In 1901 a 56-year old Thomas Edison arrived in the small Falconbridge township near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, with his wife and brother-in-law. He had already invented the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, but those days were far behind him. He was there to prospect for nickel.
But this story really began 45 years earlier…
Magnetic Indications of Sudbury Deposits
In 1856, a map surveyor, W.A. Salter, was running surveying lines near Sudbury when he “discovered considerable local [magnetic] attraction, the needle varying between from four to fourteen degrees westerly”. He later met another surveyor, Alexander Murray, who made a similar observation.
Salter and Murray reported their findings to the Assistant Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, who examined the area and found a deposit of iron sulphides which assayed only low values of nickel and copper. The site investigated was actually only 200m from where Vale’s world-class Creighton mine stands today!
No further attention was given to the Sudbury deposits until they were accidentally re-discovered 27 years later.
The Sudbury Deposits
In August of 1883 Thomas Flanagan, a blacksmith on the Canadian Pacific Railway, noticed a rust coloured patch of rock (a gossan: the iron-oxide rich outcrop expression of a weathered sulphide body) while working with a crew in a recently blasted rock cut north-west of present-day Sudbury in Ontario, Canada. Assaying of the rocks revealed elevated amounts of copper and nickel. Prospectors soon located the richest area by searching for outcroppings.
But the pickings were not easy. Aenaes McCharles, a local mining entrepreneur, later remembered in his book “Bemocked of Destiny”:
“Northern Ontario is one of the hardest countries in the world to explore. There are no roads nor trails that pack horses can be taken on, and the canoe routes are few and far apart, and seldom convenient to the mineral ranges. All supplies and outfits must be carried on men’s backs through the trackless woods and swamps and over rocky hills to no end.“
“The season for this is very short, being only about four months of the year, leaving out fly time, when it is positive torment to stay in the bush. Then in the spring the low ground is flooded with water from the melting snow, and during the rest of the season the undergrowth of bushes, ferns and wild grass is so thick that no one can see where to step half the time, and the heavy dew keeps it wet till noon.“
“In short, more poor fellows have lost their lives trying to find mines in the Sudbury district than have made fortunes there.”
Despite these hardships most of the ore bodies in the Sudbury area had been discovered from outcroppings within a few years of the first discovery. However, in the small township of Falconbridge the bedrock was overlain by glacially transported gravels and sands, and the prospectors of that time had little interest in the area.
Edison in Sudbury
When Edison arrived in the township of Falconbridge in 1901, he had recently invented a rechargeable nickel-iron battery and hoped it would eventually be used to power Henry Ford’s new automobiles. He had seen a five-ton block of Sudbury ore exhibited by the Canadian Copper Company at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and he thought that nickel from the deposits in the Sudbury area could ultimately be used in his batteries.
Aenaes McCharles later remembered:
“When Thomas A. Edison visited the Sudbury district in the summer of 1901, he used to call at my office almost every day for a week or more.“
“I have never met a more interesting man to talk and listen to. When thinking, he would look down and begin to pull his right eyebrow with his finger and thumb in an abstracted way, as if he did not know that he was doing it.“
“He hated snakes awfully, and nearly the first thing he asked me was if they were numerous in that part of Northern Ontario. He was very glad to hear that we had only a few harmless garter snakes on the nickel belt.“
“He told me that he had not made very much out of all his work, and also that his greatest invention was the incandescent light, which is now in use in all the cities and towns of the whole civilized world”
The Ogdensburg Iron Ore Venture
Edison was no stranger to prospecting and mining. In the 1890’s he had launched a New Jersey-based iron ore milling and processing plant using ore from a low-grade magnetite deposit near Ogdensburg, NJ, in an ill-advised attempt to corner the US iron-ore market.
He designed rock-crushing technology and an electromagnetic ore separator to extract the low-grade magnetite iron ore from the crushed boulders.
Unfortunately the final product, a powdered iron ore briquette (which he had also invented) was not a commercial success, especially after high-grade ore was discovered around Lake Superior in the great Mesabi Range in the northern Minnesota wilderness. In 1899, Edison left the iron-ore mining industry, having lost the better part of his fortune on the venture.
Early Magnetic Prospecting
The magnetic properties of the earth have been studied for more than four centuries, but the first scientific application of geophysics to the search for minerals was published in Swedish Professor Robert Thalen’s book in 1879 entitled, “On the Examination of Iron Ore Deposits by Magnetic Methods“.
In the late 19th century Sweden was in the forefront of the development and use of magnetic prospecting, and the state-of-the-art Thalen-Tiberg magnetometer was manufactured in Stockholm. Edison was aware of this new technology, and he had tried to contact the inventors. Failing that, he resorted to build a similar instrument of his own instead!
Failure at Falconbridge
Around 1890 Edison had used his self-built magnetometer to locate the Ogdensburg magnetite iron ore deposit in New York, and he was now determined to use magnetic methods again to search for nickel deposits under the glacial cover near the Falconbridge Township.
Edison ended up securing options on a large package of 21 claims covering 840 acres on the far western end of Falconbridge Township. For nearly two years the elderly, but still energetic Edison, crossed the claims and conducted magnetic surveys with his brother-in-law and discovered an E-W striking magnetic anomaly which indicated the possible presence of an ore body.
