James M. Hyde

James M. Hyde was born June 25, 1873, in Mystic Bridge, Connecticut, the son of Rev. William Penn Hyde and Seraphine Smith Carr. His mother was a Mayflower descendant. When he was age eight, his father moved the Hyde family of eight children to Santa Cruz, California, and, later, to Palo Alto, California.[1] As the youngest son, not expected to enter the ministry, James studied mining engineering and geology at Stanford University. He was active in the school's geology club, engineers' club, and was an assistant instructor in assaying before graduating in 1901.[2]

In 1903, he married Bessie Lorraine Ransom, born in California 1872. They had one daughter, Helen Elizabeth, born in California in 1908.[3][4] After Hyde resigned from Stanford in 1927, he moved to Los Angeles.[5][6]

He died July 18, 1943, in his home at 1300-3/4 North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood.

After graduation, Hyde went to work for the California State Mining Bureau as curator of its museum and as field engineer. This was followed with three years, 1903 -1906, as professor and head of the University of Oregon, Eugene's mining department where he helped found the new department. Offered a job in industry, he left the university in the fall of 1906, and spent the next three years during a mining boom that went bust with the Panic of 1907: he was metallurgist for a silver mill in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1906-1907; then an assayer for the Charles Butters & Company's cyanide plant at Virginia City, Nevada, 1907; then, 1907-1908, superintendent of a small stamp mill and attached cyanide plant at the short-lived gold rush town of Manhattan, Nevada; and then managed a gold prospect in the California Mother Lode country.[3] He returned to education in 1909 as director of the San Diego public school system's new agriculture and horticulture program.[7]

During this time, Hyde's reformer's zeal also manifested itself. At San Diego, he was a proponent of the City Beautiful movement; in Oregon he was president of the Good Roads Association in the state; and in Palo Alto he and brother William cheered on the Good Government League. An ongoing battle was with the California State Mining Bureau, which he resigned after making "charges of the most sensational character" against state Mineralogist Lewis E. Aubury over what was termed "Mismanagement, . . . public advertisement of private interests and a desire for personal aggrandizement."[8] He also claimed the bureau was under the control of "the Octopus," the Southern Pacific Railroad and its minions.[9] Aubrey countered that Hyde spent "too much time theorizing, with the result that nothing was getting accomplished in the museum" and was "a savant with his head swelled out of all proportion." When Hyde asked for a two-week vacation, Aubrey said, "I gave [him] a vacation and a long one at that."[10] The state's board that governed the bureau met to discuss Hyde's claims and decided by unanimous vote, "That the matter . . . be ignored entirely."[8][11] Hyde's reformer's zeal would arise throughout his life, often to his discredit. By 1910, according to Hyde, he was considering relocating to Mexico to aid in the government's planned education reforms, when the Mexican Revolution intervened. He instead took a job in London, which would bring him fame and notoriety.

In 1989 Hyde was posthumously inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum in Leadville, Colorado, as a result of his installation of the first froth flotation process in the United States.[12] The museum states:

Without this process, there would be no mining industry as we know it today: virtually the entire world of copper, lead, zinc and silver is first collected in the froth of the flotation process. . . . Froth flotation has permitted the mining of low-grade and complex ores that otherwise would have been unprofitable, and thanks to James Hyde, many old "worthless" tailings dumps have been converted into profitable mines.[12]

In January 1910, his Stanford classmate Theodore J. Hoover offered Hyde a job with the Minerals Separation, Limited, of which he was manager in the London Office. The firm had perfected an early froth flotation process in their labs and in the field, and introduced it with great financial success at the massive zinc-lead deposits of Broken Hill, Australia.[13] Hyde accepted, moved to London, and was immersed in studying the revolutionary new process for working low grade ores. In what was a defining moment in his career, he left the company after a year to lead in the technology's transfer to America. He was following in the time honored tradition of technologists, who learned of new technology in England, and then stole all the information they could in order to introduce the technology to the United States, often over the cry of fraud and dishonor by the British owners of patents and the royalties they produced. (For an early example, see the life of Samuel Slater, builder of the first textile mill in America).

