Three mining legends honoured

The 23^rd anniversary of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel in mid-January, fittingly kicked off with a tribute to the spectacular rescue late last year of 33 miners trapped deep in a copper-gold mine in Chile.

“No other event in recent memory has done more for the mining industry to show the attention, care and priority we put into safety,” Pierre Lassonde, chairman of Franco-Nevada (FNV-T) and master of ceremonies told the 800-plus guests at the ceremonial dinner. “To the Chilean miners themselves we owe a big round of applause.”

It is often said that the mining industry’s best assets are its people, Lassonde continued. “Our industry has endured good times and bad, achieved international prominence, and conquered daunting challenges thanks to the collective skills, innovations and tenacity of generations of prospectors, geologists, miners, engineers, entrepreneurs and financiers. Our newest inductees into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame personify these talents and qualities – ones that will be needed if our industry is to overcome new challenges and prosper in the years to come.”

John Williamson 

The first inductee of the night was John Williamson (1907-58), a brilliant and enigmatic geologist from McGill University who spent most of his working life in East Africa and built the successful Williamson diamond mine, also known as Mwadui, in Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Williamson first travelled to Africa in the early 1930s and took a job with Anglo American (AAL-L) in the copper belt. But after visiting the Kimberley diamond mine in South Africa, he became intrigued with diamonds and joined the diamond prospecting arm of a junior company called Tanganyika Gold and Diamonds, in 1936. Three years later when that company left Africa, Williamson stayed on and continued to look for the elusive gems.

“It was a bold move as he had few resources other than fierce determination and a theory that systematic prospecting within dolerite dykes associated with kimberlite fields would lead to the discovery of diamond indicator minerals and ultimately diamonds,” Lassonde noted in his introductory remarks. “He was down to his last penny and battling bouts of malaria before he discovered a single diamond in an isolated region called Mwadui.”

Remarkably Williamson built his discovery into a mine by selling diamonds as they came out of the ground and using the proceeds to buy equipment and finance his operation. It proved a workable model. Between 1941 and 2008, the Williamson mine produced an estimated 20 million carats. Today the mine is owned by Petra Diamonds (PDL-L) (75%) and the Tanzanian government (25%), and is undergoing an expansion. At the height of his success, Williamson was known as the “Diamond King” and in 1947 made the headlines when he gave a pink, flawless, 54-carat diamond from his mine to Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip as a wedding gift. Typically, however, he shunned the limelight.

“I’d give my eye teeth right now to sit down with Jack over a scotch or two, preferably a bottle or two, to get a better sense of who he was,” Bill Barclay, a distant relative, said in an acceptance speech on Williamson’s behalf. “I never knew Jack Williamson when I was a kid. I would have been about twelve and a half years old or so when he passed away.”

Barclay confided to the audience that he also had never heard much about Williamson in the family either, “beyond a veiled reference or two,” because he was “kind of a black sheep in the family – headstrong and independent in his teens and forever thereafter.” When Barclay later chose a career in geology too, he was quietly taken aside and warned of possible consequences – “a slippery slope… at least malaria and isolation in East Africa.”

“Some slippery slope!” Barclay joked.

“He discovered the largest economic diamond-bearing kimberlite pipe in the world; gave a 54-carat flawless pink diamond to a young lady who was travelling through East Africa in 1947, who five years later became Queen Elizabeth II, and became during his short lifetime one of the wealthiest men in the world.”

Just as importantly, however, Williamson was a man ahead of his time when it came to what the industry today calls corporate social responsibility. “As Jack Williamson got the Mwadui mine up and running out of mine profits, which means out of his own pocket, 70 years ago… he provided housing on site for 4,000-plus people – workers and their families together,” Barclay explained.

Not only that, but Williamson provided ancillary employment for their families; built a hospital and staffed it with fully trained doctors and nurses, accessible to all; built a primary school accessible to all; provided medical treatment including emergency treatment offsite including, if necessary, to England.

He also provided various places of worship and set up marketplaces where produce was flown in from Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.

Corporate social responsibility is the current mantra of our industry and rightly so, Barclay concluded. “Jack Williamson got that, big time, 60 or 70 years ago.”

Bert Wasmund 

The second inductee of the evening was Bert Wasmund (b. 1939), a world-renowned and visionary leader in metallurgical plant engineering and design for more than 40 years. Wasmund “transformed our industry and helped secure its future by finding solutions to long-standing problems through knowledge, ingenuity and imagination,” Lassonde said. “His breakthrough contributions to various operations in Canada and abroad have improved their productivity, cost and energy efficiency, their capability to extract value from lower-grade ores, and their environmental performance.”

Born in Monteagle, Ont., Wasmund graduated from high school at the age of 16 and went off to work at a uranium mine in nearby Bancroft, Ont. He spent a year at the mine and was urged by his employer to study chemical engineering. Wasmund took his advice, earning degrees in chemical engineering from Queen’s University and a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1966. He then joined Hatch Ltd., where he became known for his excellent technical skills and novel approaches to metallurgical and mineral processing challenges.

The founder of the firm, Gerry Hatch “teamed me up with some very bright and multi-disciplined engineers who pushed for ingenuity on every project,” Wasmund recalled. One of Wasmund’s first success stories was assisting Falconbridge (now Xstrata [XTA-L]) in piloting and then designing a completely innovative ferro-nickel smelter in the Dominican Republic.

In 1973, Wasmund developed a novel copper cooling system for protecting the furnace brickwork that enabled operations at very high-powered production levels. “These remarkable technology achievements greatly enhanced the productivity, lifespan and energy efficiency of the smelting furnaces,” Wasmund explained, “and progressively became a cornerstone of Hatch’s thriving custom-design furnace business around the world.” Today there are more than 100 such installations around the world.

