Chester F. Millar launched an illustrious career in the mining industry in the mid-1960s by discovering a copper-gold deposit that became the highly successful Afton mine near Kamloops, British Columbia.
Ernest Craig was the first General Manager of Falconbridge Nickel Mines, building a mine and a townsite in the late 1920s that became the foundation for the international powerhouse that now operates under the Xstrata banner.
Johannes J. (“Joe”) Brummer was one of Canada’s most accomplished exploration geologists. During a multi-faceted career that began with great promise in Africa’s Copper Belt and spanned five eventful decades in Canada, he continually pioneered the development of innovative exploration techniques in the fields of geochemistry, Pleistocene geology and geophysics.
Geological acumen, entrepreneurial instincts, and an engaging personality are some of the qualities that contributed to the extraordinary success achieved by Mackenzie Watson during his 50-year career in the Canadian mining industry.
Major advances in metallurgical engineering and metals processing can be traced to the intellectual prowess of a few giants, and Keith Brimacombe is unquestionably one of them. As a researcher, he pioneered the application of computerized mathematical modeling to analyze and design processes to extract metals from their ores and convert them into useful products.
Robert C. Stanley was the driving force that built Inco into the largest nickel company in the world and one of the world’s most successful mining and metallurgical enterprises. Sudbury, Ontario, with a complex developed around eight mines, and Thompson, Manitoba, with it's large mining and processing complex, are two of a number of communities whose fortunes have gone hand in hand with those of Inco.
Mining on Canada’s northern frontier poses a particular set of challenges and few mining men had more successful experience with them than Eldon Leslie Brown. The operations he managed during his career - Sherritt, God’s Lake, Sachigo River, Lynn Lake - all had their Beginnings in remote, northern areas supplied and developed by tractor trains on winter roads and the bush pilots who appeared after World War I.
Selwyn G. Blaylock devoted a working lifetime to mines and minerals and left a number of monuments to his effectiveness including: A successful Canadian mining and metallurgical enterprise, Consolidated Mining & Smelting Co. of Canada, moving upward in this organization from assayer in 1899 to president and managing director in 1939.
It is largely due to the direction of John Simpson that Placer Development, a predecessor company of Placer Dome Inc., developed a global perspective that characterizes a growing number of Canadian mining companies. Under Simpson’s direction and foresight, Placer became pre-eminent in high-tonnage, open pit mining operations in British Columbia and overseas and in the production of a variety of minerals.
