William Feldtmann
FELDTMANN, William Robert MIMechE, MAmIME, MIMM, MCMSSA (1865-1938)
William Feldtmann was born in Milton, Glasgow, Scotland, on 30 Jan 1865. He was the third son of Rudolf Feldtmann who was born in Schleswig Holstein and owned ironworks in Glasgow and Whitehaven (Cumbria). William Feldtmann was educated at Glasgow Academy and the Freiberg School of Mines, where he studied mining and metallurgy. He returned to Glasgow and joined Cassel Gold Extracting Co. Ltd, which had been set up in 1884 to develop a gold recovery process based on the use of chlorine and electricity invented by an American H.R. Cassel. Despite Cassel terminating his connection with the company in June 1886 Cassel Co. continued to test the process.
In March 1887 the company sent Feldtmann to Brazil to set up a prototype Cassel plant at the St. John del Rey’s Company’s mine to fulfill an obligation made earlier to the del Rey Co. Meanwhile, the technical manager of the Cassel Co., John S MacArthur, continued to test the Cassel process intensively. On 20 May 1887 he reported to the Cassel board that the process was unsatisfactory so Feldtmann was recalled from Brazil after being there for more than a year.
Since 1885 John MacArthur and two medical doctors Robert and William Forrest and been experimenting in their own time into ways of recovering gold from its ores. They had agreed to offer any patents derived from their work to Cassel. In 1887 they made their first discoveries into the use of potassium cyanide for gold recovery and in 1887 and 1888 Cassel took over the patents which covered the full cyanide process. Feldtmann probably was involved in the intensive testing of the process on ores from different goldfields that the company carried out in Glasgow.
In 1888 Feldtmann moved to South Africa to work on the Johannesburg goldfield. At the end of the same year Cassel decided to send one of their leading metallurgists, Alfred James, to South Africa to investigate the potential use of the cyanide process on the Rand. It is not clear whether Feldtmann assisted James or was involved in the first demonstration of the cyanide process by Cassel at the Salisbury Company’s works near Johannesburg in June 1890. However, during the ten years that Feldtmann was in the Transvaal, he spent two years as superintendent metallurgist of the African Gold Recovery Company which was set up (in March 1891) by the Cassel Co. to promote the use of the MacArthur Forrest process. Feldtmann was vice president of the Chemical and Metallurgical (and Mining) Society of South Africa in 1895 and 1896 and was president of the Society for the subsequent two years. He wrote several papers for the Society.
Feldtmann moved to Western Australia in February 1898 where he was engaged by Bewick Moreing and Co. as a consultant metallurgist. Later in the year, Bewick Moreing appointed him superintendent of the Hannan’s Brownhill mine (ECGF Kalgoorlie). Anglo Continental Gold Syndicate’s subsidiary London and Hamburg Gold Recovery Company had just started testing its oxidised ore treatment plant at the Brownhill mine which Anglo Continental had designed to replace the original Cassell designed plant which had been a failure. The mine was then working very rich sulphide ore from the Oroya Shoot (6 oz per ton) which was sent for smelting in South Australia. After Bewick Moreing’s resident partner in Western Australia, Edward Hooper, returned to London in 1898, Feldtmann was made Western Australian manager of the company. He was appointed one of the commissioners to collect mining exhibits for the Glasgow Exhibition of 1901 and was an inaugural vice president of the Western Australian Chamber of Mines in 1901.
In 1901 Herbert Hoover was appointed Bewick Moreing partner responsible for operating the mines managed by the company. When he arrived in the state, in January 1902, Feldtmann worked with him on plans to revive the operations of the Lake View Consols mine (ECGF Boulder). Feldtmann was also involved in the management take over by Bewick Moreing of the Cosmopolitan Pty Ltd mine at Kookynie (NECGF).
In November 1902 Feldtmann resigned from Bewick Moreing and returned to the Transvaal, later moving to London where he worked as a mining consultant, establishing W.R. Feldtmann and Company in 1910. His principal clients were British companies with mines in the Gold Coast and South West Africa. He was managing engineer of Ashanti Goldfields Pty in 1909-20 which entailed annual visits to the Gold Coast. He also managed Bibiana Ltd. and Sansums Mines Ltd. in 1909. He was general manager of the South West Africa Company from 1926 to his death in 1938. The latter was founded by Edmund Davis who had also formed the Anglo Continental Gold Syndicate and the London and Hamburg Gold Recovery Company.
Feldtmann died on 6 April 1938 at Grootfontein, South West Africa.
Feldtmann's publications include:
- Notes on gold extraction, Johannesburg, c.1892;
- President’s Address, 18 July 1896 (Improvements to the cyanide process), Proc CMSSA 1894-97, pp.234-38;
- (with W. Bettel) ‘Notes on the estimation of sulphides and cyanates in commercial cyanide’, Proc CMSSA 1894 97, pp.267-71;
- 'The wholesale idea in gold mining' TIMM 18, 1908-09, pp.355-66;
- 'Precipitating action of carbon in contact with auriferous solutions' TIMM 24, 1915-16, pp.329-71.
References:
Lougheed pp.1 17;
WArg 19 Jan 1899, 8 Jan 1900;
Thiel p.200;
MM Jan 1916 p.340, Oct 1916 p.227, Dec 1916 p.347;
WAMBEJ 13 Jun 1903;
JCMWA 1902, 1920;
RH.Kalgoorlie ch 1.3;
Skinner 1905; 1909; 1915; 1920;
MCER June 1938;
TIMM 48, 1938, pp.831-32;
pers. comm. A. Fleming 2010
