Juana Barraza
Mexico
Date of Birth: Dec 27, 1957
Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio is a Mexican serial killer known as "La Mataviejitas" (The Little Old Lady Killer). She was sentenced to 759 years in prison for the killing of 16 elderly women. Sentences imposed in Mexican courts are generally served concurrently, but the maximum sentence under...
Blane David Nordahl
United States
Date of Birth: 1962
Burglar to the Stars
Blane Nordahl is a unique American cat burglar - a person who is adept at entering and leaving the burglarized place without attracting notice. He became a specialized cat burglar, a Silver Cat Burglar. His burglaries focussed on items that were valuable including a stein...
Thomas Edison
United States
Date of Birth: 1847 — 1937
"I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion ." --Thomas A. Edison, 1888
Edison, an incredible creator, patented 1,093 inventions. These included the phonograph, the kinetograph...
Peter Mawdsley
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1824 — 1909
Peter Mawdsley invented the first photographic paper, the silver gelatin print, in 1873. It was the first photographic process that submerged exposed paper into chemicals, rather than using light, as the chief agent in developing an image. Due to its stability and ease of use, developing-out...
Charles Harper Bennett
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1840 — 1927
Charles Bennett was an English photographic pioneer. He improved the gelatine silver process developed by Richard Leach Maddox. In 1873 he created a method of hardening the emulsion, making it more resistant to friction, and larger. In 1878 he discovered that by prolonged heating the sensitivity...
Louis Aim Auguston Le Prince
France
Date of Birth: 1841 — 1890
Born in Metz, France, Louis Aim studied chemistry and physics at university and then worked as a photographer and painter. By the 1880s, he was one of many inventors trying to master the technology for what would become film. Le Prince's first camera had 16 lenses, which took "sequential...
Wilhelm Rontgen
Germany
Date of Birth: 1845 — 1923
Wihelm Rontgen was a German physicist who was the first person to systematically produce and detect electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays. His discovery of X-rays was a great revolution in the fields of physics and medicine and electrified the...
George Eastman
United States
Date of Birth: 1854 — 1932
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company. His invention of the Kodak camera, a name he coined, was a major reason for making photography accessible to the public.
In 1878, when he was 24, he bought a photographic outfit with all the paraphernalia of the...
Antoine Claudet
France
Date of Birth: 1797 — 1867
Antoine Claudet was a French businessman who moved to London to open a glass warehouse. The daguerreotype process quickly attracted his interest and he returned to Paris to be taught its fundamentals by the creator himself, Louis-Jacques Daguerre.
Returning to England with an operating license,...
Robert Jefferson Bingham
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1824 — 1870
Robert Bingham was an English pioneer photographer, mainly active in France, making portraits and reproductions of paintings. He had a background in chemistry and was particularly interested in photographic processes and published a treatise on this subject in 1848. He later became the first...
Richard Leach Maddox
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1816 — 1902
Richard Maddox was an English photographer and physician who invented lightweight gelatin negative plates for photography in 1871. Dry plate is a glass plate coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver bromide. It can be stored until exposure, and after exposure it can be brought back to a darkroom...
Henry Fox Talbot
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1800 — 1877
Henry Talbot was an English polymath - a person whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects. His interest in photography led him to invent the salted paper and calotype process, also called talbotye, in the 1830s. In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was...
Richard Beard
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1801 — 1885
Richard Beard was an entrepreneur who profitably established himself in the coal trade in London. With his entrepreneurial spirit, in 1841, he paid Louis Daguerre 150 pounds for a license to use his technology. He set up photography as a business speculation and opened the world's first...
Thomas Sutton
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1819 — 1875
Thomas Sutton, who was born in Kensington, London, studied architecture before earring a Bachelor of Arts degree from Caius College in Cambridge. Photography first entered his life in 1841 when he posed for a daguerreotype portrait in Antoine Claudet's studio. In 1855 he set up a photographic...
