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A Kennecott Story On Thursday's Access Utah

barnesandnoble.com

  On Thursday’s AU Charles Hawley will join us from Alaska to talk about Kennecott and the history of mining.

While copper seems less glamorous than gold, it may be far more important, as it was vital to the industrial revolution and indispensable for electrification. Kennecott Copper Corporation, at one time the largest producer of copper in the world, played a key role in economic and industrial development.

In his new book “A Kennecott Story: Three Mines, Four Men, and One Hundred Years, 1897-1997” (University of Utah Press) Charles Hawley tells the story of how Kennecott was formed from the merger of three mining operations (one in Alaska, one in Utah, and one in Chile), how it led the way in mining technologies, and how it was in turn affected by the economy and politics of the day.  His narrative follows four mining engineers--Stephen Birch, Daniel Cowan Jackling, William Burford Braden, and E. Toppan Stannard--self-made men whose technological ingenuity was responsible for much of Kennecott's success.

While Jackling developed economies of scale for massive open-pit mining in Utah, Braden went underground in Chile for a copper-caving operation of unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, Birch and Stannard overcame the extreme challenges of mining rich ore in the difficult climate of Alaska and transporting it to market. The Guggenheims, who brought these three operations together, provided the funding without which the infrastructure necessary for the mining operations might not have been built. As a geologist with first-hand knowledge of mining, Hawley describes the technology behind the Kennecott story and places Kennecott and the copper industry within their historical context and allowing the reader to consider the controversial aspects of mineral discovery and sustainability.

Charles Hawley has had a long career as a geologist. He worked for the U.S. Geological Survey before moving to the private sector, eventually forming his own consulting company for the mining industry. Hawley has served on national and state land-use advisory councils and has in the recent past served as director of several mining companies. He has published both technical and nontechnical articles in the field on geology and is the author of “Wesley Earl Dunkle: Alaska’s Flying Miner.”

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Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.