This silent Eastman Kodak educational film “Copper Mining” shows the operations at the Bingham Canyon Mine, more commonly known as Kennecott Copper Mine. This is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine is the largest human-made excavation, and deepest open-pit mine in the world, which is considered to have produced more copper than any other mine in history – more than 19,000,000 short tons. The mine is currently owned by Rio Tinto Group, a British-Australian multinational corporation. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation which operates the mine, a concentrator plant, a smelter, and a refinery. The mine has been in production since 1906.
0:00 Copper as a great conductor of electricity. Workers shown working on power poles.
0:30 Copper resists rust, and is shown being used to coat the hull of a ship.
1:03 A blast brings down ore inside the Bingham open pit mine.
1:32 Slide: Arizona, Utah and Montana produce three-fourths of all the copper in the U.S.A.
1:58 Views inside the Bingham open pit
2:33 Map showing the Bear River, Bear Lake and Hydroelectric power plants
3:03 Hydroelectric power plant at Bingham, Utah. (Electricity was needed in every step of the copper process; it was in the lights, on the rails, and in the refinery. Starting in 1898, power to the Bingham Mine was supplied by the Salt Lake Water and Electric Company. Using hydro-electric power meant that the power plant needed to be located on a water source.)
3:27 Power shovel moves ore into a waiting freight train
3:45 Ore moved to concentrators by electric railroad
4:25 Title card: Concentrating Copper Ore
5:31 Title card: Ore is ground to powder
6:15 Title card: Waste material is washed from the ore
6:47 Map shows the Jordan River, the Great Salt Lake and the Utah Lake. The Utah Lake supplies water for the concentration process
7:26 Map shows the gravity canal that brings water to the concentrators
7:40 Shots of the gravity canal
8:30 Title card: Bubbles of oil pick up grains of ore from the muddy water
9:24 Title card: Forty tons of ore are thus reduced to one ton
9:54 Title card: Concentrated ore is taken to smelters
10:26 Title card: Smelting copper ore
10:53 Title card: After heating the ore is smelted
11:33 Title card: After smelting, liquid copper, silver and gold sink to the bottom of the furnace.
13:26 Title card: The ingots are shipped to a refinery where the metals are separated. Large anodes are seen in the smelter.
Copper extraction is the multi-stage process of obtaining copper from its ores. The conversion of copper ores consists of a series of physical, chemical, and electrochemical processes. A copper concentrator is a large industrial facility at a mine that processes raw copper ore, crushing and grinding it into a fine powder and then using froth flotation to separate the copper minerals from waste rock (tailings), producing a high-grade copper concentrate that is then dried and shipped to a smelter for refining into pure copper metal. Copper smelting is a high-temperature pyrometallurgical process used to extract copper from sulfide ore concentrates by heating them to break down impurities, forming a copper-iron-sulfur mixture called matte and separating it from molten slag. This matte is then further refined into blister copper and finally into 99% pure anode copper through processes like converting and anode smelting, with any remaining gold and silver often recovered later.
Motion picture films don’t last forever; many have already been lost or destroyed. For almost two decades, we’ve worked to collect, scan and preserve the world as it was captured on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm movies — including home movies, industrial films, and other non-fiction. If you have endangered films you’d like to have scanned, or wish to donate celluloid to Periscope Film so that we can share them with the world, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us via the weblink below.
This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