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard
France
Date of Birth: 1802 — 1872
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard was a cloth merchant from Lille, France who learned the calotype process from his druggist, a student of the inventor of the calotype, William Henry Fox Talbot. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather...
John Johnson
United States
Date of Birth: 1813 — 1871
John Johnson was born at Saco, Maine, U.S.A. in 1813. He was brought up in New Hampshire and, for a time, worked as an assistant to a jeweller and watchmaker in New York. He formed a business partnership with Alexander Simon Wolcott (1804 -1844), a New York instrument maker.
1839 was the year...
Alexander Wolcott
United States
Date of Birth: 1804 — 1844
Alexander Wolcott was an American experimental photographer, inventor, and maker of medical supplies and optical instruments. In 1839, he met John Johnson, a jeweller and watchmaker's assistant. 1939 was also the year that Louis Daguerre of France, in efforts to finance his developments, went...
Frederick Scott Archer
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1813 — 1857
Frederick Archer was an Englishman who apprenticed as a bullion dealer and silversmith. He moved on to work as a sculptor creating busts of well known people. In 1847 he began using photography as an aid for this work. He was unsatisfied with the calotype process and the paper negative. In 1849...
Edward Herbert Land
United States
Date of Birth: 1909 — 1991
November 26, 1848, marks a major day in the history of photography as American Edward Land introduced his Model 95 camera, which produced sepia-coloured prints in about one minute. It was the achievement of his efforts between 1943 and 1947 to create self-developing photography.
Land called his...
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
France
Date of Birth: 1787 — 1851
Louis Daguerre, was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. The first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce but it was of poor quality and required eight hours exposure time. Niépce...
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
France
Date of Birth: 1765 — 1833
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, is credited as the inventor of photography. He was a French inventor, who first gained fame, with his older brother Claude Niépce, for their invention of the internal combustion engine. When lithography began advancing he experimented with this new printing technique....
Thomas Wedgwood
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1771 — 1805
Thomas Wedgwood, a son of Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame, was an English inventor. He is the first person known to have created impermanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. His practical experiments yielded only shadow image photograms that...
Johann Heinrich Schulze
Germany
Date of Birth: 1687 — 1744
Johann Schulze was a German physician and anatomy professor who made a significant discovery in the development of photography when he observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to sunlight. In 1725, while attempting to create a phosphorescent material by combining a slurry of chalk with...
Johann Zahn
Germany
Date of Birth: 1641 — 1707
Johann Zahn, was inducted into the Silver Hall of Fame, not for his use of silver, but for his studies related to light and his interests in the production of the camera obscura, (latin for dark chamber.) Zahn, a German priest, was the author of Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive...
William Bell Frue
United States
Date of Birth: 1830 — 1881
William Bell Frue, emigrated, at a young age, from Ireland to the United States. His mining career began in 1853 when he worked for the Pewabic copper mine in Michigan. With the discovery of the rich silver deposit on Silver Islet in the Canadian waters of Lake Superior, he was hired by the...
Sir John Frederick William Herschel
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1792 — 1871
Sir John Herschel was a scientist and astronomer, like his father, Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus. He floundered in his early schooling before focusing on math and at the youthful age of 21 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He worked on a variety of projects...
Atsidi Sani
United States
Date of Birth: 1830 — 1918
Sani played an important role in the history of Navajo silversmithing. He is known by many to be the first Navajo silversmith, although his main focus was in blacksmithing; working with iron. Many agree that he learned silversmithing in the year 1853. According to Navajo tribal leader, Chee...
Tommy Singer
United States
Date of Birth: 1940 — 2014
Tommy Singer (born 1940; death May 31, 2014) was a Navajo silversmith who specialized in chip-inlay jewelry. He died in a motorcycle accident on May 31, 2014. His inlaid turquoise, coral, and silver pieces incorporated traditional Navajo designs. Singer gained acclaim as the originator of the chip...
