My Great-Grandfather Ivor Monger; Westinghouse; Tesla; and Copperfield, Vermont.




Ivor John Monger:


Ivor was my great-grandfather. The 1881 Welsh census shows him in Swansea, Wales working as a clerk for the Copper Works at age 17. He was the son of William Monger, Master of Copper Rolling Mills; and Jane Bevan Monger.


Sometime between 1881 and 1890 he moved to New Jersey, USA. My Grandmother told me he moved to America to work for Standard Oil. In 1888, Standard Oil opened it’s first branch in England. He well may have hired on there. A few years after moving to America, he married a local New Jersey girl, Lucinda Alzada Clayton, oldest daughter of David C. Clayton and Mary Ann Bennett. She was five years older than he was. They lived in Bayonne, New Jersey, and had three children. The eldest, Alice Marion (evidently named after Ivor’s younger sister), was born in 1893. She eventually became my grandmother. Walter was born in 1895 and Robert in 1896.


Standard Oil was a holding company and owned a number of copper interests. It is certain Ivor worked with copper, not oil. There were several smelters in New Jersey in those days – some smelted ore from as far away as Sudbury, Ontario. Ore from some of the copper mines in Vermont had been sent there for final processing earlier on.


The 1900 census shows the Mongers still resident in New Jersey, but within a year or two they had left and moved to Copperfield, Vermont where George Westinghouse had bought the abandoned Ely Mine in 1899 and was putting it back into production, reportedly with Nikola Tesla in charge of a project to find cheaper ways to smelt the ore. Ivor seems to have worked in the smelter there. Exactly when the Copperfield smelter got into operation is in question, either 1901 or 1902.


By 1905 they were in Utah, where they moved around a bit and lived in both Bingham and Murray. Copperfield was auctioned in 1907, so had probably closed in 1903 or 1904 and forced them into moving west.


I would put them in Copperfield from 1901 through 1904. I believe my grandmother said they were in Vermont around three years. It may have been more like 2 to 2 ½. She used to take us over there and she showed me where they used to live, where she went to school, where the mines, smelter, and the long smokestack were (I used to climb up inside that). She never said much of anything about what they were doing there in her youth, but I don’t think the copper industry greatly interested her as a young girl. Although Copperfield itself was an unattractive desert with nothing green growing due to the fumes, she did gain a great love of Vermont in the years she lived there, and was always eager to go back. She once told me they came most of the way from New Jersey by train, and the rest of the way by stagecoach. (She lived to watch men land on the moon!)


Ivor was hired by Utah Copper as a foreman in the Garfield smelter in 1911 and they settled in Garfield. It was there Alice met and married my Grandfather, who was an Episcopal priest working as a missionary to the miners and copper workers. Ivor stayed there for the rest of his working life, until a drunken engineer started a locomotive up in the wrong direction and took off his leg. He was then forced to retire on a small pension. He eventually had a stroke and had to be moved to a nursing home. He died in 1940 at age 77. Lucinda lived until age 79, when she died in July 1938 in Salt Lake City.




The Background:


The long war between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over whether America should be wired with Direct Current or Alternating Current was won by Westinghouse, using Nikola Tesla’s alternating current patents, phased power, and motors. While Direct Current couldn’t be transmitted more than a few miles, nor could the voltage be easily changed after it was generated, AC could use transformers to step the voltage up and then back down, allowing the development of the power grids we know and use today. Lighter phased electric motors without brushes, could produce more power. With the building of the Niagara Falls generating plant, Westinghouse and Tesla began the process of electrifying America. This process involved vast amounts of copper.


Tesla moved on from AC and began working with DC, and with his Tesla Coil, into very high frequencies approaching the millions of hertz (cycles per second). He attracted other financial backers than just George Westinghouse, and moved on to researching and developing other things. However, he always respected George and they seem to have stayed in contact. In the events I am about to describe, Tesla may have returned to work for George around 1900 on a specific project.


Amalgamated Copper, (Standard Oil) attempting to corner the market:


In April of 1899 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil decided to monopolize the world’s copper as it had previously done with oil and to that end formed the Amalgamated Copper Company. This had been tried 10 years previously by Pierre Secretan in France, ending in disaster and a bailout by the Bank of France, but John D. Rockefeller evidently thought he was going to succeed where Pierre Secretan had failed. Amalgamated held controlling interest in Anaconda, the world’s largest copper producer, and with the cooperation of others began to withhold production and to curb exports to Europe. Prices initially went through the roof, but soon independent producers began to flood into the market, forcing Amalgamated to either buy them up or compete with them. Amalgamated then cut prices, eventually to below cost, but the independents then refused to sell, forcing Amalgamated to sell even still to be mined copper at its own profit-killing prices. When Amalgamated then raised their prices, the independents resumed selling and crashed the price again. By 1902 prices had stabilized and things returned to normal.


