. Birmingham, Pittsburg, and a host of
wealthy cities could never have come into being but for these
discoveries. James Gayley’s discovery taught the practical
steelworkers how they could save one-third of their coke and at
the same time increase the output of their furnaces by a new
process of extracting the moisture from the blast. This alone
means the saving from now on of 10,000,000 tons of coal annually
in the United States.--New York _Evening Post_.
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