Paul de Lamerie
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1688 — 1751
Paul de Lamerie (9 April 1688 – 1 August 1751) was a London-based silversmith. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes him as the "greatest silversmith working in England in the 18th century". Though his mark raises the market value of silver, his output was large and not all his pieces are...
David Austin Sayre
United States
Date of Birth: 1793 — 1870
David Austin Sayre (March 12, 1793 - September, 1870) was a prominent silversmith, banker and educator. Sayre is best remembered as founder of Sayre Female Institute.
George Guess, aka Sequoyah
United States
Date of Birth: 1767 — 1843
Sequoyah (Ssiquoya, as he signed his name, or Se-quo-ya, as is often spelled in Cherokee; named in English George Gist or George Guess) (c.1770-1843), was an American and Cherokee polymath. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in...
Mario Buccellati
Italy
Date of Birth: 1891 — 1965
Founded in 1919 when Mario Buccellati took over Milan's Beltrami & Beltrami, Buccellati is known for its richly textured pieces that are influenced by Renaissance motifs and nature. He was the first famous for the technique of texture-engraving where pieces look like silk, damask, tulle, lace,...
Jean Baptiste Claude Odiot
House of Odiot
France
Date of Birth: 1763 — 1850
The House of Odiot was founded in 1690 by Jean-Baptiste Gaspard Odiot but rose to prominence under Jean-Baptiste Claude, Gaspard's grandson. Jean-Baptiste Claude was influenced by classical Greek and Egyptian motifs as expressed in the Directoire and Empire styles.
Odiot purchased many of Henry...
Jean Puiforcat
France
Date of Birth: 1897 — 1945
Founded in Paris in 1820 by Louis-Victor and Emile Puiforcat and their cousin, Puiforcat rose to fame as one of the great French silversmiths. The Puiforcat collection features outstanding designs ranging from classical through Art Deco to modern design. Many of the works were recreated from...
Paul Storr
HUNT & ROSKELL
United Kingdom
A manufacturing firm, retail jewellers and silversmiths founded by Paul Storr in 1819 as Storr & Co. John Samuel Hunt, who had assisted Storr from the start, continued as a partner until his death in 1865 when he was succeeded by his son, John Hunt. Robert Roskell joined in 1844 and remained in...
Jonathan Mappin
Mappin & Webb
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1775
In 1775, teenager Jonathan Mappin started a small cutlery workshop in Sheffield. Within a year the first Mappin hallmark was recorded at the assay office. But it was under his four great-grandsons who incorporated the business as Mappin Brothers Ltd in the middle of the 19th century. In 1963...
Robert Hennel, & Sons
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1800
Hennell of Bond Street is one of London's oldest silversmiths and jewellers. It was founded by David Hennell and originally made fashionable silverware for the nobility and landed gentry. David's son, Robert I, is known for his fine neoclassical silver, often with bright-cut engraving. His son,...
George Wickes
Garrard & Co.
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1735
Originally founded in 1735 by royal silversmith George Wickes, the firm was eventually taken over by Robert Garrard in partnership with John Wakelin in 1792. Garrard had many aristocratic patrons and was represented at numerous international exhibitions including the Great Exhibition of 1851....
George & Henry Richards
Elkington Kingston & Co.
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1830
Brothers George Richards and Henry started G. R. Elkington & Co in the 1830s. The firm then operated independently as Elkington & Co. for over 100 years. In 1840 Elkington & Co. patented the electrolytic process for silver plating that is still in use today and they expanded at an incredible...
William Chawner
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1797 — 1834
Flatware-making is one of the sub-specialties of silversmithing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the vast majority of spoons and forks were made by specialist 'spoon makers' (knives were made by an entirely different tradesman called a cutler). The Chawner family was one of England's dominant...
Hester Bateman
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1708 — 1794
The most famous woman silversmith, Bateman was the widow of John Bateman. After his death in 1760, she took over his London-based metalwork business and transformed it into one of the most successful and prolific silversmithing workshops in London. Hester and her sons were known for their...
