Copperopolis: how copper wired the world

Copper ore is heavy and mostly waste. Smelting it takes a great deal of fuel. In the early 19th century it made more sense to bring the ore to the coal than the coal to the ore. Copper smelting in Cornwall ended after 1819. From then on, all Cornish copper was smelted in south Wales.^2,3

Cornish ports shipped the ore across the Bristol Channel. At first it went as cobbed raw ore, broken by hand. Later some went as partly smelted regulus. The port of Hayle had vital links with the Swansea smelters. Our map shows the Hayle to Swansea run.^2,3

Swansea became known as Copperopolis. Its smelters often made 40 percent of world copper output between 1830 and 1870, and over half at times in the 19th century. The city depended on the sea for ore coming in and for copper ingots going out.^1,4

The ore came from further and further away. Raw copper shipments from Chile to Swansea began in 1825. British imports of Chilean ore grew from 1,670 t in 1834 to 19,829 t in 1843, and totalled 92,941 t from 1836 to 1843. In 1844, 99.6 percent of Chile's copper ore went to Britain. After that, Chile began to smelt more of its own.^5,6

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Swansea also trained a famous geologist. William Logan made geological maps of the South Wales coalfield while living in the town. He went on to found the Geological Survey of Canada and became its first director.⁷

Australia's first mining boom was copper, not gold. Copper was found at Burra in South Australia in June 1845. The workings became known as the Monster Mine. More than 1,000 workers, most of them Cornish, shipped about 80,000 t of ore in the first six years.⁸

By 1860 Burra was the second largest copper producer in the world. Underground mining ended in 1867, and an open cut ran from 1870 to 1877. Over its life, from 1845 to 1877, Burra produced about 50,000 t of copper metal, worth about 5,000,000 pounds sterling.⁸

Copper was found at Moonta on the Yorke Peninsula in 1861, and the Moonta Mining Company formed in 1862. Mining closed in 1923, though leaching of the waste went on until 1943. Cornish miners came there too.⁹

Both towns kept their Cornish cottages and engine houses. You can follow Australia's copper mines today on our guide to mining in Australia and our copper page.^8,9

In the United States, the first great copper district was the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. Its copper was native: pure metal in the rock. In 1858 Edwin Hulbert found an ancient copper cache there, a sign that people had worked the copper long before.¹¹

The man who made it pay was Alexander Agassiz, born in Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He saw that the Calumet conglomerate, which carried the copper, dipped at 35 degrees. He became superintendent in March 1867 and president of Calumet and Hecla from 1871 until his death.¹⁰

Calumet and Hecla merged in 1871 and made 16.2 million lb of copper in its first year. In 1883 Agassiz installed an engine able to lift 24 tons of rock from 1,200 m down. He gave about 500,000 dollars of his copper fortune to Harvard.^10,11

Michigan did not stay on top. By 1887 Montana had overtaken it.¹¹

The hill was at Butte. From 1881 Marcus Daly developed the Anaconda copper mine there, with backing from George Hearst, Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis. He managed the Anaconda Copper Mining Company until the late 1890s and built a whole town to feed his smelters.¹²

The Butte district had more than 100 vertical shafts, and many went deeper than 1 km. Underground mining ended in 1975, after more than 150 years of hard-rock mining, milling and smelting.¹⁶

Butte's money turned into political power, and scandal. The copper magnate William A. Clark was elected to the US Senate from Montana in 1899. A petition alleging bribery was filed the day he took his seat. A committee heard testimony of bribes from 240 to 100,000 dollars, and he resigned on 15 May 1900. Montana elected him again in January 1901.¹³

The third copper king was F. Augustus Heinze. He came to Butte in 1889 as a mining engineer. In 1893 he set up the Montana Ore Purchasing Company and in 1894 opened a smelter that competed head on with Anaconda. After about a decade of fighting Anaconda in the courts and underground, he was forced to sell most of his Montana properties in 1906.^14,15

Then came the crash. In October 1907 a plan by Heinze, his brothers and Charles Morse to corner the stock of United Copper failed. Depositors ran on banks linked to the group, including the Knickerbocker Trust. The failed corner helped set off the Panic of 1907. A copper fight in Montana had shaken Wall Street.^14,15

Butte was dangerous. On 8 June 1917 a fire in the Granite Mountain shaft killed 163 miners. It is the deadliest metal mine disaster on the US Mine Safety and Health Administration's list.¹⁸

The open pit left its own legacy. The Berkeley Pit mined copper from 1955 to 1982. Its pumps were switched off on 22 April 1982, and the pit began to fill with acid water in November 1983. In November 2016 more than 3,000 snow geese died on the lake. In 2002 the US and Montana reached an 87 million dollar settlement with ARCO and five other companies to control the acid drainage.^16,19

Butte also trained some of the first women mining engineers in the United States. Clara Clark was the first student to enrol at the Montana School of Mines. She graduated in 1904 as one of its first two women mining engineers, alongside Isabel Little.¹⁷

