Arthur Smith Dwight was an American mining metallurgical engineer. He became a President of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers.
Background
Arthur Smith Dwight was born on March 18, 1864, in Taunton, Massachussets. He was the younger of two sons of Benjamin Pierce Smith, a jewelry manufacturer, and Elizabeth Fiske (Dwight) Smith. His mother, whose father had been a deacon in Brooklyn, New York, was related to Timothy Dwight, clergyman and president of Yale. She died a year after Arthur's birth. He was christened Arthur Edwards Smith, but he and his older brother assumed their maternal surname by court authority when they came of age.
There is very little information available about Dwight's childhood.
Education
After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1882, Dwight entered the School of Mines at Columbia University and received the Master of Engineering degree in 1885.
Career
In his choice of career, Dwight was influenced by his uncle Rossiter W. Raymond, who lived in Brooklyn and who was one of the founders and for over twenty years the secretary of the American Institute of Mining Engineers.
Through Raymond's connections, he went to work as assayer and chemist for the Colorado Smelting Company at Pueblo, where he advanced rapidly, becoming generalsuperintendent in charge of the concern's Colorado mining and smelting operations. After becoming manager, he left in 1896 to reorganize and superintend plants of the Consolidated Kansas City Smelting and Refining Company in Kansas, Colorado, and Texas. When properties of this firm were merged to form the American Smelting and Refining Company in 1899, Dwight was a member of the operating committee that had charge of technical direction of the twenty smelting plants included in the consolidation.
In 1900 he went to Mexico as assistant to the president of the Compa a Metal Rica Mexicana at San Luis Potosi. Three years later he moved to Cananea, Sonora, as consulting engineer and then general manager of the Greene Consolidated Copper Company plant. During his last year there, when revolutionary insurgents threatened to seize the mines, Dwight turned his organization into a military unit to protect American employees and the citizens of Cananea. It was also at Cananea that Dwight and Richard Lewis Lloyd invented the Dwight-Lloyd sintering process, by which fine ore or flue dust was ignited on moving grates that passed over a down-draft, thus converting the ore or dust to a sinter or agglomerate which could be treated in a blast furnace. The process had two clear benefits: it salvaged ore that had previously been lost as waste, and, when applied to the lead industry, it reduced the hazard to workers of free-floating lead dust.
Dwight returned to the United States in 1906 and set up a consulting practice in New York, meanwhile patenting and perfecting the sintering process. With his co-inventor, he formed the Dwight and Lloyd Metallurgical Company in 1909 and the Dwight and Lloyd Sintering Company in 1912 to improve the method and equipment and to grant licenses for use of the basic patents. Dwight was president of both companies until his death. The down-draft grates, originally designed for copper flue dust, proved useful for lead concentrate and for iron ores, and ultimately in 1923 were applied with greatest importance to zinc.
With the outbreak of World War I, Dwight became an ardent advocate of preparedness. With a fellow engineer, William Barclay Parsons, he helped organize an engineer officers' reserve corps, and was one of the first civilians commissioned into the reserve ten weeks before the United States entered the war. In July 1917, the 11th Engineers (Railway), in which he was a major, sailed for France. The first American Expeditionary Forces unit to see action, it fought at Cambrai, in the Arras sector, in the Lys defensive, and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Later Dwight served as special metallurgical advisor to the French and as engineering salvage officer for the American Expeditionary Forces; he was promoted to the rank of colonel.
After twenty-two months in France, he was appointed chairman of the minerals advisory committee in the secretary of war's officein Washington. Upon his return to civilian life in 1919, he again established an office in New York City. He now turned his attention to the study of special metallurgical processes, the Dwight-Lloyd companies, and others with which he was involved: the American Ore Reclamation Company, the Thornewood Construction and Securities Corporation, and the Tirrill Gas Machine Corporation. He was president of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers in 1922.
Dwight died at his winter home, "Beau Rivage, " at Hobe Sound, Florida, of coronary thrombosis. He was buried in Great Neck, Long Island.
Achievements
Arthur Smith Dwight received James Douglas Medal for his work on the sintering process. In addition to the many patents he obtained, he wrote many technical articles, including the chapter on roasting and sintering in Donald M. Liddell's Handbook of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy (1926).
Religion
In religion he was an Episcopalian.
Personality
He was a genial, cultured, and generous man.
Connections
On June 4, 1895, Dwight married Jane Earl Reed, daughter of Samuel B. Reed, chief engineer in the construction of the Union Pacific railroad; after her death in 1929, he married Anne (Howard) Chapin, a widow, on March 15, 1930. He had no children.