Copperfield:


The events I am writing about took place during the 1898-1905 time period and had their beginning in late 1899, when George Westinghouse, being heavily hit by rising copper prices due to John D. Rockefeller, evidently decided to buy another copper mine and supply his company’s copper needs himself. To this end, he purchased the Ely Mine together with its smelter and small town known at the time as Copperfield, Vermont. (In 1889, probably in response to Pierre Secretan, he had started buying up copper mines in the vicinity of Duquesne/Washington Camp in Arizona, but had done nothing much with them, probably due to Secretan’s failure to keep copper prices up.)


This attempt seems to have been rather a disaster from the beginning. He first had to de-water (pump out) the mine, which had been abandoned for 2 to 16 years (accounts vary), and make it safe to reopen. This cost him much more than he had planned on and took longer1. While that was going on, he had surveyors laying out two different roads to get the copper out. While these are described as roads, it logically would have been smarter to lay out at least one rail line, as the nearest railway to the mine at the time was at Ely Station, 6 miles away. After writing and publishing this article, I found out that is exactly what had been planned2! In any case, nothing was done on either of them, reportedly as the assessors, looking on the mine’s reopening as a golden goose, were all too eager to raise taxes.


Knowing that the ore he had was inferior to that held by Amalgamated and more expensive to process, George Westinghouse also reportedly put Nikola Tesla in charge of a project there to find ways to smelt and refine copper more cheaply3. Smelting began in 1901 or 19024. Tesla was occupied with building Wardencliffe at the time, and virtually nothing is known of what he carried out at Copperfield, or if he even was there, but he briefly mentioned years later that he had been successful with finding a way to refine metals more cheaply but unable to use what he found out5. It would seem this was about the only time period he could have worked with actual smelting facilities.


Interestingly, most of Tesla’s projects involved electricity. Burlington was the first city in Vermont to start producing electricity, in 1881. Copperfield was probably the earliest small village in Vermont to get electrical power, in April of 1888. 6 It was most likely generated by water power, as there was a dam there. So Nikola Tesla would have, surprisingly, had electricity to work with at Copperfield. (Vermont was not totally electrified until the 1960’s). If He was involved he probably was working on electrolysis, already known and used at the time, but maybe trying to improve it.


I have wondered if Tesla secretly used Copperfield in mid-July of 1903 for a trial of transmitting power from Wardencliffe. He had earlier claimed to be transmitting with a facility in Scotland, but no record of any such facility has ever been found, and he also had no money for another facility, being barely able to finish the diminished 190 ft. Wardencliffe tower (his original plans called for at least one and possibly two 600 foot towers). Copperfield would have made a cheap target, as it had a high mountain on which to set an antenna without any major tower, with a 1000 foot deep mine shaft directly underneath for a ground, and was located about 150 miles from Wardencliffe (as the crow flies), ten times the distance of his Colorado experiment. It had electricity, though all he really needed was a receiving antenna. If he was also already involved there, so no questions would be raised. Another benefit was that no word would likely get back to J.P. Morgan and his other investors from rural Vermont unless he succeeded and told them himself, and no one would know if it failed. But there are no records of any such experiment, so I cannot say that it ever happened. If it did, it almost certainly failed, for Wardencliffe was never again charged up after July 14-15 1903. As Tesla later claimed the tower would have worked with a more powerful generator, a higher tower, etc. it is only reasonable to assume that he had tried and failed to transmit power to somewhere in July of 1903. So either way, nothing came of it!


On the other hand, George Westinghouse was himself more than adequate at researching and obviously had purchased state of the art smelting equipment for Copperfield, only to be stymied by the low quality of the ore, which had been misrepresented to him.


George Westinghouse seems to have been giving up on Copperfield by late 19037. Copper prices had probably dropped to the point where it would not have been profitable to continue the operation, but also the ore at the Ely Mine turned out to be nowhere near the quality that he had believed and it was a losing prospect to continue8. I am not sure exactly when it was totally and finally closed, probably 1903 or 1904, but the crash of 1907 forced Westinghouse out of control of all his companies and effectively sidelined him9. He died in 1914. Copperfield was auctioned off in 1907 (or 1911 in one account) with the provision all the buildings be removed from the site10. Most were dismantled and the lumber used elsewhere, a few like Ely Ely-Goddard’s “Elysium” were rebuilt in other locations. The abandoned mine was left to refill with water. During WW1 it was reported as being reopened by another company and still running as late as 1920. However, it is most likely they were processing ore from the dumps, and did not pump out the mine again11. This was also done during WW2, with the ore being processed at South Strafford12. Today the area is privately owned and an EPA Superfund Site.


In 1906, shortly after the closing of Copperfield, George Westinghouse bought the Pride of the West Mine and smelter in Arizona and began experimenting further with ore from the Bonanza Mine. After recovering from the crash of 1907, the company continued to develop this operation and it ran until early 1919, was then leased for a year, and was sold in 192613.


It is doubtful if Ivor or his family ever saw or spoke with either Westinghouse or Tesla, but not impossible. They were certainly not on intimate terms with either. Ivor was simply a smelter worker. But they did play a small part in the great changes the electrification of America and the world brought about, and I think I have shown to some extent how those changes affected them while they were in progress.