In 1989, Wasmund and his team at Hatch revolutionized the platinum smelting business with the design of a new electric smelting furnace for Impala Platinum in South Africa, tripling production and reducing energy requirements by 25%.

“This remarkable achievement led to the development of many new plants in South Africa, Canada, and other parts of the world and earned Bert two CIM awards: The Falconbridge Innovation Award and the prestigious Airey Award,” Lassonde noted, adding that the inventor also played a leading role in minimizing the acid rain problem in Ontario by helping to design and improve processes to capture sulphur dioxide from smelters in Sudbury.

Wasmund developed many innovative processing technologies over the years including ne
w smelting processes using fluid-bed roasters, as well as off-gas cleaning systems, and autoclave leaching plants, all of which propelled Hatch’s expansion into South Africa, Australia, South America, and the Far East.

Most recently, Wasmund and his team built the most productive ferro-nickel smelter using a 90-megawatt furnace in South Korea, and are planning to supply to China the world’s largest-ever furnaces at 120 megawatts each.

“The success of the many innovative projects delivered by Hatch was achieved by the highly talented teams that I was privileged to lead,” Wasmund said. “I continue to enjoy recruiting and mentoring our younger staff who continue to improve our technologies and improve our business around the world.”

Mike Muzylowski

The third inductee of the night was Mike Muzylowski (b. 1934), a talented geologist and mine finder, shrewd financier and mining executive, who throughout his 50-year-plus career, contributed to the growth and luster of the Canadian mining industry.

His determination and “forceful ‘drill here’ suggestions” led him to find and develop 16 deposits that became producing mines (13 in Manitoba, two in Nevada and one in the Northwest Territories), which rightfully “earned him the title of ‘Mr. Mine Finder,'” remarked Lassonde, adding that the combined production value of the 16 deposits has been pegged at $25 billion.

“A remarkable legacy indeed for a Manitoban first introduced to rocks at his family farm,” Lassonde joked, adding, “there, his father asked him to clear some small rocks from the vegetable garden ‘before they had a chance to grow into much bigger ones.'”

Muzylowski moved from his small-town, farming community of Oakburn, Man., to attend the University of Manitoba, where he enrolled in the faculty of science and stumbled upon geology. With only one more course needed to complete his registration and the option of choosing etymology, botany, zoology or geology, he chose the latter to figure out what it was all about.

“And was that a decision, or was that a decision,” commented Muzylowski, adding he was immediately “captivated” and “enthralled” by geology, and spent many hours in the library reading up on it.

After finishing his B.Sc. degree in geology, Muzylowski joined the Hudson Bay Exploration and Development Co. in 1955 as a field geologist. He quickly learned how to protect himself from black flies and bears among other things while working in the bush near Snow Lake, Man.

After spending five years as a field geologist, he was promoted to senior project geologist, then chief geophysicist and later, assistant superintendent of exploration and development. Two of his first drill targets that became HudBay producers were the Anderson Lake and Centennial mines in Manitoba.

After 15 years with HudBay, Muzylowski was recruited by the Swedish parent of Granges Exploration to spearhead its North American exploration efforts from Vancouver – where he accepted the challenge of finding a mine within five years on a budget of $5 million. And in January 1976, his team discovered the prolific Trout Lake copper-zinc mine. “Which wasn’t bad for a start,” said Muzylowski, following the audience’s applause. He beat his five-year deadline “by three months and $200,000 to spare,” noted Lassonde.

Along with the Trout Lake mine, Muzylowski helped advance other Manitoba deposits, including the two gold-silver deposits that later became the Puffy Lake and Tartan Lake mines.

Muzlowski’s philosophy of discovering mines is comparable to finding a needle in a haystack. “The philosophy I have is, if you find the right rocks, or the possible ore-bearing rocks, you better hang in there and find the orebody, because it’s probably there somewhere,” he said. “Mother Nature had a billion years to hide it… and us mere mortals only have one lifetime to do that. So that is an accomplishment to just beat the odds.”

Muzylowski continued to strive. In 1984, he took the reins of Granges Exploration as president and chief executive, after financier Doug McRae worked out a deal to buy the company, which had fallen on hard times, from its Swedish parent. Once acquired, Muzylowski and McRae partnered up to drive Granges into a mid-tier producer, significantly boosting its revenues from $4 million to $65 million, before the company was scooped up by Australian mining giant MIM. Muzylowski also helped Granges’ subsidiary Hycroft to become profitable by advancing the Crofoot and Lewis gold mines in Nevada.

The partners became well-known for their ability to raise capital. They secured a cumulative $400 million for Granges and Hycroft during the 1980s, which put them among the first to tap into foreign sources of capital and establish credibility of international investments in Canadian mineral exploration.

For his many contributions to the industry, Muzylowski was awarded the “Developer of the Year” in 1988 by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. Since then, he has been instrumental in developing various other mining companies, such as DRC Resources (predecessor to New Gold [NGD-T, NGD-X]). His passion for mineral exploration continues even today as Callinan Mines‘ (CAA-V) president.

Muzylowski said: “I happen to believe so strongly that there is no better profession (than mining) anywhere in the world, because there isn’t a citizen on our planet that doesn’t benefit from mining.”

After expressing his gratitude for the award, Muzylowski ended the night on high note, with a verse from the song Dark in the Dungeon: “It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as a dew. Where the dangers are double and pleasures are few,” he sang to the delight of the audience. “Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines. It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”