Background
August Wilhelm Raht was born on Feburary 25, 1843 at Dillenburg, Nassau, Germany. His father, Adolf Raht, was a prominent jurist; his mother was Wilhelmine Marie von Goedecke.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
August Wilhelm Raht
Edit ProfileEducation
Raht was educated at the Polytechnic Institute, Hesse-Cassel, and the Royal School of Mines, Freiberg, Saxony.
Career
In 1867 he came to the United States, where most of his professional life was spent. His first engagement was at a copper-smelting plant at Ducktown, Tennessee. The Mingo and the Horn Silver plants, as well as the plant of the Helena & Livingston Reduction Company, afterwards combined with the Great Falls plant built by Anton Eilers under the ownership of the United Smelting and Refining Company, were among his earlier Western operations.
His reputation was such that in 1891, when the "Philadelphia" smelter at Pueblo, Colorado, was experiencing disastrous metallurgical results, he was engaged at a startling salary by Meyer Guggenheim to remedy the situation. He thus became the metallurgical authority of the Guggenheims. With the extension of their interests his sphere of operation was extended from Colorado into Mexico, and after the combination with the American Smelting & Refining Company, into a wider field. He remained with the last-named company, except for some two years of professional work in Australia, until his retirement in 1910.
Raht died at San Francisco in his seventy-fourth year.
Achievements
-
In Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana, he became a prominent figure among the pioneer metallurgists who established American lead-silver smelting practice. Raht was one of the first to recognize the benefit of a reduced fuel in the lead blast-furnace and was insistent upon this reduction at the plants under his management. He was always willing to discuss metallurgical problems, but was not noted as a contributor to technical literature. It is therefore difficult to point to the improvements for which he was responsible. For example, he was an early investigator of the bessemerizing of copper matte, but the patent for the process is in his brother's name. This work and his later work at the "Philadelphia" smelter upon the bessemerization of leady mattes is of permanent value. Of more temporary value, yet important in its day, was his share in developing the "gum-drop" method of sampling silver-lead bullion. Raht's modesty was such that only upon intimate acquaintance did one become aware of his great fund of knowledge of all the branches of natural history, upon which he could discourse most interestingly, his facts gained from his own observations.
Interests
Connections
Raht's first wife, Marie Katherine Schulz, whom he married at Cassel, Germany, on July 15, 1869, died December 24, 1874, at Ducktown, Tennessee, leaving two daughters. He was married a second time, in September 1886, to Julia F. Brown of New York City, who died in 1915. There were no children by this marriage.