George Adams
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1840 — 1883
William Chawner II's son-in-law who took over Chawner & Co. with his mother-in-law Mary Chawner. He took over the firm and registered his first mark in 1840. He was an exhibitor at the 1851 Great Exhibition and the company became one of the largest producers of quality silver flatware in...
Charles Tiffany
Tiffany & Co.
United States
Date of Birth: 1837
America's most famous silversmith from the mid 19th to early 20th century. The company began in 1837 when Charles Lewis Tiffany and John Young opened Tiffany & Young. In 1851, Tiffany became the first American firm to introduce the .925 English Sterling Standard in American-made silver. The name...
Carl Poul Peterson
Canada
Date of Birth: 1895 — 1977
According to his family history, Carl Poul Petersen apprenticed at Georg Jensen in Denmark before emigrating to Canada in 1929. He worked at Henry Birks and Sons in Montreal but he also set up a studio for commission work in the late thirties. Petersen left Birks and opened his permanent studio...
Jabez Gorham
Gorham Manufacturing Company
United States
Date of Birth: 1831
Established in 1831 in Rhode Island, as a coin-silver flatware and jewelery manufacturer, Gorham eventually became one of the largest silversmiths in the world. By the late 1860s, they grossed $1 million in sales per year. Gorham was tremendously successful with flatware patterns like Chantilly,...
Henry Birk, & Sons
Canada
Date of Birth: 1879
Birks was by far the largest and most influential Canadian silversmith in the 20th century. Henry Birks & Company was established in Montreal in 1879 as a retail jeweler. It became Henry Birks & Sons in 1893 when his three sons joined the business. In 1897 Birks bought out Hendery & Leslie,...
Charles Christofle
France
Date of Birth: 1805 — 1863
Charles Christofle founded the company that bears his name in 1830. Originally a jeweler, he bought the patents silver plating and electrolytic gilding of gold in 1842. As a goldsmith, he transformed ceremonial items and everyday objects: from jewelry to cutlery, gold smithery to sculptures, and...
Jean Puiforcat
France
Date of Birth: 1897 — 1945
Jean Puiforcat served in WW1. After the war, he apprenticed as a silversmith and a designer. He lived in Paris. He designed in the art deco style. His silver work had smooth surfaces and was based on the geometric series. Ivory, onyx, lapis lazuli and rosewood were used to decorate pieces. He...
Georg Jensen
Denmark
Date of Birth: 1866 — 1935
Born in 1866, Jensen was the son of a knife grinder in the town of Raadvad just to the north of Copenhagen. Jensen began his training in goldsmithing at the age of 14 in Copenhagen. His apprenticeship with the firm Guldsmed Andersen, ended in 1884, and this freed Georg to follow his artistic...
Paul Storr
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1770 — 1844
Paul Storr was England's most celebrated silversmith during the first half of the nineteenth century. His pieces historically, and currently, adorn royal palaces and the finest stately homes throughout Europe and the world. Storr's reputation rests on his mastery of the grandiose neo-Classical...
Nathaniel Mills
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1784 — 1843
Nathaniel Mills & Sons were 19th century Birmingham silversmiths who excelled in making silver boxes, snuff boxes and visiting card cases. Nathaniel Mills, the Elder, was a partner in Mills & Langston, Northwood Jewelers when he registered his first mark in 1803. In 1825, he registered his...
Judas Iscariot
Date of Birth: - — 33
The thirty pieces of silver that Judas received for betraying Jesus have become a symbol of greed and betrayal. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Judas agreed to betray Jesus for this sum of money, which was equivalent to the price of an enslaved person at that time. Some scholars believe this...
William Morris Stewart
United States
Date of Birth: 1827 — 1909
William Morris Stewart (August 9, 1827 – April 23, 1909) was an American lawyer and politician. In 1964, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Personal
Stewart was born in Wayne County, New York, on August 9, 1825. As a child he...