In 1902 he attempted to sink a shaft on a ridge to explore the magnetic anomaly. The test shaft was sunk to a depth of 11m, but encountered fast running water and ‘quicksand’ before they could reach the bedrock.
Throughout 1902 and 1903, Edison tried numerous times to sink his mine shaft, but failed in each attempt. Unable to reach the bedrock and unwilling to sink more money into the project a discouraged Edison abandoned his options on the property that year and returned to his home in New Jersey.
The claims were abandoned and by 1911 the former Edison claims had reverted back to Crown Land.
But the story doesn’t end here….
Discovery in Falconbridge
A couple of years later the claim was re-staked and in 1915 the firm of E. J. Longyear drilled through the glacial sands just 15m to the east of Edison’s test shaft site hitting nickel ore in the bedrock at a depth of 15m, a mere 4.5m lower than the bottom of Edison’s original shaft! A diamond-drilling program confirmed the existence of a large body of ore.
However, since nickel was being utilized mostly for military armour plating, the nickel market almost disappeared with the end of WWI in 1918. Market conditions only gradually improved though in the 1920’s. The Longyear Diamond Drilling Company merged with several other mining enterprises in the area to form Falconbridge Mines Limited. However, it would be another 13 years from the initial discovery before the mining industry in Falconbridge truly emerged.
In 1928, the experienced prospector and businessman Thayer Lindsley came to Falconbridge and purchased the land surrounding the Falconbridge Mines Limited claims. Not long after, he bought out Falconbridge Mines Limited as well. With his holding company, Ventures Ltd. as the parent corporation, he established Falconbridge Nickel Mines Limited. The purchase price of $2,500,000 was the most anyone had ever paid for a mine in the Sudbury area.
With the Falconbridge company secured, Lindsley began the task of sinking the first mine shaft in the township. By October of 1929, the Number One mine shaft was sunk without incident. Strangely enough, the company did not encounter the quicksand that had plagued Edison’s earlier attempts, even though the shaft was set up only 100 meters from Edison’s location.
When the Falconbridge Company successfully sank their first shaft in 1928, Edison was one of the first to congratulate the company, as he did again in 1930 when the company produced its first nickel.
Falconbridge went from strength to strength over the next many decades, becoming one of the largest nickel companies in the world. Xstrata acquired and absorbed Falconbridge in August 2006 for an approximate total value of $22.5 billion CAD. In May 2013 Glencore completed the purchase of Xstrata.
I wonder, if Edison had had the advantage of experienced engineers and geologists for his early work, who knows what path the course of Sudbury nickel mining history might have taken?
Edison after Falconbridge
Back in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, Edison studied the failed iron ore venture to determine lessons learned. He noted that the crushing machinery was especially good at manufacturing finely-ground material that could be used in high-quality cement. Edison packed up his innovative rock-crushing equipment and the hot briquette furnaces and moved them about 45 miles southwest to New Village, and in 1903, a new business was born: the Edison Portland Cement Company. From there he would eventually revolutionize the cement and commercial-construction industry. The cement business would ultimately make enough money to repay a good portion of the nearly $3 million that the Ogdensburg iron-ore failure had cost him.
By 1911 Edison had developed a mature, very efficient and durable nickel-iron rechargeable battery with lye as the electrolyte. However, the nickel–iron battery was never very successful commercially: by the time it was ready electric cars were disappearing and lead-acid batteries had become the standard for turning over petrol powered car starter motors.
Thomas Edison died at 84 years of age on October 18, 1931, in his home in West Orange, New Jersey.
He left quite a legacy: apart from his numerous inventions, Thomas Edison also made one of the first attempts at scientific detection of ore bodies in the Sudbury area, and is today officially acknowledged for the discovery of the Falconbridge orebody.
Edison’s influence on Falconbridge is still apparent today with a street named in his honour and in the shape of the 1960s Edison Building, originally the head office for Falconbridge Ltd.’s operations in the Sudbury area, and now the city archive for the Greater City of Sudbury.
Comments
Edison was indisputably America’s greatest inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, but was he any good at minerals exploration?
I personally believe that he was, and that we could learn one or two things from him:
- He was safety conscious.
- He kept up-to-date on new technology, and he used it aggressively in his exploration efforts, ultimately bagging an iron ore discovery and a nickel sulphide discovery.
- He was able to transition from one commodity (iron) to another (nickel, and then cement) as the market conditions changed.
- He could pivot from one venture to the next.
- He carefully examined his failures and learned from them. He was resilient: where others might see disaster and failure he was always optimistically looking for opportunities and seeing the possibility of new directions for improvements.
- He was humble about his successes, and he had enough class to congratulate those who succeeded where he had failed.
Finally, he carried no regrets. When a colleague reminded Edison that he had personally lost US$2.7 million (about US$50 million in today’s money) in the failed Ogdensburg iron-ore venture, Edison replied:
“Well, it’s all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it!”
Thanks for reading, for now stay at home and stay safe!
Asbjorn Norlund Christensen is a consulting geophysicist at Nordic Geoscience, a geoscience consultancy with bespoke solutions in exploration geophysics and data science – www.nordicgeoscience.com
PS:
If you want to read more about Thomas Edison’s misadventures in the mining industry, then here is a link to an excellent account of Edison’s failed Ogdensburg iron ore mining venture:
https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/thomas-edison-failure-1?page=full