ATDDTA(10) Little Drummer Boy [291]

Wed Jun 6 23:50:01 CDT 2007

Frank and Bob relax over Cosmopolitans at the Cosmopolitan with  
Meldrum (the reredrum) emphasizing his role as guardian of the Cap'n,  
refusing to disclose his location to Kid Traverse, rather introducing  
him to a local amalgamator, Merle Rideout. Frank seizes this  
opportunity to go into his pitch regarding his technique of magnetic  
ore separation (which is actually a decoy for wanting to discover the  
whereabouts of Kindred Demon-Spirit and The Frez), evoking a  
skeptical invitation to rideout to Hellkite for further conversation.

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[291:3] "seguro" = Sure! as in "O.K."

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[291:7-8] "double array of gold dental crowns"

This doubles the references to gold teeth a la Ellmore's canines and  
uses the term 'double' to do so. (Everything is doubled in this book.  
I neglected to note the doubling of pies, peach [287.10] and cherry  
[290.37], earlier in this section.)

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[291:11-12] "Cosmopolitan Saloon and Gambling Club"

Once a grand saloon in the thriving mining camp of Telluride, The  
Cosmopolitan is now home to the fresh, innovative creations of Chef  
Chad Scothorn, who was recently honored by an invitation to the James  
Beard House in New York City. Serving dinner nightly, this elegantly  
simple 70-seat restaurant is located in the luxurious Hotel Columbia  
at the base of the Gondola and the Oak Street Lift. Known locally as  
"The Cosmo," our custom cherry wood bar is the perfect place to  
unwind. Chef de Cuisine, Aaron Woo. 300 West San Juan Ave, Telluride.
   http://www.cosmotelluride.com/

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[291:23] "Little Hellkite" = A kite of infernal breed. Shak.  
[Webster's 1913]

Macbeth (4, iii)

ROSS
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter'd: to relate the manner,
Were, on the quarry of these murder'd deer,
To add the death of you.

MALCOLM
Merciful heaven!
What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows;
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.

MACDUFF
My children too?

ROSS
Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.

MACDUFF
And I must be from thence!
My wife kill'd too?

ROSS
I have said.

MALCOLM
Be comforted:
Let's make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.

MACDUFF
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O *HELL-KITE*! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

MALCOLM
Dispute it like a man.

MACDUFF
I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!

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[291:25] "listen to some junior drummer"

traveling salesman:

a traveling representative of a business concern who solicits orders  
usually in an assigned territory by showing samples or catalogs or by  
demonstration of his company's products or services
-- called also commercial traveler, *drummer*
        --Webster's Unabridged

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[291:29-30] "Mr. Edison's scheme down in Dolores using static  
electricity, though sad to say none too successfully"

In 1900 Thomas A. Edison, the inventor, came west to Cerrillos and  
erected a large plant in Dolores to again extract gold from the Ortiz  
area by a "secret" process based upon static electricity. It has been  
told that this operation closed after a few unsuccessful attempts.  
Edison then decided to invent other things with "some" success.
   http://www.agmc.info/ortiz_mine.htm

In 1879 two miners from Leadville, Colorado, found deposits of gold  
in the area. Short afterwards, the Santa Fe Railroad came through,  
and a postoffice opened in 1880. Soon, silver, copper, zinc and lead  
and turquoise worth about a million dollars were discovered as well.  
Thomas Alva Edison is said to have spent over two million dollars at  
his laboratory in the Ortiz Mountains trying to discover how to  
separate gold from its imprisoning rock through an electrostatic  
process because of the scarcity of water in that region.
   http://www.ghosttowngallery.com/htme/cerrillos.htm

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[291:31-32] "they've been pulling pyrites out of zinc blende with a  
Wetherill's magnet"