Peder Olofsson
Sweden
Date of Birth: 17th C
The Nasa (Nasafjäll) silver mine (Swedish: Nasa silvergruva), located on Nasa Mountain on the border between Sweden and Norway, was used for mining silver, mainly from 1635 to 1659 and from 1770 to 1810. Smelting occurred during the first period (1635-1659) at Skellefteälven; during the second...
Hunt Brothers - Nelson, Lamar & William Hunt
United States
Date of Birth: 1926 — 2014
Silver Thursday was an event that occurred in the United States silver commodity markets on Thursday, March 27, 1980, following the attempt by brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt, William Herbert Hunt and Lamar Hunt to corner the silver market. A subsequent steep fall in silver prices led to panic on...
Henry Comstock
Canada
Date of Birth: 1820 — 1870
Henry Tompkins (or Thomas) Paige Comstock (1820–1870) was an Canadian miner after whom the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada was named. The Comstock Lode was the richest silver mine in American history.
Referred to by history books variously as a "sanctimonious gaffer", an "illiterate...
Noah A. Timmins
Canada
Date of Birth: 1867 — 1936
Noah Anthony Timmins (March 31, 1867 – January 22, 1936) was a Canadian mining financier and developer who is now counted among the founding fathers of Canada's mining industry.
Noah Timmins partnered with his older brother Henry in 1903 to buy into the La Rose silver claim in Cobalt, Ontario...
Horace Tabor
United States
Date of Birth: 1830 — 1899
Horace Tabor's life story is a testament to hard work but also a great anecdote about short-sightedness. From a simple stone-cutter, he would grow to become one of the country's wealthiest men, only to lose his riches after spending lavishly and investing poorly.
Born in Vermont in 1830, Horace...
Augusta Tabor
United States
Date of Birth: 1833 — 1895
As the first woman in the California Gulch district, Augusta Louise Tabor, fondly remembered as "The First Lady of Leadville," spent much of her life in helping make Leadville a great mining camp.
She was born in Maine and, in 1857, married the now famous mining magnate, Horace Tabor, who was...
Antonio Siraumea
Mexico
Date of Birth: 1710 — 1760
Antonio Siraumea, a Yaqui, was likely a resident of the rancheria Arizonac, a real or small mining camp at the edge of the northern frontier of the Spanish colonies of New Spain.
(Yaqui, Indian people centred in southern Sonora state, on the west coast of Mexico. They speak the...
Giovanni Battista Serpieri
Italy
Date of Birth: 1832 — 1897
Giovanni Battista Serpieri was the first foreign "mega-entrepreneur" to invest in Greece. He was demonized almost immediately after he had invested fifteen million drachmas to gain the concession to re-open the Lavrion Mines, the same mines that had made ancient Athens an economic powerhouse....
Paul Sarnoff
United States
Date of Birth: 1918 — 1999
Paul Sarnoff was, in addition to being a career commodities trader, a prolific writer. His 30-some titles include "Silver Bulls: The Great Silver Boom and Bust," covering the seven months leading up to the rise and fall of silver during 1979 and 1980. It is a constructive and contrarian...
Paul Revere
United States
Date of Birth: 1735 — 1818
Paul Revere (December 21, 1734 – May 10, 1818]) was an American silversmith, engraver, early industrialist, and Patriot in the American Revolution. He is best known for his midnight ride to alert the colonial militia in April, 1775 to the approach of British forces before the battles of...
Robert A. Quartermain
Canada
Date of Birth: 1955 — -
Inducted into the Silver Hall of Fame in 2017
Robert A. Quartermain has extensive global experience in geology, exploration and development. Over his 40-year career in the resource industry, he has established a solid track record in building shareholder value in the field of precious metals...
Dan O'Connor
Canada
Date of Birth: 1864 — 1933
Daniel O'Connor (31 January 1864 – 30 March 1933) was a Canadian politician, businessman and prospector from Pembroke, Ontario. In the late 1880s, O'Connor moved to Sudbury where he became associated with economy, life and industry, becoming the town's second mayor in 1894. Inn and Ronnoco...
