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An Outline of the Metallurgy of Iron and Steel: Prepared for the Use of Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Mass
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Robert Hallowell Richards was an American mining engineer, metallurgist, and educator.
Background
Robert Hallowell Richards was born on August 26, 1844 in Gardiner, Maine, the fifth son and sixth of seven children of Francis and Anne Hallowell (Gardiner) Richards. His birthplace was named after his mother's great-grandfather, Dr. Silvester Gardiner; her father, Robert Hallowell Gardiner, founded the Gardiner Lyceum in 1821, a pioneering venture in American technical education. Francis Richards, a businessman, took his family to England in 1857 for the sake of his sons' education and soon thereafter drowned.
Education
Tutors and a private school in Gardiner had not inoculated Robert with a fever for learning. Neither did the ensuing five years of English private schooling. A private school and tutoring in Boston, after his widowed mother brought her children there in 1862, did not get him into Harvard in 1863, nor did Phillips Exeter Academy, which he attended for the two following years, reconcile him to "learning dead languages by heart. " "Up to twenty-one years of age, " he later wrote, "I was the dunce of every school I attended, but my mind was active in observing and studying nature. " In February 1865 his perceptive mother suggested that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just about to open, might suit him better than Harvard. Richards quit Exeter at once and became the seventh student to register. One of the new school's two temporary rooms was a laboratory in which Richards "learned from experiment and experience what might be expected to happen if a given collection of material were put together, or if a given set of forces started to act. The interest which began in those days captured me, body and soul. " Some credit was also due Tech's extraordinary faculty. A summer job with the United States Coast Survey in 1867 gave him new assurance and purpose, and another in 1868 with the Calumet & Hecla copper mine in Michigan initiated his lifelong interest in ore dressing. When he graduated, B. S. , in 1868, the elements of his career had been determined.
Career
Appointed a chemistry instructor at M. I. T. , he soon found his greatest strength to be in laboratory instruction, in the visual and tangible rather than the abstract and verbal. Lack of laboratory equipment brought out his talent for improvising.
In 1871 his enthusiasm and energy led president John D. Runkle to put him in charge of organizing the mining and metallurgical laboratories at the Institute. Without much consciousness of historic innovation, simply doing his youthful best in the pioneering spirit which pervaded the new school, Richards worked out a laboratory program and equipment which for the first time anywhere made possible ore dressing and smelting on a scale large enough to illustrate and test actual mill operations, yet not too large for the finances of the school or the strength of the boys.
Richards emphasized ore dressing or concentrating - the elimination of unwanted materials by mechanical processes - more than he did the chemical processes of smelting. As professor of mining engineering and head of the department from 1873 to 1914, Richards at one time or another taught mineralogy, metallurgy, and mining engineering as well as ore dressing, and directed the mining and metallurgical laboratories.
His lectures were painstakingly prepared; his explanations were simple, clear, and patient; his goal was to instill good habits of thought and work and to teach those underlying principles which would be most useful in practice.
In 1886 he was elected president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. The needs of his laboratory and the problems of consulting work led Richards to invent or improve a number of machines for ore dressing: separators, pulsators, jigs, and classifiers, the most significant being his "hindered-settling" classifier, devised for the lab in 1874 and adapted to industry in 1894.
Although he did occasional consulting work for mining companies during more than half a century, especially for Calumet & Hecla, 1878-88, his suggestions for mechanical improvement were often developed commercially by others without royalties to him; he found that only close, prolonged, and sympathetic supervision in the mill ensured the proper introduction of a new device, and teaching kept him from that.
Richards retired, with some reluctance, in 1914, at the age of seventy. Thereafter he busied himself with consulting work, traveling often and keeping up a Boston office; with the affairs of the Protestant Episcopal congregation in which he had always been active; with tolerantly received advice to successive M. I. T. presidents; and with keeping fit by regular exercise, sensible diet, and abstinence from smoking.
At eighty-five he toured Japan, where one of his former students, Baron Takuma Dan, was a leading industrialist. In 1936, now M. I. T. 's oldest living graduate, he published his memoirs, Robert Hallowell Richards: His Mark, pleasantly and interestingly discursive, full of simplehearted good nature.
At ninety-six he had to give up archery, but on the eve of his hundredth birthday he was quoted as saying, "I've had a wonderful time" (Boston Herald, July 9, 1944). He died of hypostatic pneumonia at a nursing home in Natick, Massachussets, in his 1016t year and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston.
Achievements
His published papers numbered more than a hundred, mostly brief and technical. Beginning in 1893, he collected, collated, and analyzed data on the techniques and machinery of nearly a hundred American mills for a four-volume work of more than 2, 000 pages, Ore Dressing (1903 - 09), the only such study in English.
Though it made him a recognized authority in the industry, the first two volumes were soon outmoded in part by the appearance of the Wilfley table, and the second two by the equally prompt introduction of ore flotation. He did not recover the $20, 000 of his own money he had spent on the research.
His one-volume A Textbook of Ore Dressing (1909) was much used, however, and revised as late as 1940. In the end, his most significant contributions to technology were probably in helping to strengthen M. I. T. , setting a pattern for the education of mining engineers, and training some 700 of them, many of whom won high distinction in later life.
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Personality
Tall, erect, naturally strong, with an aristocratic face and a full moustache, he lost no dignity in the long spinning out of his years.
Connections
On June 4, 1875, Richards had married one of his students, Ellen Henrietta Swallow, the first woman admitted to M. I. T. Mrs. Richards shared her husband's interests fully (their honeymoon consisted of a field trip with his entire mechanical engineering class) and taught chemistry at M. I. T. until her death in 1911.
On June 8, 1912, he married Lillian Jameson, who died in 1924. Both marriages were childless, but Richards's Jamaica Plain home during seventy years usually included one or more boarding students.