Ted Rice, White Creek, NY July 2021


An interesting video of the Copperfield mine site: https://www.pbs.org/video/windows-wild-digging-vermont-history/


1 MILESTONE HERITAGE CONSULTING Technical Memorandum Ely Copper Mine Site Remediation Vershire, Vermont Section 106 NHPA Compliance Support: University of Vermont Archival Research July 4, 2015

Milestone Report No. 0007 https://semspub.epa.gov/work/01/577672.pdf


2 New York Times, January 1, 1901 Ely Mine Sale Completed. “It is proposed in the Spring to build a railroad from the Ely Mine to White River Junction--” https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1901/01/01/118459042.html?pageNumber=1


3 I found one reference online to George asking Tesla to lead a project in Copperfield to find cheaper ways of smelting, but didn’t write it down and can’t find it now. The project definitely existed, and was later continued in Arizona, but whether Nikola Tesla actually got involved is uncertain. He did refer to having found cheaper ways of smelting and refining copper and other metals in a 1934 Scientific American article (see footnote #5), but said he couldn’t use them without giving a reason why. Unless he was involved in Arizona after 1906, (I have found no mention of that), the only opportunity he would have had to experiment with copper smelting was at this period in Copperfield.


4 Day, David T. Mineral Resources of the United States. Calendar Year 1900. Washington, Gov’t. Printing Office. P. 161 https://books.google.com/books?id=kcctOFbFeHAC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=westinghouse+project+at+copperfield+1900&source=bl&ots=2fgSw0ttlg&sig=ACfU3U2g5yjSkVgWCTXsffYtKsVLZGJ5SQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwivjbTr-vTxAhUDSN8KHQd8BSwQ6AEwDnoECCwQAw#v=onepage&q=westin

However, David Day is contradicted by Joseph Struthers in “The Mineral Industry” who writes that the smelter: “was not finished and in operation during the year (1901) owing to the difficulty in getting deliveries of material.”


Struthers, Joseph Ed. The Mineral Industry, It’s Statistics, Technology, and Trade In the United States and Other Countries to the end of 1901. Vol. 10. New York and London. The Engineering and Mining Journal, Inc. 1902.

P. 186 “Vermont. — The Copperfield mines, at Copperfield, Vt. , owned by Mr. George Westinghouse during 1901, pumped out the mine, straightened and widened the shaft so as to permit an output of at least 300 tons of ore per day, and began the erection of a smelter, which was not finished and in operation during the year owing to the difficulty in getting deliveries of material. The copper furnaces are two of about 150 -ton capacity each , and were erected by the Colorado Iron Works, of Denver, Colo.”

P. 211 “Copper Smelting Jackets.—The use of drop furnace bottoms supported by screw jacks resting on and attached to a car, traveling on a track beneath the furnace, came into general use during 1901. Among the furnaces erected with this type of bottom, were the 42x160-in. jackets erected by the Allis -Chalmers Co., for the Rio Tinto Copper Co. , Ltd. , of Huelva, Spain , and three furnaces built by the Colorado Iron Works, two for Mr. George Westinghouse for erection at Copperfield, Vt. , and one for an Arizona company.”


5 Due to unfavorable circumstances, Dr. Tesla states, some of his important results have not yet been announced, among them being a new refining process for producing steel, copper, aluminum, and other metals at low cost. https://teslaresearch.jimdofree.com/articles-interviews/possibilities-of-electro-static-generators-by-nikola-tesla-scientific-american-march-1934/


8 Weed, Walter Harvey. Copper Deposits in the Appalachian States. USGS Bulletin 455. Washington. U.S. Government Printing Office. p.25.

“The property was equipped with smelting works early in its his-

tory, and was for many years regarded as a model in this respect.

In 1885 there were 24 brick furnaces of a type originating here and

called the Vershire type. Rapid advances in metallurgical treat-

ment soon made the plant antiquated, and it was remodeled by Cazin

in 1888-89 and a 100-ton concentrator built at an expense of $53,000.

The plant erected at that time is estimated to have cost $700,000.

After the purchase of the property by the present owners various

changes were made and a year's work done. The result was not satis-

factory, for although equipped with modern water-jacket blast fur-

naces, reverberatories, and a Bessemer plant, the treatment of raw

sulphides resulted in low-grade mattes (14 per cent) and the re-

treatment of material so increased the cost as to render the work

unprofitable. The ore was found to be lower grade than had been

expected and very siliceous.”

https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/b455


11 Final Public Health Assessment for the Ely Copper Mine site, Vershire, Vermont. EPA Facility ID: VTD988366571. September 30, 2008. P. 2. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/pha/ElyCopperMineSite/ElyCopperMineSite%20Final%20PHA%20093008.pdf


12 Ibid. P. 2.


13 Thorman, Charles H. and Lane, Diane E. USGS Research on Minerals – 1994 – Part B – Guidebook for Field Trips. US Geological Survey Circular 1103-B. Washington: US Government Printing Office. 1994. https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/cir1103B pp. 43 – 45.

Email Post

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts