(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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George William Maynard was born on June 12, 1839 in Brooklyn, New York. While being a student of Columbia College, he was registered under the name of George William Toy. Before he reached his majority, however, his name had been changed to Maynard, and the names of his parents, as given in Who's Who in America (1910 - 1913), are George Washington and Caroline Augusta (Eaton) Maynard.
In 1855 Maynard became a student in Columbia College. He graduated from Columbia in 1859, having earned a large part of his expenses. In the following year he was employed as assistant by the professor of chemistry, and in 1860 he went abroad to study at Göttingen, where he specialized in chemistry, physics, and mineralogy, under Wohler and other distinguished teachers. Later he went to the school of mines at Clausthal to study mining and mineralogy.
Maynard's first professional engagement (1863 - 64) was to devise a suitable process for the treatment of pyritic ores at Wicklow, Ireland. This he successfully accomplished. Returning to the United States, he opened an engineering office and chemical laboratory under the firm name of Maynard & Tiemann. In 1864 he received the degree of A. M. from Columbia College. Being sent to Colorado the same year to examine a gold mine, he was so much impressed with prospects there that he established an engineering and assay office in Gilpin County which he maintained some three years. Returning to the East in 1867, he took charge of a small plant for manufacturing sulphuric acid, on Staten Island, but in 1868 accepted the professorship of metallurgy and practical mining at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y. Four years later, since the Institute was without the means to establish an adequate school of mines, he returned to New York, and on his retirement the course was discontinued. In 1873 he went to England to endeavor to negotiate the sale of an iron property in the Southern states, and, to occupy himself in the intervals of the protracted negotiations, opened an office in London, becoming consulting engineer for sundry steel works in England and Wales. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas was then developing his modification of the Bessemer steel-making process which permits steel to be made from pig iron that is too high in phosphorus to be used in the ordinary or "acid" Bessemer. Maynard directed the first test in England, on a large scale, of the Thomas process. He remained abroad for six years, part of the time in Russia, where he erected a copper smelting plant at Vosskressensk for a British company. During this time he had maintained his friendship with Thomas, and on returning to the United States in 1879 he succeeded in selling the American rights to the Thomas process, which never proved of any importance in this country, although it became the principal basis of the German iron industry, making available for use the extensive ore deposits of Alsace-Lorraine. Maynard wrote a careful historical account of the development of this process which was published in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (vol. XLI, 1911). The remainder of his life was spent in practice as consulting engineer with offices in New York, although his work took him to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, British Columbia, the Yukon, Mexico, and Cuba. Attacked during a professional journey with the disease of which he died, he was taken to the home of his daughter in Boston and died in that city in his seventy-fourth year.
Maynard was active in the development of technology, and in addition to being for two years a vice-president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, he contributed to its Transactions a half-dozen technical papers, most of them dealing with iron and steel, and was a frequent contributor to other technical journals. He was a member of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, and the American Electro-chemical Society. He was elected a member of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1874, and in that year he read a paper before the Institute, describing the iron ores of Lake Champlain, United States. In 1904, during the visit of the Institute to America, he acted as vice-chairman of the New York Reception Committee, and played a prominent part in the reception and entertainment of the visitors.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
a member of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, and the American Electro-chemical Society, a member of the Iron and Steel Institute
Maynard was interested in art and natural history and was active in organizations in those fields. The notices of his death quite generally referred to him as "the dean of American mining engineers. "
On June 12, 1865, Maynard married Fannie Atkin of New York City.