Wetherill's magnetic separator

An apparatus for separating magnetic minerals from nonmagnetic  
minerals. It consists of two flat belts, the upper of which is the  
wider, run
parallel to each other and over long magnets set obliquely to the  
belts. Consequently, magnetic particles are drawn up against the  
upper belt, and as they pass beyond the influence of the magnets,  
fall from the edge past the other belt into a bin. Another form  
operates by belts moving across the line of travel of the main belt.  
Liddell
   http://www.maden.hacettepe.edu.tr/dmmrt/dmmrt1336.html#d28050

The brown ores of iron from surface deposits are contaminated with a  
considerable amount of clay and some quartz. The crude ore from  
surface pits or shallow underground workings is treated in a log- 
washer and yields the fine clay, which runs to waste, and the coarse  
material which is caught upon a screen and hand-picked, to free it  
from the little quartz, or jigged if it contains too much quartz. The  
magnetic oxide of iron occurs associated with felspar and quartz, and  
can often be separated from them by the magnet. The ore, after being  
broken by breaker and rolls to a size varying from to - 1 3 - 6 of an  
inch in diameter, goes to a magnetic machine which yields (I) the  
strongly magnetic, (2) the weakly magnetic, and (3) the non-magnetic  
portions. The second or middlings product contains grains of  
magnetite attached to quartz, and is therefore re-crushed and sent  
back to the magnets; the strongly magnetic portion is shipped to the  
furnace; and the waste to the dump heap. In concentrating by water  
certain zinc sulphides, siderite (carbonate of iron) follows the  
zinc, and would seriously injure the furnace work. By a carefully  
adjusted roasting of the product in a furnace the siderite is  
converted into magnetic oxide of iron, and can then be separated by  
magnet from the zinc ore. A special magnet of very high power, known  
from its inventor as the Wetherill magnet, has been designed for  
treating the franklinite of New Jersey, a mineral which is non- 
magnetic in the usual machines. The ore, crushed by breaker and rolls  
and hand-picked to remove garnet, is treated upon a belt with a  
roughing magnet to take out the most magnetic portion, and then very  
closely sized by screens with 16, 24, 30 and 50 meshes per linear  
inch. The several products are treated each on its own magnetic  
machine, yielding the franklinite for the zinc oxide grates, and  
followed by spiegel furnace; the residue, which is jigged, yields the  
zinc silicate and oxide for the spelter furnaces, and waste carrying  
the calcite, quartz and mica.
   http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Ore-Dressing

 From _The Mineral Industry_ By Richard Pennefather Rothwell
   http://tinyurl.com/3288k9

During the 1890s, Edison tried to develop a method for concentrating  
low-grade iron ore into high-grade briquettes suitable for use in  
Eastern steel mills. Edison had developed an electromagnetic ore  
separator in 1880 while working on electric light and power. In this  
device, sand from tailings or crushed rock was poured through a  
hopper so that it fell in a thin, broad stream in front of an  
electromagnet that attracted magnetic particles, such as iron, into  
one receptacle while non-magnetic particles fell straight through  
into another bin. His first ore venture involved the concentration of  
iron found in black sand during the early 1880s, but his more  
important effort took place between 1887 and 1898 when he designed a  
whole system of mining, crushing, separating, and concentrating the  
ore into briquettes at a mine in northern New Jersey. After pouring  
over $2 million of his own money into this venture, Edison was forced  
to abandon it when the discovery of large iron ore deposits in the  
Great Lake region made Edison's concentrated low-grade ore too  
expensive for steel mills. Edison was able to recoup part of his  
investment by transferring his rock crushing technology to the  
production of Portland cement.
   http://edison.rutgers.edu/ore.htm

And to the next level and beyond:

Mention high-temperature superconductivity and it brings to mind a  
passel of developing applications, predominantly in power generation,  
transmission, and distribution. While these highly visible  
developments are spearheading great strides in superconductivity, it  
is a lesser known mining application that is bent on leapfrogging  
existing limits on the size of superconductive magnets.
   http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/membersonly/august99/features/ 
pushing/pushing.html

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