Willett G. Miller
Canada
Date of Birth: 1866 — 1925
Dr. Willet G. Miller, a world-renowned geologist, had an enormous influence on the scientific advancement and mineral development of Canada, and particularly Ontario, in the early decades of the 20th century. His memory has been perpetuated by such practical tokens as a bronze plaque on a cairn...
James J. McKinley
Canada
James H. McKinley and Ernest J. Darragh were contractors providing lumber for a railway being pushed north through the thick Ontario bush. On August 7, 1903 the two partners were walking the right of way scouting for trees suitable for railway ties. As they passed through a rock cut on the banks...
Elizabeth McCourt
United States
Date of Birth: 1854 — 1935
Elizabeth 'Baby Doe' McCourt Tabor: Colorado's Silver Queen
Elizabeth McCourt Tabor (1854 March 7, 1935), better known as Baby Doe, was the second wife of pioneer Colorado businessman Horace Tabor. Her rags-to-riches and back to rags again story made her a well-known figure in her own day and...
Eduardo Luna
Mexico
Inducted into the Silver Hall of Fame in 2017
Mr. Luna is currently (2017) Director, President and CEO of Rochester Resources Ltd., a junior natural resources company. Mr. Luna recently joined the board of DynaResource, Inc., which has appointed him as special advisor to the president of its...
Jaime Lomelin
Mexico
Inducted into the Silver Hall of Fame in 2017
Mr Lomelin spent 36 years at Peñoles where he served as Group Vice President of the metals and chemicals division for four years and subsequently held the position as CEO for 21 years. He brings to the board an invaluable wealth of senior...
Alfred LaRose
Canada
Date of Birth: 1870 — 1940
Alfred LaRose, was a blacksmith working as a contractor on the railway being pushed through northern Ontario near Mile 103. About two weeks after Alfred McKinley and Ernest Darragh had made their discovery, LaRose noticed erythrite (red cobalt/cobalt bloom) along the tracks. LaRose noted "One...
Alan Kulan
Canada
Date of Birth: 1921 — 1977
Credited with the discovery of several sizeable lead-zinc-silver deposits in Yukon, most notably the renowned Faro deposit, Alan Kulan was a compassionate and pioneering prospector with an independent, entrepreneurial spirit. His successes spawned other ventures such as prospecting syndicates...
John (Jan) II Dobry, John the Good - Duke of Opole
Poland
Date of Birth: 1460 — 1532
In 1526 Tarnowskie Góry in Silesia (southern Poland) was awarded the status of a free mining town, and in 1528, John II the Good, Duke of Opole, issued an ordinance known as the Ordunek Górny, granting the town a series of mining privileges. At the same time a mining authority was also...
Kamiya Jutel
Korea
Date of Birth: 16th C
In 1526 Kamiya Jutei, a wealthy merchant from Hakata, founded the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine in Ōda. In 1533 he introduced a Korean method of silver refining to the mine, which became the Hai-Fuki-Ho method.
Historians compared the Hai-Fuki-Ho method to the Medieval European seigerprozess [de] of...
Tom Herbert
Canada
Tom Herbert was a French-Canadian working on the railroad being pushed through northern Ontario in the early 1900s. He discovered a vein in the face of a cliff and prevailed on the geologist William Miller to examine it. Miller, Ontario's first government geologist, was in the area looking into...
George Hearst
United States
Date of Birth: 1820 — 1891
George Hearst, of Scots-Irish origin, was born near present-day Sullivan, Missouri, to William G. Hearst and Elizabeth Collins. Hearst was raised in a log cabin on his family's farm in rural Franklin County. His father operated three small farms, all of which were mortgaged, with slave labor....
Alvinza Hayward
United States
Date of Birth: 1822 — 1904
Born in Vermont, Hayward moved to Canton, New York early in his life. He studied law in New York, but also pursued lumber and lead mining interests. His experience in Michigan vein mining proved invaluable after his move to California in the Gold Rush of 1850. After buying an interest in the...