Early in 1911, Hyde left Minerals Separation, Ltd, to introduce the flotation process at a zinc mine in Butte, Montana, being considered for purchase by mining specialist Herbert Hoover, later the President of the United States, with the help of his brother Theodore J. Hoover, who had also left the London company. Although Hoover backed out of the purchase, Hyde was hired by the owners of the Butte and Superior Copper Company and built a successful, small test plant in 1911. In 1912, he designed and the company built the Butte & Superior works, Butte, Montana, the first great froth flotation mill in the United States. Some would claim that Hyde demonstrated great intuition and genius in his "Hyde process." The Minerals Separations, Ltd., company disagreed and declared an infringement of its flotation process patent and began a lawsuit that took five years and ended in the U. S. Supreme Court.[14]

Hyde had designed "a unit with two sections, one of rougher cells and the other of cleaner cells. The rougher concentrate was cleaned in the cleaner cells and the cleaner tailings were returned to the rougher cells. This was the first time the "rougher-cleaner circuit" was employed and the procedure has never been disputed. He was awarded a patent on the process in 1911."[12]

Unfortunately for Hyde, at issue in the court's eyes was not how a box was shaped or a cell was devised but about the "process" of introducing air and limited amounts of oil to make the metals in the finely ground ore "float."

Hyde lost his case in 1913, but a court of appeals decided in his favor in 1914, only to have the Supreme Court hold, in December 1916, that he had infringed on the Minerals Separation patent.[15] In general, the American press and mining industry favored a decision for Hyde over the British patent holders. Mining engineer Daniel C. Jackling, who had purchased the Butte & Superior, funded Hyde's lawsuits while contesting the Minerals Separation company patents at the Jackling group of mines in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, which introduced their own modified Hyde flotation process—and were sued by Minerals Separation as well. Thomas Arthur Rickard, editor of the Mining & Scientific Press, San Francisco, made Hyde's suit, and the others that followed against Minerals Separation, into a cause celeb, where the firm was described as evil incarnate.[16] Hyde received professional accolades, probably the greatest being during the many talks on flotation, recognizing his primacy, presented at the American Institute of Mining Engineer's conference in Arizona, September 1916. But in the end the Minerals Separation, Ltd would prevail in its many suits until its patent expired in 1923, "and in so doing earned for itself the cordial detestation of many in the mining world."[17]

During the period between his 1914 court victory and the Supreme Court's negative decision, Hyde's consultant business flourished with work primarily undertaken by him in the silver-lead-zinc mines of Colorado, with a test lab in Denver and in southern Colorado. In 1916-1917, his biggest personal financial failure was on the lease of the Genesee-Vanderbilt group of mines above Silverton, Colorado, and the construction of a flotation mill that failed because of complex ores. (The Butte & Superior ores had been simpler in their composition, fortunate for Hyde's first, 1911-1912, success). Over the next decade, other metallurgists and chemists would solve the problems with new differential flotation, addition of xanthates and other reagents, and additional steps to a continually evolving process that would take more technical skill while exceeding everyone's expectations of utility.[18] By 1917, Hyde had relocated back to Palo Alto and was hired as a consulting metallurgist for the U. S. Bureau of Mines experiment station at Stanford.

In 1919, Stanford hired Hyde and his old friend Theodore J. Hoover as faculty in the mining department. Over the next seven years he would teach metallurgy, work in his metallurgical lab, and do a limited consulting business with the Hoover brothers.[19] More and more, his interests leaned to reform and political activities. In 1927, he resigned from Stanford to, officially, return to his consultant work in Mexico and Southern California, but, unofficially, to become more active in Republican politics. As before, some of his mining ventures were suspect, including an attempt in 1935 to reopen the Good Hope Mine in Riverside County.[20] A state inquiry was held in 1935 on the financing of this mine.[21] But by then, his name had secured its place in the mining history books.[22]