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Third, it occurs in round masses, sometimes no larger than peas, and sometimes an inch in diameter. In this form it can easily be loosened with a pickaxe, and shoveled into cars to be carried to the mill. Bauxite is a rather mischievous mineral and sometimes acts as if it delighted in playing tricks upon managers of mines.
Meanwhile a Frenchman of the same age had been working away by himself, and made the same discovery only two months later. Aluminum is now made from a mineral called "bauxite," found chiefly in Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas. Mining it is much more agreeable than coal mining, for the work is done aboveground. The bauxite is in beds or strata which often cover the hills like a blanket.
The vein had been followed completely through the ridge, and the spur track in the eastern gulch, which had originally served it, had been abandoned and a new spur built up along the western foot of the butte, with a main line connection at Little Butte. Up here, ten miles above Little Butte, was a bauxite mine, with a spur; and here....
He had a thin intellectual face, dark eyes, trap mouth, white hair, soft speech that was almost shy. "I'm Xavier Rodan," he said. "I search out my own employees. I do minerals survey for gypsum, bauxite anything. And site survey, for factories and other future developments. I also have connections with the Selenographic Institute of the University of Chicago.
The aluminum may be obtained in the form of bauxite, and is produced in large rectangular iron pots with a thick carbon lining. The pot itself is the cathode, while large graphite rods suspended in the bath serve as the anodes.
First of all, the mine is "stripped," that is, the soil which covers the ore is removed, and then the mining is done in great steps eight or ten feet high, if a hill is to be worked. There is some variety in mining bauxite, for it occurs in three forms. First, it may be a rock, which has to be blasted in order to loosen it. Second, it may be in the form of gray or red clay.
It has thus a virtual monopoly of the available water-power of Niagara, and the promoters have not the least doubt that the enterprise will be a great financial success. Already the Pittsburg Reduction Company have begun to use the electricity in reducing aluminum from the mineral known as bauxite, an oxide of the metal, by means of the electric furnace.
The ore may not change in the least in its appearance, and yet it may suddenly have become much richer or much poorer. Therefore the superintendent has to give his ore a chemical test every little while to make sure that all things are going on well. This bauxite is purified, and the result is a fine white powder, which is pure alumina, and consists of the metal aluminum and the gas oxygen.
Aluminium, the now well-known valuable metal, present in clay, bauxite, and a variety of other mineral substances, is electrolytically deposited from a bath of alumina obtained by dissolving bauxite either in potassium fluoride or in cryolite. Aluminium is now coming into extended use in the construction of long-distance electric power transmission lines.
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