George W. Maynard
George W. Maynard (1839-1913)
1913 Obituary [1]
GEORGE W. MAYNARD died on February 12, 1913. He was born in Brooklyn in 1839, and was graduated from Columbia College in 1850. In 1860 he proceeded to Gottingen to study physics, mineralogy, and chemistry under Professor Wohler and other distinguished teachers; and subsequently he spent a year in the Hare, where he studied mining and metallurgy at the Clausthal School.
In 1862 he received from Columbia the degree of A.M. His first professional engagement was in Ireland, where he introduced a suitable process for the profitable treatment of the deposits of pyritic ore at Wicklow.
Upon his return to New York in 1864 he opened an engineering office and chemical laboratory under the style of Maynard and Tiemann. Almost immediately he went to Colorado to report upon a gold mining property, and he was so much attracted by the prospects of this new industry that he established one of the first assay laboratories in that district. In 1868 he became Professor of the mining and metallurgical department of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York. A few years afterwards he established himself in London as a consulting engineer, and in that capacity directed at Middlesbrough the first test on a large scale of the basic process of steel manufacture. This led to a friendship with Sydney Gilchrist Thomas, whose agent in America he subsequently became. He also spent six months at Voskrevensky in Russia, where he erected a copper reduction plant. Returning to America in 1879, he succeeded in selling the Thomas-Gilchrist patents, and thus introducing into the American iron industry the most important improvement of both the Bessemer and open-hearth processes. His subsequent professional work took him to many parts of the world.
He was a member of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, and the American Electro-chemical Society. He was elected a member of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1874, and in that year he read a paper before the Institute, describing the iron ores of Lake Champlain, United States. In 1904, during the visit of the Institute to America, he acted as vice-chairman of the New York Reception Committee, and played a prominent part in the reception and entertainment of the visitors.