I just noticed the name of the company owning the Cerro Muriano mine --
the Cordoba Copper Company -- then I remembered that it was the
Cordoba Copper Company which, shortly after 1924, purchased mining
rights for an area of 50km2 around the Mosaboni area in the Singhbhum
area of southern Bihar, India, opening the Mosaboni mine there which
came into production in 1928.
I worked at the Mosaboni mine from 1958-1960 and visited the smelter, 8
miles away at Moubhandar. It too had a reverberatory furnace for smelting
copper, which is why the bottom photo from Cerro Muriano looks so familiar!
Small world!
When I was with Mining Magazine I revisited Mosaboni in 1983, my write-up
on the then Hindustan Copper Limited's "Indian Copper Complex" appearing in the
November 1983 issue of MM, pages 343 to 353. By then Moubhandar was
using an Outokumpu flash smelter, and the reverberatory with its "poling"
refining (in which the molten copper is stirred with wooden logs) had long gone.
In my travels with Mining Mag I saw several other reverberatory furnaces (at
Ilo in Peru in 1981 they stirred the copper with eucalyptus trees, which was
quite spectacular), so I feel sure that's what it was at Muriano.
Tony Brewis
|