metallurgy

Imagine that you are a Victorian gentleman with a reasonable income and a mid-life crisis. You hear about a gold strike somewhere in the far corners of the earth (to you, at least). In hopes of turning your bourgeois into gorgeois, you pack up your things and say "Toodle-oo" to the missus. What’s the first thing you buy to prepare for your new adventure? A book, naturally! Specifically, you want Charles G. Warnford Lock’s Practical Gold-Mining.

Learn more about the history of metallurgy! All That Glitters features a selection of 43 scholarly articles on topics ranging from metallurgy to mining, which originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. Accompanying the articles on metallurgy are black and white photographs and illustrations.

Searching for a book on the history of metals? Then look no further than John Wadsworth William Sullivan’s The Story of Metals. Published in 1951 by the American Society of Metals as part of the Series for Self-Education, The Story of Metals offers an accessible glimpse into the evolution of the use of metals from mining to metallurgy and minting.

David Rickard gives gold’s poor relation the royal treatment in this scholarly work on the mineral pyrite. Rickard presents both the social uses of pyrite—from historical accounts—and the scientific nature of the mineral. Whether a scientist is researching the history of an older piece of metalwork or the chemical properties of the raw material, Rickard’s work is useful for the scholar and layman alike. This nicely illustrated book is from the Minerals Library at the National Museum of Natural History.