Robert P. Koenig was a mining engineer who possessed high qualities of imagination, inventiveness, and entrepreneurship.
Born in New York City, he graduated from Harvard College in 1924, magna cum laude, with highest honors in geology. Early in his career, he was engaged in mining engineering and geological work in Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, and the Western United States. He was President of the Ayshire Collieries Corporation and its predecessor company, the Electric Shovel Coal Corporation.
He devoted most of his professional life to the Cerro Corporation, which he served as Director, President, and Chairman in the period 1950 to 1972. He was responsible for an innovative mine in Chile called Rio Blanco. Considered uneconomic because of its low-grade copper ore and its high elevation (13,000 feet), the deposit remained undeveloped for years. To avoid avalanches on the mountain, he devised a plan in which engineers drilled from the base below the snow line, and then drove a shaft up. The “upside-down” method reversed the usual process of bringing ores up through the top of a mine. The ores were dropped down to the bottom of the shaft where they were taken away on rail cars. He continued to meet the challenge by creating the infrastructure for the mining community and successfully raising money for the project, one of the premier mines in Chile.
As a colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers, he led a detachment of coal-mining specialists whose objective was to protect European coal mines from destruction by the retreating German army. For his success in assuring coal supplies for the armed forces and the liberated civilian populations, he was accorded honors by the British, French, Belgian, and American governments.
He later advised British officials on the postwar rehabilitation of their coal industry and held a number of consulting jobs throughout the United States on various coal-related problems.
He was awarded the Charles Rand Medal by the AIME for distinguished achievement in mining administration.