In Arizona, the city of Bisbee dates its first copper claim to 1877. DeWitt Bisbee and investors bought the Queen mine in 1880. By 1910 Bisbee was the largest city in the territory, with more than 25,000 people. The city puts its mines' total output at 8 billion lb of copper. Phelps Dodge ended underground work there in 1975.^20,22

The smelters made a family rich. Meyer Guggenheim made his first fortune importing Swiss embroidery. Then he moved into silver smelting, buying a plant in Denver and building a smelter at Pueblo, Colorado, in 1888. In 1900 his firm joined the American Smelting and Refining Company, keeping a controlling interest.^23,24

His son Daniel Guggenheim led the family into copper in Alaska and Chile, and tin in Bolivia. In Alaska, rich copper ore was found at Kennecott in 1900. The first trainload left in April 1911, and by 1938, when the camp closed, it had produced 591,535 short tons of copper.²⁵

In Chile, Chuquicamata began in 1915 under the Guggenheims' Chile Exploration Company. Its engineers used open pit methods that were new at the time. Codelco's 2018 report calls the open pit the largest in the world. In the Andes south of Santiago, the American-owned Braden Copper Company began works at El Teniente in 1904.^26,27

The biggest change in copper mining was an idea about grade. In the 1890s the mine owner Joseph De Lamar sent a young engineer, Daniel Jackling, to examine the low-grade copper at Bingham Canyon in Utah. De Lamar decided not to invest. Jackling did not let it go.^28,29

With Seeley Mudd and Guggenheim consultants, Jackling proved 50,000,000 tons of ore grading 1.93 percent copper. That is poor ore by the standards of Butte. But there was a great deal of it, and it sat near the surface. The Guggenheim company agreed to finance Utah Copper.²⁹

As manager and later president of Utah Copper, Jackling developed Bingham Canyon as the first large open pit mine and concentrator complex in the United States. It has been mined since 1903. He applied the same bulk mining approach at the Chino and Ray mines. Spencer Penrose, who had sold a Cripple Creek gold mine, came to hold the largest share in Utah Copper.^29,33

The ore Jackling mined is now called a porphyry copper deposit. Such deposits form above intrusions in volcanic arcs, with copper sulphide spread in fine veinlets through a large body of altered rock. Bingham Canyon is the classic example, and Chile hosts many more.^30,31

Bingham Canyon is still working. Rio Tinto reports 133.6 kt of refined copper from Kennecott in 2025. On 10 April 2013 two landslides carried about 145 Mt of waste rock into the bottom of the pit. The Utah Geological Survey calls them the largest mining-induced landslides in history. No one was hurt. The survey notes that Kennecott had a network of geotechnical monitors in place. We rank the biggest pits today in the biggest copper mines in the world.^32,34

Copper finds often came by accident. In August 1883 Thomas Flanagan, a blacksmith with the Canadian Pacific Railway crew, noticed copper-bearing rock on a hillside near Sudbury in Ontario. It led to the Murray Mine. In 1886 the Canadian Copper Company opened Copper Cliff, the first producing mine there. The find grew into the Sudbury nickel-copper camp. INCO formed there in 1902 and Falconbridge in 1928.^35,36

Small owners could do well too. Clara Kinney ran a boarding house in Globe, Arizona, and bought mines near Kelvin in 1889. She patented 25 claims and sold them in 1930 for 250,000 dollars.¹⁰

The American copper boom also trained the people who would open the next frontier. Alfred Chester Beatty graduated from the Columbia School of Mines in 1898 and started in Denver as a mucker, shovelling rock for 2 dollars a day. He joined the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1903. In 1914 he founded Selection Trust in London and went on to make a fortune from copper in what are now Zambia and the DR Congo, including the Mufulira mine.¹⁷

Katanga copper production began in 1911. At first the hand-mined ore was shipped to Belgium for processing. We return to the Copperbelt in chapter 10, when its countries took their mines back, and you can read the full story in Congo's copper and cobalt.³⁷

Bulk mining changed the scale of the industry. The world produced 495,000 t of copper in 1900, by USGS records. In 2020 it produced 20,600,000 t. The chart shows the climb.³⁸

World copper production, 1900 to 2020

USGS estimates the world mined 23,000 kt of copper in 2025. Chile mined 5,300 kt, the DR Congo 3,200 kt and Peru 2,700 kt. World reserves are put at 980,000 kt. For the countries, see mining in Chile and mining in the United States.⁴⁰

Copper also produced one of today's largest mining names. In 1873 a London group led by Hugh Matheson bought the old Roman mines of Riotinto from the Spanish state and registered the Rio Tinto Company. We met those mines in chapter 1.⁵⁶

Next: gold fever

Copper made steady fortunes for companies. Gold did something else. It made ordinary people believe they could get rich in a season with a pan and a shovel. In January 1848, James Marshall was building a sawmill for John Sutter in the hills of California when he saw gold in the tailrace. By 1852 California's population had grown from about 14,000 to about 250,000. Read on in chapter 5: the gold rushes.^57,58