Arthur Fay Taggart’s Handbook of Ore Dressing (1927) and Handbook of Mineral Dressing (1945), apart from their importance to practicing engineers, embody the evolution from the art of ore dressing to the science and technology of mineral processing. Dr. Taggart was the primary contributor to this evolution.
Dr. Taggart received an AB from Stanford in 1909 and an EM from the same institution in 1910. His initial interest was in mining, and early in his career he gained practical mining and milling experience as an assayer, surveyor, mill sampler, and machine operator at various mines in Arizona and Nevada. For a brief period after graduating from Stanford, he worked in mine development in Bolivia.
Dr. Taggart taught at Yale University's Sheffield Science School from 1911 until 1919, first as an Instructor and then as an Assistant Professor of mining. In 1913 and 1914, he was a special student in ore dressing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and thereafter taught ore dressing.
In 1919, Dr. Taggart moved to Columbia as Professor of ore dressing. He almost immediately began work on his Handbook of Ore Dressing. For this work, he collected a vast amount of practical information from milling operations and broke new ground in engineering generalization. He sought useful empirical relations and tabulations that summarized practice, the first stage in the transition from the art of ore dressing to the science of mineral processing.
As an educator, Dr. Taggart’s courses were of extreme rigor and long remembered with appreciation by those who attended them. Dr. Taggart was most concerned to present the scientific method and fundamental principles and their applications. He believed in the unity of engineering and conducted courses in engineering principles and data analysis that were required of all engineering students. Facts, he taught, emerge as a consequences of proper inquiry. Full written reports were required, which Dr. Taggart read and criticized in great detail, often exceeding the length of the report itself.
While at Columbia, Dr. Taggart established ore dressing, later mineral dressing, as a separate curriculum. This example was later followed by many other mining schools.
Dr. Taggart’s research was directed more to understanding than to practical results. He was provocative rather than prolific. Because of the needs of the field, he preferred to move rapidly toward broad and useful generalizations, rather than to work in narrow areas minutely studied.
Ore dressing at the start of Dr. Arthur Fay Taggart’s career was largely uncoordinated empiricism. Dr. Taggart left this field of specialization as a developing engineering science, much of the advance deriving from his own efforts and the efforts of others stimulated by him.
