engineer inventor philanthropist
Erskine Ramsay was born on September 24, 1864 at Six Mile Ferry, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Robert Ramsay, a mining engineer and inventor, and Janet Erskine Ramsay, who had emigrated from Dumfermline, Scotland, in 1863. Shortly after Ramsay's birth, the family moved to Shafton, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Connellsville coal region.
Under his father's tutelage, he received a practical education in addition to irregular public school instruction. By the time he was eighteen he had been a storekeeper, mineworker, machinist, assistant payroll clerk, general office man, and master mechanic. Ramsay attended the Benedictine-run St. Vincent's College in Westmoreland County in 1882-1883 and, in the same year, graduated first in his class from the commercial technical course.
He became the youngest mine superintendent in the history of the Connellsville region and, by the time he was twenty, was superintendent of a group of mines that yielded enough coal to rank third in Pennsylvania coke production.
In 1886 he became assistant engineer for the H. C. Frick Coke Company.
Ramsay left Pennsylvania in 1887 to become superintendent and engineer of the Pratt Mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company at Birmingham, Alabama.
In 1894 he was made chief engineer of the mines and the next year was named assistant general manager as well. Ramsay was also, like his father, a prolific inventor. To his father's nine inventions he added more than forty patented improvements. The two Ramsays were responsible for nearly every breakthrough in coal mining technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing efficiency and safety with a self-oiling car wheel, a safety cage, an automatic car stop, a coal sampler, a continuous rotary dump, and an improved mine car. Through his organizational ability, engineering experience, and inventive genius, Ramsay increased the annual output of the Pratt Mines from 600, 000 tons in 1882 to 2. 3 million tons in 1897.
Ramsay had left the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company in 1901 to form the Pratt Coal Company of Delaware (although the mines were actually located in Alabama) in partnership with G. B. McCormack; the firm became Pratt Consolidated Coal Company in 1904. During these years Ramsay had begun to realize that the future of bituminous coal lay in its potential by-products rather than in its use for fuel. He therefore engineered a merger with the Alabama By-Products Corporation that was completed in 1924. Over a period of thirty years Ramsay not only made improvements in coal mining that established the steel industry in Alabama, but also insured the future of the bituminous coal industry by recognizing the trends it would follow in later years.
In 1937 he received the highest award given to mining engineers, the William Lawrence Saunders Gold Medal. Ramsay generously donated the funds for the establishment of several vocational schools in both Birmingham and his native Westmoreland County. In 1922 he became president of the Board of Education of Birmingham, a post he held until his retirement in 1941. During that period he devoted much time and large sums of money to the education and welfare of the children of Birmingham. It is said that even when faced with threats from the Ku Klux Klan he worked to upgrade the education of the blacks in that city. Ramsay was somewhat eccentric.
He died in Birmingham.
A wealthy bachelor who wore kilts and patent leather high-buckle shoes, and who gave large birthday parties to which he invited at least half the population of Birmingham, he was also a brilliant engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur.