Meyer Guggenheim
United States
Date of Birth: 1828 — 1905
Meyer Guggenheim was born in Lengnau, Aargau, Switzerland on February 1, 1828. He was of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and emigrated to the United States in 1847. He started out in the importing business, but made his and his family's fortune (which was one of the largest fortunes of the 19th...
Daniel Guggenheim
United States
Date of Birth: 1856 — 1930
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Daniel Guggenheim was sent to Switzerland as a young man to study the Swiss lace and embroidery business, and to serve as a buyer for his father's import firm. The discovery of high-grade silver-lead ore in the Guggenheim mines in Leadville, Colorado in 1881...
Diego Gualpa
Peru
Date of Birth: 16th C
The Spanish conquest of South America led to the discovery of Peruvian mountains rich in gold and silver. In April, 1545, high up in the Andes, an Indian named Diego Gualapa climbed a distinctively shaped conical peak in search of a rumoured Indian shrine. Such shrines frequently contained some...
Juan Godoy
Chile
Date of Birth: 1800 — 1842
Juan Godoy (1801-1842) was a Chilean prospector who made significant contributions to Chile's mining industry. He was born in the small town of Copiapó and grew up in a family of miners. Juan Godoy inherited his father's passion for mining and began working in the industry at a young...
Charles Englehard, Jr.
United States
Date of Birth: 1917 — 1971
Charles W. Engelhard Jr. (February 15, 1917 – March 2, 1971 was an American businessman who controlled an international mining and metals conglomerate, as well as a major owner in Thoroughbred horse racing.
Engelhard made his fortune in the precious metals industry, where he operated a...
Ed Schieffelin
United States
Date of Birth: 1847 — 1897
Edward Lawrence Schieffelin was an American prospector and Indian fighter best known for discovering the Tombstone silver mine in Arizona. He was born on May 7, 1847, in Aurora, Illinois, and was the son of a prominent family. However, he was interested in something other than following in his...
Charles Dow
United States
Date of Birth: 1851 — 1902
The Dow of Dow-Jones is Charles Henry Dow, born Nov. 5, 1851, in Connecticut. He went into journalism, working for New England newspapers. His work impressed Charles Danielson, editor of the Providence (R.I.) Journal, and so in 1879 he assigned Dow to join a group of bankers and reporters who...
Henry Lawrence Vincent Day
United States
Date of Birth: 1902 — 1985
Hank Day (1902-1985) was born in in Spokane, Washington, to Helen Dwyer and Harry Lawrence Day, and grew up in Burke, Idaho, site of the great Hercules mine. In 1905, the family moved to Wallace, Idaho where he remained with the exceptions of when he attended the University of California where,...
Marcus Daly
United States
Date of Birth: 1841 — 1900
Marcus Daly (December 5, 1841 – November 12, 1900) was an Irish-born American businessman known as one of the three "Copper Kings" of Butte, Montana, United States. Prior to his copper career, Daly gained experience in the silver mines of the Comstock mines under the direction of John William...
Bonanza Kings - Mackay, Fair, Flood, O'Brien
United States
John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood, William O'Brien
In 1871, Irish-Americans John William Mackay, James Graham Fair, James Clair Flood and William S. O'Brien, organized the Consolidated Virginia Silver Mine near Virginia City, Nevada, from a number of smaller claims on the Comstock Lode and...
Ross J. Beaty, C.M.
Canada
Date of Birth: 1951 — -
Throughout his 48-year career, Ross Beaty has been a leader in the international mining and renewable energy industries, making a significant and lasting impact in BC and around the world.
After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1979 in geology and law, Ross began a...
Bartolomé de Medina
Spain
Date of Birth: 1497 — 1585
Bartolome de Medina was a successful Spanish merchant who became fascinated with the problem of decreasing silver yields from ores mined in Spanish America. By the mid-sixteenth century, it was well known in Spain that American silver production was in decline due to the depletion of high-grade...